a response to raypaquin's comment

Raypaquin from Canada is an obvious imbecile and doesn't even have the simplest facts correct, but the real problem I'm beginning to understand is IMDB for allowing these kinds of outrageous, inflammatory comments to be displayed on the front page of these movies' critiques. If anyone can find an alternative to IMDB, please write me, because they've shown that they are just a venue for people to express their anti-American views at every turn.

Good points sterling. I am just watching this movie again. And of course we know more about the Abu Ghraib's scandal now than we did before. Not only did the soldiers involved never spend a day in a an academy, they were mostly reserves, having went through basic training and then going home to serve a weekend a month, until being called up.

I was a reservist in 1977, and I can tell you we never ever expected to be called up, and if we had been I know that we all doubted if we would have been able to perform based on the limited training.

I later did go active duty, and was commissioned as an officer in the USMC. Everybody knows that there are bad apples in any group or any endeavor, it has nothing to do with whether you are a USA "soldier" or a cadet, or a reservist called up to active duty in Iraq. (or even a person sitting in Canada watching a movie in conjunction with CNN headlines)

I think it is important to note that the USA has one of the very few known fighting forces that policies its own, and has standards of conduct that cause those who break them to go to jail, and in some cases even result in the death penalty, even when the infraction is against an enemy combatant in a time of war. In evidence is all the recent penalties imposed upon those so-called soldiers in their acts as prison guards at Abu Ghraib.

Most recently a one-star General was demoted to Colonel, and a Colonel was rebuked and fined, and as you all know many of the enlisted participants are serving jail sentences.

That all being said, it is important to note (as you said) that this is a FICTIONAL movie, based on a FICTIONAL book. You might as well be watching Fahrenheit 451 and get all puffed up about how terrible it is that people are burning books!

I assume Raypaquin is just a bad apple from Canada, and I won't indict the whole country because of him, even though he indicts the whole USA based on the prison scandal, and his viewing of a movie.

And I found that there was a lot that was noble in this movie too. The bad guys were the "ten", not the normal cadets, and they were bad not only because of their brutality, but also because they fell outside the rules of the school. All the other cadets believed in something bigger than themselves and that dishonor was worse than death, that following the code was what made them men.

The southern upperclassmen may not have liked the black cadet, but they followed the code anyway, unlike the "ten". They faced demerits, expulsion, even physical harm exposing the ten and treating the black cadet as one of Colonel "Bear's" "lambs", no different than a white cadet, in spite of their personal feelings.

No one earned the ring more than David Keith's character Will. And nothing speaks louder to me about our military acadamies than his example, not the ten's, if it is any kind of accurate representation at all.

"I feel this is obviously overdramatized (suicide and cutting the kids back up in the shower) but i feel it was still accurate for its time."

The suicide wasn't very overdramatized; messed up kids attempt to, and do, jump off the galleries often. In fact, someone tried it a few months ago.

I go to a military school and although it isnt a college (its a highschool) we are VMI's brother school Fishburne...I think hazing is neccesary ive noticed since the school has begun to crack down on it new cadets, we call rats, are more defiant and dont know their roles or positions in the school.

Norwich is crap. Everyone knows they are a bunch of fags anyways. The Citadel is the real deal when it comes to academies. Our cadets actually put forth an effort to get a military contract and when they do get commissioned they have to put up with so much garbage but it only makes us hungrier. We have history and we are located in the most historical city in the USA.