Tiger Land

Tiger Land unspools like a half-remembered fever dream stitched from tattered war maps and sweat-soaked fatigues: a rag-tag platoon of raw U.S. Army recruits, slated for Vietnam, is shipped instead to a sweltering Louisiana backwater nicknamed Tiger Land—an ardorous, mock-hell simulation of jungle warfare where the humid air itself seems to conspire against human dignity. Here, battle is less a distant reality than a gnawing abstraction; the true enemy is the circuitry of dehumanization humming inside every screaming drill command. Enter Roland Bozz—a magnetic, anti-authoritarian Texan whose insurgent conscience rattles the pecking order. He bucks the war machine by shepherding his bunkmates through loopholes and legal deferments, smuggling them out of the jaws of deployment while wrestling his own dread of a conflict he refuses to baptize with noble purpose. His foil, Paxton, a Harvard-educated idealist armed with a notebook and moral vertigo, documents the moral attrition, his lens serving as both confession and indictment. The narrative crescendos not in Saigon but inside a dusk-lit clearing where live rounds snap inches from flesh during a final field exercise: a staged ambush that mutates into cathartic bloodletting. When the smoke clears, some boys are stamped fit for the slaughterhouse of Indochina, others ejected from the meat-grinder, and Bozz—bloodied yet uncaged—vanishes into the thicket, a mythic deserter whose footprints echo the film’s open wound of ambiguity. Tiger Land is less a war epic than a scalding inquiry into institutional violence, a celluloid ghost that stalks the liminal corridor between coercion and conscience.