If you respected and/or enjoyed 2009's Taking Chance starring Kevin Bacon, you just might love The Last Full Measure, despite its paltry production value. It feels very much like something Lifetime or Kirk Cameron might have produced, but *almost* no matter, because its blockbuster cast includes Amy Madigan, Bradley Whitford, Christopher Plummer, Diane Ladd, Ed Harris, Samuel L. Jackson, Sebastian Stan, William Hurt, and the late, great Peter Fonda in a role that almost certainly curled Jane's liberal toes.
I must admit, I did not enjoy the film very much either (nor did its production studio, apparently, having sat on its release since 2018), as it pales in comparison to something gritty and 35 or 70mm like Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Saving Private Ryan, Hacksaw Ridge, Dunkirk, The Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, The Longest Day, 1917, or, well, just about any other film ever made about war.
BUT THEN, like lemon sorbet at some fast-food tasting competition, the ending came and pressure washed all that snooty judgment away. Once I realized the title was lifted from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, nothing else mattered but William H. Pitsenbarger's sacrifice on behalf of 60 comrades he'd never even met, and so I leave you with that Address myself:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave THE LAST FULL MEASURE of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Rest In Peace, Soldier.
