Vietnam in HD

Even at six hours, this tends to be more impressionistic, and less bound to a strict historic timeline.

It is so crisp and clean and the clarity is so great that you will definitely forget that what you are watching is real.

Vietnam In HD is vivid and compelling without being intrinsically political.

While it goes out of its way to cast these soldiers as the heroic equals, if not betters, of their "Greatest Generation" counterparts, the series does not have the same impact--mainly because these images, though at times awful and upsetting, are also much more familiar.

Over all, the most interesting scenes are not those that depict Americans but the less frequent, more unusual ones that show us Vietnamese villagers and Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops.

"WWII in HD" at times felt like a rough outline of what an actual history of the war would look like, but it had all that amazing, horrifying imagery to compensate. The Vietnam in HD footage is no less incredible and/or dismaying, but it's also much more familiar.

With the line between documentary and amusement-park ride now crossed, it's easy for a critic to start noticing Vietnam in HD's other narrative and technical shortcuts with filler and stock footage, splicing in wherever needed the images we have seen before, including those familiar payload-perspective views of bombs being dropped over the hills and villages.