We Were Soldiers Review
by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)February 19th, 2002
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While it doesn't measure up to fellow Viet Nam dramas Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, or even the recently released Black Hawk Down and Behind Enemy Lines, Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers is still a decent war film whose biggest strength is its telling of an important story with which the public is not entirely familiar. The most glaring thing that separates Soldiers from those other four films is a director with a sense of style and vision (or at least a decent cinematographer like Platoon's Robert Richardson or Down's recent Oscar nominee Slavomir Idziak).
Then again, comparing it to other Nam movies might be unfair because Soldiers isn't your typical Nam flick in which a small group of men wander through the jungle and stumble upon that friendly village that ain't so friendly after all, or wind their way through the rubble of a former city while snipers pick them off one at a time. Instead, it focuses on the first skirmish between U.S. forces and the Viet Cong on November 14, 1965, which served as both an ominous gauge for American success throughout the conflict as well as an incredibly painful reminder of why we now bomb the shit out of countries for weeks at a time before ground troops are even thought of being sent in.
Originally planned as a summer blockbuster but moved up because of Lines' success, Soldiers is based on the book by Lieutenant-General Harold G. Moore and Joe Galloway from which it takes its name (81% of the book's cumbersome title was hacked off for a more marquee-friendly moniker here). Their bestseller was not a work of fiction but something the two men collaborated on after living through the events of the Landing Zone X-Ray Operation - Moore as a then Lieutenant-Colonel of the 1st Battalion, 7th Regiment, and Moore as a UPI reporter covering the offensive maneuver which pitted 395 mostly inexperienced U.S. soldiers against several thousand troops from North Viet Nam.
The battle proper took place over 34 days, but we see only the first day or so, and that doesn't happen until writer-director Wallace (The Man in the Iron Mask) spends nearly an hour setting up the situation. Mel Gibson (What Women Want) plays Moore, the Harvard-educated expert in international diplomacy and happily married father of five who insists on getting all philosophical about everything, even though his gravelly, two-packs-a-day Southern intonation and slight pudginess make him look and sound a bit like John Wayne. Knowing the situation in Nam is about to boil over, Moore becomes increasingly haunted by images of famous massacres brought on from being blindsided by both the enemy and a general state of unpreparedness (like Custer by the Indians and, as demonstrated in Soldiers' first scene, the French by the Viet Cong).
We only get a handful of characters fleshed out for us, like Sam Elliott's (The Contender) gruff Sergeant-Major and Greg Kinnear's (Someone Like You) cocksure helicopter pilot. Soldiers would be no better or worse without the presence of either of these characters (or actors). More effective is the obligatory innocent young soldier (Chris Klein, Rollerball) whose obligatory innocent young wife (Keri Russell, Felicity) has just squeezed out their first obligatory innocent young baby. Galloway's character, played by Barry Pepper (61*), doesn't show up until more than half of the film is over, which is kind of odd considering he's been narrating the whole thing from the get-go.
It takes about 45 minutes for that first Neil Armstrong-esque step off the helicopter, and the fighting starts soon after, but, as a whole, the battle sequences aren't that impressive at all. Wallace's idea of artistic style is to simply show the more devastating injuries in slow motion, or to occasionally cut off the sound and crank up Nick Glennie-Smith's decent score. Coming on the heels of Down and even Lines, the boringly photographed Soldiers just doesn't measure up and is pretty disappointing. Things may have been better and more intense if it didn't constantly switch perspectives from the U.S. troops to the strategizing Viet Cong (a la Pearl Harbor, which was also penned by Wallace) to the wives back home, who seem to receive word of their husbands' grizzly fates just seconds after the bullets pierce their skin.
The drab editing and photography (from Dean Semler, the director of bombs like Super Mario Brothers, Firestorm and The Patriot...with Steven Seagal, not Mel) actually makes the manipulative scenes with the soldiers' wives that much more dramatic and effective, with Russell and Impostor's Madeleine Stowe (whose poufy new lips make me think she's been frequenting the same inept plastic surgeon as Meg Ryan) delivering the Bad News telegrams like a pair of grim reapers in pretty floral prints. Also bothersome is the fact that the film looks like it takes place in a suburb of Cleveland much more than it resembles any Viet Nam I've ever seen in television or movies (the press notes go out of their way to say this particular part of Nam looks just like the part of California they used to shoot the film).
Since gaining critical acclaim for his Braveheart screenplay, Wallace directed the dopey Mask (his debut) and penned the unintentionally funny Harbor, making him just as much of a threat to the art of filmmaking as Michael Bay, Arnold Schwarzenegger or the person who keeps greenlighting those awful Mummy-related films. Don't get roped into thinking Soldiers will be anything like Braveheart just because Wallace and Mel are both involved. On the plus side, I guess, Wallace gives Mel plenty of chances to be Mel, and that's probably all the moviegoing public wants anyway.
2:18 - R for sustained sequences of graphic war violence and for language
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