A 1990 movie that’s partially about the Vietnam War should feel pretty dated today. For that matter, audiences would be forgiven for assuming it might have been dated back then. A spate of Vietnam movies arrived in the years following the war’s end in 1975 (The Deer Hunter; Coming Home; Apocalypse Now). These were joined by an echo boom in the latter part of the ’80s, with the Oscar-winning Platoon, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July, among others. These high-profile films arrived en route to 1994, by which point the war (still just two decades out from its end) had become sanitized enough for the feel-good tearjerking dramedy of Forrest Gump.
It’s been 35 years since the release of Jacob’s Ladder, an unusual hybrid of war drama and horror film, which adds another layer of time’s passage onto a film that blurs eras. Released on Nov. 2, 1990, Jacob’s Ladder (which screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin had been toying with for a full decade) fell somewhere between a combat story (like Platoon) and a post-war veteran story (like Coming Home or In Country); a purgatorial space that would prove thematically fitting, and key to its long-term success.
There isn’t a lot of combat footage in Jacob’s Ladder, but what’s there informs the rest of the plot-light, mood-heavy film. The story opens in 1971, introducing Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) as an infantryman in the Mekong Delta. Jacob and the rest of his platoon (which includes characters played by a pre-fame Ving Rhames and Eriq La Salle) are suddenly attacked. In the midst of the chaos, some of them exhibit bizarre symptoms, as if they’re victims of a chemical attack. Eventually, Jacob is stabbed by someone with a bayonet and airlifted out of harm’s way.
The bulk of the movie takes place four years later, in 1975 New York City. Jacob lives with his girlfriend Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña) and is haunted by strange visions. Some of them are straight out of a horror movie (a tentacle slithers around a man sleeping on a subway platform) others involve his experiences in Vietnam; still others have to do with his young son Gabe (Macauley Culkin, just before Home Alone), who died before the war. Jacob lives in what often resembles a perpetual dream state, where memories and nightmares bleed into each other. It briefly seems as if he and his fellow survivors have convinced a lawyer (Jason Alexander, in the earliest years of Seinfeld) to look into the possibility of military experiments performed on them, but he abruptly drops the case.
That storyline has hints of ’70s conspiracy thriller to it, but the style of the movie in general is more in line with the just-concluded ’80s. Director Adrian Lyne, who spent that decade making sexually forward hits like Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, and Fatal Attraction, hadn’t really worked in big-studio horror before, but then, big-studio horror in the 1980s was often recategorized as thrillers, erotic and not. Jacob’s Ladder isn’t really about sexuality (though it casually has more nudity than most R-rated movies today), but it has the slick, music-video-y style of an ’80s urban thriller, used to more overtly disturbing and less titillating effect. One of its signature recurring moments is when the camera’s frame rate is adjusted while filming a shaking head, blurring and distorting the motion to appear unnaturally fast. (This would go on to be used frequently in the Saw series.)
To this combination of ’70s setting and ’80s style, add one seminal ’60s TV show: The most obvious critique of Jacob’s Ladder would be to call it a glorified and distended episode of The Twilight Zone, a high compliment (comparing it to one of the best TV shows ever…) with some backhanded elements (…that typically ran well under an hour per episode). It’s impossible to talk in detail about Jacob Ladder in retrospect without discussing its ending; like The Sixth Sense at the other end of the ’90s, it’s what the film became famous for, though it wasn’t a blockbuster hit. Jacob eventually learns that his platoon was indeed subject to chemical tests, specifically of a drug called Ladder, designed to enhance and further weaponize their aggression. The “attack” they experienced was from within, and he was stabbed by one of his own. Even this information, however, is called into question by Jacob’s ultimate fate: He’s back in Vietnam, in a medic tent, and as the Jacob we know ascends a staircase led by his dead son, he moves on to the afterlife. The entire movie has taken place on his deathbed — an extended vision, explaining the mix of memories, dreams, and fantastical elements.
Like I said: very Twilight Zone, and essentially a combo variation on the hoary tropes of “it was all a dream” and “he was dead the whole time.” It was all a death dream the whole time! Yet on its terms — and if you can roll with 85% of a 110-minute movie being a death dream — the trope works here, especially because of its timing. Made a decade earlier, Jacob’s Ladder might have seemed awfully gimmicky next to the first batch of movies to grapple directly with Vietnam. With further distance from the second round of major Vietnam films (and in closer proximity to the Sixth Sense-era twist-ending boom), it might have felt even cheaper, which seemed to be the consensus when the story was refitted for the war in Afghanistan in the 2019 remake.
Because of its Vietnam material, the 35 years since the original Jacob’s Ladder now render it even more of a time capsule than other movies of its time. Its initial release, in fact, came 35 years after the start of the Vietnam War in 1955 (and 25 years after U.S. involvement began in 1965). Other Vietnam movies have been better-equipped to dramatize the experience of the war itself, as well as its effect on soldiers’ psyches. But in its time-skipped way, Jacob’s Ladder has its own affecting, less traditional outlook on Vietnam. Its depiction of those wartime experiences is inherently wide-ranging, capable of ending lives literally and figuratively in a few precious moments.
