A Gen Z Reviews the Classics: ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and the America that never quite arrives

‘A Gen Z Reviews the Classics’ is a new weekly column on Firstpost. We revisit great books and films, and talk about why they remain relevant even today.

Tom Cruise exists in the cultural imagination as a grinning fighter pilot, aviators on, Top Gun style. And then there is this film, made three years later, visualising Cruise as a paralysed Vietnam veteran screaming in a VA hospital that has run out of basic supplies.

Born on the Fourth of July is Oliver Stone's 1989 adaptation of Ron Kovic's memoir, and watching it before America's 250th birthday, the distance between those two Tom Cruises starts to feel like a diagram of something — about what this country is willing to show itself, and what it would rather keep in the dark.

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The film follows Ron Kovic (Cruise), a working-class kid from Massapequa, New York, raised on JFK speeches and John Wayne movies, who enlists in the Marines and goes to Vietnam believing every word of it. He comes back paralysed from the chest down, is treated appallingly by the VA hospital system, and after a long and ugly unravelling becomes one of the most visible anti-war activists of his generation, ending up at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in a wheelchair to speak against the war he nearly died for.

Before Maverick, there was this

Vietnam ended in 1975. Stone made this film in 1989, fourteen years later, which is the amount of time it apparently took for a war to go from an open wound to something a major studio would greenlight as a drama starring its biggest action star. That lag is something to sit with, because it turns out fourteen years was the optimistic version of the timeline.

It also matters what Cruise had just come from. Top Gun in 1986 was the highest-grossing film of that year and, whatever its intentions, one of the most effective pieces of military recruitment material the decade produced. Three years later, Cruise used the Hollywood capital that film handed him to make something that said almost the exact opposite.

A year after Born on the Fourth of July came out, he called the very idea of a Top Gun sequel "irresponsible” in a Playboy interview, saying he wanted young audiences to understand that Top Gun was never meant to be reality. That he eventually did make Top Gun: Maverick in 2022 is its own conversation, but the Cruise of 1989 and 1990 was spending his fame very deliberately, on a film built to puncture exactly the mythology that had made him famous.

Cruise was born on July 3, 1962, missing the Fourth by exactly one day. On the last day of filming, which fell on his birthday, Kovic gave him his own Bronze Star Medal: a Vietnam veteran handing a movie star his war decoration, one day before the Fourth.

Stone's America

Stone opens in overheated 1950s nostalgia: parades, bunting, a kid playing war in the woods on his birthday, the full mythology of American boyhood laid out in primary colours. The point isn't subtlety, it's deliberate excess. Ron Kovic didn't invent his own naïveté. It was handed to him, the way it was handed to a whole generation of working-class boys who grew up on John Wayne and the idea that service was the highest form of love for your country.

What the film does well is track exactly where that belief breaks, and it doesn't break all at once. It breaks gradually, through friendly fire, through a VA hospital that runs out of basic supplies, through the particular cruelty of coming home to a country that has moved on and would prefer not to think about what it sent you to do. Kovic's disillusionment isn't a single revelation but an accumulation, and Stone understands that, even if his instinct is sometimes to underline it twice when once would do. The Mexico section drags, and this is a known issue, but the film finds its way back.

Cruise is the reason the film holds together as well as it does. He was 27, still carrying that boyish eager-to-please quality that had made him a star. Kovic's early naivety is believable precisely because Cruise is so fluent in that register. The work is then in dismantling it, scene by scene.

There's a moment late in the film where Kovic is carried to his childhood bedroom by his father, and lying there, quietly, asks: "Who's ever going to love me, Dad?" Cruise drops every instinct he has toward likability in that scene and just lets the man be broken. This performance earned him his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor and his first Golden Globe win.

The clock is still running

Here is where the timing becomes uncomfortable. Stone made this 14 years after Vietnam ended, and it landed as a genuine provocation in mainstream cinema — a real star, a real studio, a film willing to say plainly that the country had lied to its young men and then discarded them. That kind of film existed then as a possibility. What's strange, watching it now, is how much harder it is to name an equivalent for, say, Iraq or Afghanistan.

It isn't that no one has tried to engage with those wars on film. But the attempts reveal the gap pretty clearly. The closest anyone came to showing actual battlefield disillusionment was probably Jarhead, which conspicuously avoids combat scenes entirely. Dark Thirty engaged with the machinery of the war on terror and still largely left its moral architecture intact.

Meanwhile, the films that received the most attention — the ones that became cultural events — tended to flatter rather than interrogate. There's a tradition of this kind of honest reckoning existing for other conflicts: Grave of the Fireflies for the Pacific War, Oppenheimer for the moral cost of what won it. For Iraq and Afghanistan, that film still hasn't been made, and it's been over two decades. Stone made this one fourteen years after the fact. The equivalent clock for the 2000s wars is still running, and given the state of things right now — military confrontations in the Middle East — it's not obvious anyone is planning to start it.

The window that seems closed

And then there's Kovic himself, turning eighty this weekend, still writing, still speaking, still doing what he has been doing since he came back from Vietnam and decided to keep going. He redefined what it meant to be a patriot, not by defending his country's actions but by refusing to pretend they didn't happen.

What's harder to answer is whether it mattered. The anti-war movement that Born on the Fourth of July both documents and belongs to didn't end American militarism. It just pushed it into less visible forms. Ron Kovic stood on a stage at the Democratic National Convention in 1976 and said no to a war his country had already technically ended.

Fifty years on, the protests that most resemble that energy are getting students expelled. Some of them are being detained by immigration enforcement for showing up at the wrong demonstration. The film that was supposed to be a reckoning now plays more like a period piece about a window that opened briefly and then closed.

As a Gen Z viewer watching America turn 250, Born on the Fourth of July doesn't leave you with hope exactly. It leaves you with a portrait of what hope looked like when it still had somewhere to go, and the uncomfortable awareness that the distance between then and now is not as large as it should be.