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
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| We Were Soldiers |
by Preston Jones
"Gritty, powerful filmmaking."
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For good or ill, 1998’s Saving Private Ryan irrevocably changed the face of the modern war movie. Gone are the days when soldiers expired from bloodless wounds, gasping poetry as they breathed their last. War movies circa 2002 all feature graphic, unrelenting violence that grab audiences by the collar and refuse to let go.Gone as well are the days of clear delineations between good and evil; now war films are portraits of men, on both sides of the conflict, painted in shades of gray.
The latest war film to march into multiplexes (and there have been many of the course of the last three months--nearly a half dozen) is writer/director Randall Wallace’s (Braveheart) adaptation of Lt. Gen. Harold Moore (Ret.) and Joseph Galloway’s book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: Ia Drang--The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam shortened simply to We Were Soldiers.
The book focuses on three days in November 1965, when some 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore, were dropped into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley.
2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers immediately surrounded them. Three days later, only two and a half miles away, a sister battalion was slaughtered. Together, these events constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War.
Told by the commander of the battalion and the only journalist on the ground through the fighting, We Were Soldiers is a devastating yet uplifting story of courage and determination in the face of incredible odds.
Much of the material in the 535-page book is condensed into a two and a half hour movie but still runs about 20 minutes too long. Moore (Mel Gibson) is a no-nonsense Lt. Col. in 1964, when he’s assigned to Fort Benning, Georgia with his wife, Julie (Madeline Stowe) and their five children.
Moore is placed in charge of the new air cavalry, backed up by his second in command, Sgt. Maj. Plumley (Sam Elliott). The young recruits, eager to fight, look to Lt. Jack Geoghegan (Chris Klein) for leadership; this leads to one plus that We Were Soldiers has that another war-themed film, Black Hawk Down, lacks is that the men are not faceless going into battle, but rather Wallace takes the time at the beginning of the film to familiarize the audience with the characters.
An interesting touch to We Were Soldiers is that the Vietnamese are presented as characters with a conscience rather than a faceless enemy intent on massacring Americans, a la Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The Vietnamese commander, Ahn (Don Duong) is portrayed as just as human and just as much a strategist as Moore, a refreshing viewpoint not shared by many war films.
Once the film touches down in Ia Drang, the “Valley of Death,” as Moore terms it, all hell breaks loose. While it is hardly a caveat anymore when dealing with modern war films, it still bears mentioning: We Were Soldiers is graphically violent, at times unrelentingly so. At the screening I attended, children of no older than ten were seated in front of me and they recoiled several times from the images onscreen. Nothing in this film is suitable for children, and parents should heed the rating system. It is in place for a reason.
Thankfully, this offering from writer/director Wallace is closer to the excellence that is Braveheart than the intermittently successful misfire of Pearl Harbor. The cast is excellent, with the standouts being Elliott as the gruff Plumley, Greg Kinnear as the cocky Maj. Bruce Crandall and Klein, eradicating any doubts that he can handle dramatic material; this is easily his best performance since 1999’s underrated Election.Although the days of the bloodless, clear-cut war films may be long gone, this does not mean they are of lesser quality. We Were Soldiers is visceral, kinetic filmmaking that needs to be experienced on the big screen; a film well worth your time, We Were Soldiers offers a testimony to those serving our country in the Armed Forces.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=5778&reviewer=304
originally posted: 03/03/02 12:22:35
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USA
01-Mar-2002 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
25-Apr-2002
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