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I remember renting this movie a year or two after it came out. Good stuff; I really liked it.
A word or two about the ending... I don't usually like "dream movies" (or most dream sequences in normal movies, for that matter). If the whole movie is a dream, then what was the point? Everything that happened, the plot, the action, etc etc, end up as being meaningless. The dreamer wakes from his dream, and all is how it was before the dream began. Dreams are too often used, I think, so that the director or writer can show what he wants to show, without having to accept the consequences such things would have on the story if they actually happened. And that's just a cop-out. Unfortunately, I can't think of any good examples of this at the moment, but maybe some will come to me.
However, having said that, I didn't think that way at all about Jacob's Ladder. Yeah, the whole thing is a dream, and you could argue that, say, his relationship with his wife was pointless, because it never actually happened. But because of how his actual life and what really did happen is intergrated into the dream (such as his kids, and obviously, the "dreams" (actually rememberances) of what happened in Vietnam), and especially how the film ends with, rather than him waking from the dream, dying with the dream as his last cognitive act, the whole thing did seem to have signifigance to me.
Also, I agree with Ed, one of the cool things about this movie is that when you finally know what's going on, you can look back and see how the events in the movie that happen to Jacob relate to things he was probably experiencing in the field hospital (such as the doctors, his fever, etc).
Like I said, I really dug this movie when I saw it, and I think I still have it on tape somewhere.
-Amok
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