We Were Soldiers (2002)

[IronParrot]

Man alive, it feels good to be writing again.

Straight from my site:

SUMMARY

Set in the Vietnam War, a portrayal of the ambush of 400 American soldiers in the Ia Drang Valley by over 2000 enemy troops. Based on the book We Were Soldiers Once... And Young by Lt. Colonel Hal Moore (here played by Mel Gibson) and Joseph L. Galloway (Barry Pepper).

RECOMMENDED FOR:

People who didn't like Black Hawk Down because it didn't have enough cornball propaganda and tearjerking sap.

REVIEW

A part of me wants to believe that Randall Wallace, a shining example of the words "one-hit wonder" in the current Hollywood generation, tried to convey the futility and confusion of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam by making We Were Soldiers equally futile and confusing. However, it is doubtful that Wallace's flair for self-referential irony goes that far, and the only reasonable conclusion seems to be that unfortunately, the film was not intended to be as pointless as it is.

The real question is why We Were Soldiers flops where the eerily similar Black Hawk Down succeeds. Both films involve an overlong pre-battle exposition of forgettable characters, before helicopters fly the troops into a danger zone where they fight for their survival in a ninety-minute play-by-play battle scene complete with the time of day popping up on screen every now and then. But here's the kicker: while Black Hawk Down let the spectacular visuals tell the story, implicitly making statements about war under the veil of objectivity, Wallace refuses to let We Were Soldiers do the same. After both this and Pearl Harbor, someone had better tell him that his trademark ideals of patriotic heroism do not work when, unlike in Braveheart but sadly like in We Were Soldiers, underdeveloped characters are getting their butts kicked.

While bullets are raining on the American soldiers, the cliché-laden script never ceases to shoot Cheez Balls at the audience. Virtually every American death is treated like the dead Ewok in Return of the Jedi (yes, that one). This would come off as a sentimental depiction of every life as valuable, if it weren't for the fact that these soldiers kick the bucket with a painful "I'm glad I could die for my country." Add the soldiers' wives in Saigon weeping their hearts out in discontinuously intercut sequences with no purpose but to make gullibly absorbed audience members weep with them, and you have the Kraft Dinner that is We Were Soldiers.

And despite all this explicit tearjerking, the film says nothing either explicitly or implicitly about the conflict in Vietnam itself, aside from the occasional acknowledgement that nobody understood it, which is just pointing out the obvious. Even though this film is primarily about the bravery of soldiers and the brotherhood between them, there is still no demonstration of the human element that characterized Vietnam, specifically the irreparable dehumanization of the troops involved that is covered in every Vietnam flick even remotely worth mentioning, including but not limited to Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Deer Hunter.

Perhaps this would be forgivable if the combat scenes themselves were decent, but it quickly becomes obvious that Wallace does not manage the camera with the same visual dynamism as the likes of Ridley Scott. Instead of keeping the audience involved, the repetitive battle sequences succeed more at putting it to sleep. A musical score consisting primarily of the same snare drum riff looped over and over again at every choppy transition does not help.

Of course, We Were Soldiers is not without a few redeeming qualities that are unforunately, like the Americans in Ia Drang, vastly outnumbered. Even amidst all the overt flag-waving American patriotism that has absolutely no place in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese are not portrayed as evil Communist villains bent on the destruction of global democracy, but rather as soldiers also doing their job, who also have loved ones back home. It is unfortunate that these scenes are thrown in for the sole purpose of trying to save the movie from criticism that it is too propagandistic (which it is), not unlike the brief appearances of the Japanese command in Pearl Harbor. Still, the film manages to close on a somewhat emotional tone, though all of the emotion in the movie that does not come off as superficial shows up too little, too late.

If you see this movie looking for a film about Vietnam, then there is one question I must ask you: where were you when Apocalypse Now Redux was released last summer? At the very least, please save your time and just watch the Vietnam sequence in Forrest Gump, wherein everything in We Were Soldiers is done better.