We Were Soldiers Directed by Randall Wallace Written by Randall Wallace Starring Mel Gibson, Chris Klein, Madeleine Stowe and Sam Elliott Classification: AA Rating: **½
War movies are still catching up with the impact of two films released in 1998. Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan broke new ground with the extraordinary dislocating physical violence of the first half-hour. The same year, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line offered a picture of war as an experience of moral bewilderment.
Ridley Scott's current hit, Black Hawk Down,extended the Saving Private Ryan impact. We Were Soldiers tries for a little of both. Though it falls short, it's an ambitious movie that ranges from intense peaks to embarrassing lows. At its centre is an extended battle scene to rival Black Hawk Down's ferocity, but there's also an attempt to paint a larger social canvas than Scott's blistering shoot 'em up.
One of the areas in which We Were Soldiers fails is its emphasis on one character, played by star and co-producer Mel Gibson. William Goldman, writer of The Sting and The Princess Bride,has observed that Hollywood stars aren't content with being heroes, they want to be gods, and Gibson gets the full divine trappings here. The script is based on a 1992 book by Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore and war correspondent Joseph L. Galloway (played in the movie by Gibson and Barry Pepper, respectively) about Moore's helicopter cavalry unit, which suffered heavy casualties in the first major clash between the People's Army of Vietnam and the Americans at Ia Drang in the central highlands of Vietnam in November, 1965.
The movie is mostly a chance to display what a helluva guy -- brave, resourceful, sensitive -- the commander was. Even the title, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young,has been suitably truncated to suit the middle-aged Gibson. Director Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart for Gibson (as well as Pearl Harbor),has made a safe commercial decision in putting one of the world's top stars front and centre, but fewer big Mel moments, and more hints of the lives of his grunts, would have made a better film.
We Were Soldiers beings a extensive State-side introduction, running in excess of half an hour, at the Air Cavalry training ground at Fort Benning, Ga. Here we establish Moore as an affectionate father and loving husband (to an overly glamorous Madeleine Stowe, who appears to be wearing newly inflated lips). Moore is a Harvard graduate, good Catholic and daredevil. While he studies up -- in French -- on France's military failures, he links his sense of foreboding about the upcoming Vietnam mission to Custer's disaster at Little Big Horn, and whips his officers into shape.
The scenes with the wives, evocative of similar scenes in Ron Howard's Apollo 13,introduces the women, in sixties fashion, exchanging tips on shopping and laundry. There's a pointed sequence showing how non-racist the women are toward the one black wife. It also sets up a morally conflicted new dad (Chris Klein) and introduces the curmudgeonly Second World War veteran, Basil Plumley (Sam Elliott), and hot-shot helicopter pilot Bruce Crandall (Greg Kinnear). We see little of the families again, apart from a sequence where Julie Moore, mirroring her husband's battle-charge bravery, takes it upon herself to deliver the tragic telegrams to the widows.
Most of the remainder of the film recreates the three-day battle, which has some striking similarities to Black Hawk Down. In each case, the American military brass commits soldiers deep into hostile territory. In both cases, the better-armed but hugely out-numbered Americans (about 400 to 2,000) take heavy casualties, while destroying far more enemies. Blood spurts, bodies topple and a platoon gets stranded in the midst of enemy territory. In addition, We Were Soldiers offers spinning fighter jets, napalm-burned faces and wave upon wave of Viet Cong soldiers testing the Americans' porous perimeter.
If the action is graphic and immediate, other aspects of the movie are inexcusably bad. A montage of images of journalist-photographer Joe (based on co-writer Galloway) spinning about against a dissolving slide show of war photographs is a strained attempt to give Galloway a piece of the glory. Nick Glennie-Smith's wildly overwrought musical score -- which includes everything from Scottish war songs to a growling didgeridoo -- consistently distracts from, rather than enhances, the action.
Borrowing from Moore's philosophical reminiscences, We Were Soldiers makes some attempts at showing the big picture. As has now become commonplace in war films since Saving Private Ryan/ The Thin Red Line,we hear that soldiers don't die for their country, but for their comrades. There's also an attempt at equal time (much better handled than Wallace's similar attempt in his screenplay for Pearl Harbor)where we see Moore's counterpart, a Communist commander in an underground cave. He also inspires his men and is as resourceful and as determined as his American counterpart. One bespectacled (and, of course, doomed to die) Viet Cong soldier is seen writing in his little red book, with a photograph of a young woman between the pages. It's the shorthand way of saying there's another side to the story.
Liam Lacey