The story begins in situ, with only the barest historical contextualisation. Major Harry Smith (Travis Fimmel, playing a character with more than a passing resemblance to Ragnar Lodbrok, his role in the television series The Vikings) is the determined ex-Special Air Services veteran in charge of Delta Company. He is assigned the job of locating and destroying enemy forces, using a nearby plantation to mortar an Australian base. The Australian troops are thinly spread over the plantation when one group, 11 Platoon, is attacked and takes heavy causalities. Vowing that ‘We all come back or no one does’, Smith disobeys a direct order from his commander and tries to rescue the platoon. Soon the entire company is engaged in an intense battle, a situation made even more hellish by heavy monsoonal rain.

Travis Fimmel as Major Harry Smith in Danger Close (photos via Transmission Films)

The point of view is split between the various components of Delta Company and their commanders, who are reluctant to dispatch reinforcements, including a squad of armoured personnel carriers (APC), lest it leave the base exposed to attack. Fortunately for Delta Company, Smith is not the only one prepared to disobey orders. An Australian chopper pilot more or less takes matters into his own hands to fly into the battle zone and resupply the troops with ammunition. The APCs are eventually dispatched, arriving at the critical moment to prevent Australian infantry from being overrun by the enemy.

Eighteen Australians died and twenty-four were wounded – the most casualties suffered by Australia on any given day during the Vietnam War. Around 245 North Vietnamese and southern irregulars were killed; three were taken prisoner and an unknown number wounded. The exact size of the Vietnamese force remains disputed.

Stenders, best known for the 2011 film Red Dog, working from a screenplay by Stuart Beattie, delivers a technically accomplished film that looks good, and the cast, which also includes Luke Bracey, Richard Roxburgh, and Anthony Hayes, does a solid job. The cinematography by Ben Nott (Day Breakers, 2009, and Predestination, 2014) makes excellent use of a massive plantation of paulownia trees, which appear identical to rubber trees, located three and a half hours outside the Gold Coast, Queensland, on which much of the film was shot. The attention to detail in terms of the authenticity of props and military equipment, some of which was loaned to the production by the Australian Defence Force, is also scrupulous.

Luke Bracey as Sergeant Bob Buick in Danger Close (photograph via Transmission Films)

But other aspects do not wear so well. The film’s production notes make it clear that Danger Close is a deliberate attempt to carve out a slice of the Anzac legend in the public imagination for Australian veterans of the Vietnam War in general, and the participants of the Long Tan battle in particular. This is not in itself an unreasonable historical aim, and I have no wish to criticise those veterans on whom the main characters in Danger Close are based, many of whom were conscripts. But one person’s Anzac, battling overwhelming odds whilst displaying mateship and bravery, is another’s invader, unwitting or not, engaged in a brutal war in another country against a national liberation movement, at the behest of politicians in Washington, Canberra, and their deeply corrupt South Vietnamese client regime. While the film does not necessarily have to take a side, the story and sense of drama would have been vastly improved it if had revealed more of the complexity of the conflict. With the exception of the briefest scene in which an Australian stumbles across two Vietnamese female soldiers rescuing their wounded, no effort is made to humanise the enemy or, perhaps more to the point, explain why they were fighting. All we see of the other side are, quite literally, waves of screaming soldiers charging at the Australians.

While little is spared in terms of showing the impact of bullets and bombs on human flesh, whatever its colour, it is Asian flesh that takes the brunt of the death and destruction. The Vietnamese are mowed down by small arms fire, bombarded by New Zealand artillery, napalmed by American aircraft, and, towards the end, obliterated by the arriving APCs. Put simply, audiences in 2019 should expect more than a one-dimensional rehashing of certain aspects of a traditional war-film narrative. This is especially the case for a film that, according to the production notes, purports to want to inform contemporary audiences about our involvement in this conflict.

No doubt some will see Danger Close as a fitting tribute to the bravery of Australian men under fire. Another interpretation is that it plays to those aspects of an Anzac mythos that have grown increasingly jingoistic and uncritical, and which this film will only make more unassailable.

Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan, directed by Kriv Stenders, distributed in Australia by Transmission Films, opens in selected cinemas on August 8.