What do you want first, the good news or the bad news? The good news is that Randall Wallace, the director of this film, wrote Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Braveheart. The bad news is that Wallace also wrote Michael Bay’s crap extravaganza, Pearl Harbor. The really bad news is that We Were Soldiers, Wallace’s look at the first important American skirmish of the Vietnam War, is a lot more like Pearl Harbor than Braveheart. Shamelessly combining violent and gory battle scenes with schmaltzy sentimentality, it’s an emotionally manipulative piece of propagandistic trash—all slick packaging and no substance.
Set in 1965, the film stars Mel Gibson as Lt. Colonel Hal Moore, a career soldier who brings both education and experience to the battlefield. Moore is a Catholic with a beautiful wife (Madeleine Stowe) and umpteen children (this role is yet another of Gibson’s devout fathers). When Moore’s little girl (The Grinch’s Taylor Momsen) asks him what war is, his answer sounds like one of those oversimplified rhetorical pacifiers George W. Bush is so fond of popping in the American public’s mouth.
Recently transferred to a new base, Moore quickly begins his job training raw recruits—and himself—for America’s soon-to-be-heavy military involvement in the Vietnam War. (There’s a bit of effective irony in one scene; as Moore researches the earlier French failure in Indochina, his notes reveal all the same mistakes his own country will soon make.) Placed in charge of the 7th Cavalry, the same unit Custer led into the Little Big Horn, Moore dutifully leads his own men into the valley of Ia Drang. Meanwhile, his wife demonstrates her own seasoned leadership back home among the younger wives.
Once the Stateside exposition is taken care of, the film shifts into the kind of high-action combat footage that makes war movies war movies (as opposed to antiwar movies, which this one pretends to be but isn’t). Vastly outnumbered by a Viet Cong contingent nearly 4,000 strong, Moore’s boys find themselves surrounded and pinned down. (The more interesting moments involve the tactical battle of wits between Moore and his Vietnamese counterpart, a savvy officer who had overseen the massacre of the French that opens the film.) Once it becomes clear that the mission is all but hopeless, the brass try to pluck Moore off the battlefield—it’s the difference between heavy casualties and another massacre for the history books—but he refuses to leave. Other subplots follow a small group cut off from the rest of the Americans, a beleaguered ace helicopter pilot (Greg Kinnear), and war reporter Joe Galloway (Barry Pepper, playing the real-life co-author of the book the film is based on).
The battle scenes are shot in the violently chaotic, handheld-camera style that has become a cinematic cliché since Braveheart and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Bodies burst with blood as they’re abruptly pegged from afar, while the hardened vets stand around ignoring the firefight as though they’re impervious to bullets. And that’s part of the problem with this film’s Hollywood high gloss. We know that on its simple terms, men like Gibson and fellow wily vet Sam Elliott (lending his great low rumble of a voice to a stereotypically gruff sergeant-major) are impervious to harm, while fresh young actors like Chris Klein and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Marc Blucas are most definitely not. Although it’s based on Moore and Galloway’s combat memoir, the film is about as close to reality as an airbrushed centrefold is to a real woman.
Speaking of women, the young soldiers’ wives are all so gorgeous, the U.S. Army could use We Were Soldiers as a recruitment film. In a montage of reaction shots, several of these army wives get the dreaded news that their respective husbands have been killed in action. It’s supposed to evoke the tragedy of shattered young lives, but it comes off as just another example of the film’s mentality—nothing can be moving unless it happens to beautiful people under optimal lighting.
The film’s only genuinely moving moment comes at the very end, when the names of the men killed in the battle of Ia Drang appear onscreen just before the end credits. It’s just as calculated for emotional effect as everything that precedes it, but the fact of those names—and there are so many of them—achieves that effect more powerfully and more honestly than anything else in Wallace’s blatantly unreal fiction.
(1.5/4)