Review of Two Documentary Films from First Run/Icarus Films: First Kill and Other American Voices

First Kill is a weU-integrated work whose other footage, mostly of scenes in contemporary Vietnam, tellingly and often quite cleverly accompanies or is juxtaposed with the interviewees' comments about war; the overuse of newsreel footage, almost exclusively of the clean-up operation that followed 9/11, is the weakness of Other American Voices. First Kill intercuts its interviews of two celebrated journalists and five American veterans with a little historical footage from the war in Vietnam itself and a lot of contemporary footage of the Mekong River and of American and Vietnamese tourists squeezing through Viet Cong tunnel complexes, hiking crater-pocked jungle trails, photographing war memorials, viewing internment center torture devices and photos, and shooting war-era automatic weapons on a firing range.