Someone Had Blundered

We Were Soldiers is a horrible movie, and I mean that in three different ways.

First, We Were Soldiers is horrible in the general sort of way that a certain sort of movie is horrible on occasion. We Were Soldiers has all sorts of appalling elements that are cause for fear and dread. Like the famously awful Pearl Harbor, it has a deathly awful Randall Wallace screenplay, laden with syrupy and cloying dialogue. (And like Pearl Harbor, we’re treated to the revolting spectacle of the Ridiculously Phony Southern Accent, this time by Mel Gibson.) It presents a counterfeit and idealized view of Army life in the 1960’s, whitewashing everything from the fences to the racial attitudes. It features Greg Kinnear in a role where he is called on to be something more than smug. It is piled high and deep with enough sentiment and tears and patriotism to run sixteen Congressional campaigns and still have enough left over for an AT&T commercial. It is so sickly sweet in places that you almost want to stay for the closing credits so you can watch for the inevitable appearance of the Hallmark logo.

Second, We Were Soldiers is horrible in a very specific sense having to do with war in general and Vietnam in particular. We Were Soldiers is the story of one of the earliest large-scale battles of Vietnam involving American units (as distinguished from “combat advisors” and the like). It is the story of a small number of American “air cavalry” troops, ferried into combat by helicopter into the middle of a North Vietnamese army division, a little at a time. It shows how Mel Gibson’s troopers come under fire almost immediately against a numerically superior force, and how they must fight their way out against waves of near-suicidal enemy infantry. It is the story of the Vietnam War writ small, with all the waste, futility, and horror of that war presented intact. It graphically portrays the valor and courage of the American fighting man in Vietnam, and how that valor and courage was squandered for no good reason at all due to incompetent leadership and a faulty sense of mission - and that, in its way, is more horrible than any Greg Kinnear performance or Randall Wallace screenplay there ever was.

The battle featured in We Were Soldiers takes place in an area of the Central Highlands called the “Valley of Death”, in a way that may or may not echo the Charge of the Light Brigade:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

The comparison isn’t exactly quite fair; American leadership in Vietnam wasn’t quite so lacking as British leadership in the Crimean War, and the result of the battle portrayed in We Were Soldiers was a hard-fought American victory. Still, anyone with any kind of knowledge of how the Vietnam War turned out (probably, unfortunately, excluding a significant proportion of the movie’s target teenage-boy audience), anyone who knows how the war is going to end for the Americans, can’t help but feel saddened and mortified watching the movie.

The battlefield scenes are by far the best part of the movie, outshining anything else on the screen. Randall Wallace proved in Pearl Harbor that he’s absolutely incapable of handling any sort of human interaction other than battle, but he writes and directs the battle scenes with a sure hand. (Unlike Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers doesn’t stint on the blood and gore, there’s no gauze covering the lens when the camera looks at burn victims.) The talented cast of Mel Gibson, Sam Elliott and Barry Pepper (excluding the untalented cast of Greg Kinnear and Chris Klein), does a great job of portraying the anxiety and stress of combat. The battle of Landing Zone X-Ray is comprehensible and vivid, and the portrayal of combat is worthy of comparison with Saving Private Ryan and a shade behind Black Hawk Down.

The excellence of the battlefield scenes almost makes We Were Soldiers a movie worth seeing. However, We Were Soldiers suffers from a terminal lack of honesty and authenticity concerning its main character, Mel Gibson’s Lt. Colonel Hal Moore. It’s reasonable in a Hollywood epic featuring a major star for the script to whitewash some of the details about that star’s character. (This will hereinafter be known as the “John Forbes Nash Rule”, after the hero of A Beautiful Mind.)

But We Were Soldiers is not so much a whitewash as it is a complete paint job. The movie is based on Moore’s book, and predictably shows him in the best possible light. We see Moore poring over military textbooks describing other similar massacres, supposedly learning how to avoid mistakes that he makes anyway. We see him expressing remorse and sorrow over the losses in battle, but never fully accepting responsibility for any mistakes he might have made. Although We Were Soldiers is bipartisan - presenting some scenes from the enemy point of view - it is not objective; it presents Moore the way he wanted to be portrayed instead of in a way that’s authentic and interesting. We Were Soldiers is a well-told battle movie that is filled with both cinematic and historic blunders; it would make fewer of the former if it would acknowledge some of the latter.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 10:48 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.