YMMV / The Green Berets

• Critical Dissonance: Almost universally hated by critics (Roger Ebert awarded it zero stars), but a major box office hit then and retains a small cult following today. Several Green Berets, both past and present, cited it as the reason they wanted to become Special Forces in the first place.
• Narm: The entire film could have this effect on people who've been in The Vietnam War. Gustav Hasford writes in his semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers (the basis for Full Metal Jacket) that an audience of Marines was roaring with laughter when they saw the film in Vietnam. Similarly, war journalist John Pilger said about the film: "I had just come back from Vietnam, and I couldn’t believe how absurd this movie was. So I laughed out loud, and I laughed and laughed."
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: John Wayne attributed the commercial success of the movie to the shellacking it took from critics, making back its entire $8 million budget in three months.
• Presumed Flop: Between the film's critical mauling and the fact that John Wayne was never credited as a director again, it's often assumed to have been a failure at the box-office. It actually made close to three times its budget back, and was successful enough that the studios were actually open to letting Wayne (whose directing career had previously been sunk at the get-go by the Troubled Production and financial failure of The Alamo (1960)) direct again, with the only reason that he never did so being that he simply didn't come across any scripts he was interested in directing prior to his death in 1979.
• Spiritual Successor: Act of Valor has been called The Green Berets for The War on Terror.
• Values Dissonance: Obviously, due to its pro-Vietnam War message making it a product of its time. The Vietnam War is largely considered a major US foreign policy blunder today, which resulted in the eventual fall of the US-backed South Vietnam regime and a senseless loss of lives.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: This is perhaps the most violent G-rated motion picture ever made; as the establishment of the time was pro-war, it's easy to see why this was rated G against all reason.

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