Do you frown at the thought of seeing combat movies? Who wants to take an hour out of their weekend to watch people being shot, burned, decapitated or maimed besides hunters and members of the army?
I once thought like this too. I didn’t want to see any movie that’s main prop was a gun. Movies like Saving Private Ryan, A Thin Red Line, The Patriot and of course hundreds of classics have cemented our defeats and loss of American lives by enemies on the silver screen.
We were Soldiers is a movie about a war we did not win and the enemies have a face.
We were Soldiers combines new and old tactics to lull the viewer. First the movie opens with direct entrances by characters that explain where they come from, what type of person they are and whether we are supposed to like them or not. This old tactic is combined with the new tactic of putting a face on the enemy.
The film opens with the French being defeated by the Northern Vietnamese troops.
This is ten years before the Americans get there and it sets the scene for what type of war they are about face.
It is quite startling and very effective to address it in this way.
We were Soldiers is based on Hal Moore’s best selling novel by the same name.
Before the characters are faced with 2,000 North Vietnamese troops in the first major land battle of the Vietnam War, they are forced to train for a war they don’t understand.
Mel Gibson plays a father of five and a Harvard graduate who is to command his troops in a war he compares to Korea in the beginning.
Chris Klein, who plays a new father, finds a mentor in Gibson. With such a deep character explanation, the blows in the war are much worst than other movies because there is a deep bond built between the characters from the beginning.
Randal Wallace, who also wrote the screenplay for Braveheart, does an excellent job in painting a picture of a war where America is not the hero.
The North Koreans are shown as fathers, husbands and sons who are just as scared as the Americans. Instead of showing glances of Vietnamese people, the audience is shown a story about their losses and heartbreak.
The actual combat scenes are gory and sickening - but what war isn’t.
Most of the movie is quite good except for the way the wives on the base find out if their husbands have died. A taxi cab driver is sent with the letters because apparently the government didn’t know there would be so many deaths.
Madeline Stowe, who plays Gibson’s wife, is forced to deliver the bad news.
She walks from house to house telling her friends that their husbands are not coming back.
Of course you always think her husband is next and that is pulling at you through the entire movie.
We were Soldiers is probably the first of many war movies that we will see with this type of tone. I think it is quite enjoyable.
