Overall Rating
  Awesome: 37.86%
Worth A Look: 20%
Average: 16.43%
Pretty Bad: 16.43%
Total Crap: 9.29%
6 reviews, 104 user ratings
|
|
| We Were Soldiers |
by Erik Childress
"Who Feels Like A War Cinema Veteran?"
|
During my screening of Hollywood’s latest war epic, We Were Soldiers, amidst the massive carnage, waiting and sneak attacks, a question leapt into my mind. How many soldiers in such combat actually found themselves soiling their uniforms? I thought of this not only because I imagined myself possibly a victim of dirty skivvies if I ever found myself in such a quandary, but I can’t recall any film actually showing such a predicament. We’ve seen the realism and the bloody horror of war, certainly including nerve-induced puking and no doubt, a yellow stain or two, but other than the stories of people losing all control of their internal functions at the moment of their death, I have yet to see one literally scared shitless.While I would never think to compare myself to the brave few who have fought for this country, the brutal reality of war films in the last 4 years have tried to put audiences into the thick of things and I, for one, am starting to feel like a battle-scarred veteran. It started in 1998 with the release of Steven Spielberg’s monumental Saving Private Ryan, whose opening 30 minutes would change the face of war cinema forever. Later that same year, The Thin Red Line helped put us into a druglike haze so we could experience fighting and recite poetic rhetoric at the same time while making us believe that it is possible to get some sleep during war. Then cynicism started to come through with the Gulf War Syndrome of Three Kings before flag-waving patriotism could come back in style with The Patriot and Pearl Harbor.
Thankfully, we’ve gotten down ‘n’ dirty again with Enemy at the Gates, Black Hawk Down and the harrowingly brilliant miniseries Band of Brothers. Lest leave no wartorn shrapnel stone unturned, there were several other epics that conveyed the manmade horror of armed conflict whether it be medieval, ancient or downright Civil. With reluctant thanks to history repeating itself not just in life but in the movies, we’re now given We Were Soldiers and, frankly, I feel as if I’ve received my million dollar wound and am ready for my ticket home.
We’re back to Vietnam this time, right at the beginning in 1964. Mel Gibson is Lt. Col. Hal Moore, the new leader on the base with his wife, Julie (Madeleine Stowe) and family in tow. With his no-nonsense yet optimistic approach to the daunting events ahead, his men instantly gravitate towards him. They include his second-in-command, Sergeant Major Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott), helicopter pilot Major Bruce “Snakeshit” Crandall (Greg Kinnear) and young new father but “born leader” 2nd Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan (Chris Klein).
Moore and his men of the First Battalion of the Seventh Calvary (the same regiment as one General Custer) must then charge into and walk through “The Valley of Death” of Ia Drang in Vietnam. Soon after they would commence in a three-day battle, outnumbered and surrounded roughly 2000-400. Not all that different, except in numbers, from our conflict in Somalia nearly 30 years later.
The action keeps us rooted mostly in Vietnam, but here and there, we have to go back and check on the women. While not necessarily the weaker sex, certainly the weakest part of the movie. Even the warmup character establishment scenes have a certain hors d'ouerve of cliché cheese puffs that inspire unintentional laughs. Consider the way the term “whites only” is used for humor or how we meet several black soldiers on the battlefield but only a single black wife. (Perhaps she’s the descendant of the one black soldier who fought in The Patriot.)
The most ludicrous of all, however, is Stowe telling a fellow wife that a soldier’s dying words are invariably “tell my wife…I love her.” While in wartime that’s a tragic heartfelt deathbed cry, in the movies it’s unfortunately become an aphorism. And by setting us up for it with such an overbaked announcement, each successive time we hear a soldier spout those exact words, it plays more like a running joke in a Zucker/Abrahams film. Not necessarily something we should be thinking as our boys are crying out in unspeakable pain. These distractions become such an obtrusion that I couldn’t help but wince as Stowe decides to take over for the Western Union deliveryman in bringing the new widows their husband’s death letters. Does that really make it more comforting? Doesn’t she then become the most feared doorbell ringer in the neighborhood?
All strategy may be thrown out the chopper the minute a platoon finds themselves surrounded in enemy territory, but without the William Wallace-like war tactics Lt. Col. Moore was planning prior to going in the hot zone, the on-and-off fighting sequences come off like a game. The Vietnamese cheat by bringing five times as many players and then we cheat right back by using air support to put them on the permanent injured list.
Once again, this is not to demean the casualties we suffered or the horror that is war, but once you’ve seen it over and over and over again in the movies, there are only so many new places that a filmmaker can take us. We’ve all seen the doomed introductions, speeches about the future and bullet wounds that have covered virtually every square inch of the human body. Other than a couple new pieces of horror to remember (both involving burning flesh), you won’t have much more to take home to think about.
Writer/Director Randall Wallace (Braveheart, The Man In The Iron Mask) who condemned the treatment of his screenplay of Pearl Harbor by director Michael Bay shortly after it came out to widespread critical hatred (mostly to cover his butt) finds himself in familiar territory. Take out the carnage here so notably absent in that debacle and you’ll be listening to dialogue that would seem right at home in Pearl Harbor. By cutting back and forth between our forces and that of the Vietnamese leader and the “hey, he wears glasses and writes to his girlfriend, they must be human too” guy, I kept waiting to hear something along the lines of “the rise and fall of our empire is at stake.”
Mel Gibson is one of our most likable and reliable leading men working today, but here the trailers should have just bellowed “Mel Gibson IS John Wayne IN We Were Soldiers.” His Lt. Col. Moore is such a gung-ho speechist and talks in a gruff, partly Southern drawl that we expect to hear the word “pilgrim” at any minute. Sam Elliott may have the funniest role in the film, but do we need extra comic relief from a character who refuses to use anything but his own pistol, then stands tall and barely moves as the enemy charges? Greg Kinnear asserts himself well and it was nice to see “Private Ryan” vets Barry Pepper and Ryan Hurst get into the fold. Poor Keri Russell (TV’s Felicity) though gets the thankless task of playing wife to Chris Klein. Not only is she far more talented but her dialogue is reduced to scenes where she continues to say, “I’ll go with you.”I suppose their's not to reason why, their's but to do and die, but reducing Vietnam to a flag-waving piece of the American spirit, even at a time when a decisive battle gave us reason to believe we could win the war, sort of flies in the face about everything we’ve learned about that ill-fated time in our history. (Wasn’t John Wayne’s “The Green Berets” harshly criticized for this very thing?) There are so many shots of American flags blowing in the wind (even inserted into letter-delivering montages) that even the worthiest veteran may choke on patriotism. I guess after September 11, the last thing we’d want to see a soldier do is soil themselves.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=5778&reviewer=198
originally posted: 03/01/02 16:30:50
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
USA
01-Mar-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
25-Apr-2002
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
