War Is Mel (We Were Soldiers (DVD))

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	We Were Soldiers (DVD)
Date:	12/03/02 (227 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well directed, even handed, some fine spectacle

Disadvantages: preachy , sentimental, not serious enough to be this gory, if you know what I mean (and knickers to you if you don't)

So, a few years on from 'Braveheart', where Mel Gibson starred and directed from a Randall Wallace script, we have 'We Were Soldiers', where Gibson stars and Wallace directs. It's a Vietnam War movie based on a true incident, a bloody battle fought at the beginning of the US Army's official war against the communist Viet Cong.

Let's try to be positive - the spectacle in 'We Were Soldiers' is hugely impressive, its specific historical setting makes for a fascinating, and quite novel view of very familiar cinematic terrain, and there is a sincere attempt to put forward the Vietnamese point of view. Most Vietnam films are set in the thick of the war in the late sixties, with jaded soldiers being sent into the heat of an already entrenched battle. This film is set in 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson ordered troops into Vietnam officially, rather than the 'advisors' who had previously been in place, ostensibly to help locals fight the Viet Cong. In other words, this is the very beginning of the war.

Even though the point of the film is to emphasize the waste of young lives on the American side (some of the actors are evidently teenagers), the director Randall Wallace is clearly eager to present the war from the other side as well, with sequences shot inside the enemy bunker, with the North Vietnamese guerillas presented as men fighting hard for a cause they believe to be as just as that of the Americans (and in hindsight, you have to wonder whether the US Army's mission stacks up against the Cong at all). There is a particularly good sequence where a soldier prepares himself, looking at a photo of his girlfriend, writing in his diary, and then charging across the battlefield only to be shot down by Gibson without a second thought. I was, perhaps unhappily, reminded of the gags in 'Austen Powers', where you get to see the friends and family of all the henchmen who are thoughtlessly wasted, but at least
they are trying to humanise the enemy, so often depicted as a nasty, faceless horde of asian goblins.

Wallace's other big agenda is to show the extreme brutality of war - every bullet hole sprays thick syrupy fountains of blood, a man caught by an exploding grenade is shown with glowing bits of shrapnel visible in his face (which someone else then cuts out, onscreen), and in the most intense bit, a soldier burned by the US Army's napalm is turned into a burnt piece of meat. It is extremely difficult to eat pizza after watching this film, I can tell you.

The use of helicopters and special effects is well judged, and the action - essentially one drawn-out battle) - is very well orchestrated, just coherent enough to follow, but nevertheless difficult and confusing enough to be convincing.

But I can't keep this up for too long - 'We Were Soldiers' is severely compromised by some very poor judgement. The opening stretch in the Army Barracks is deeply sentimental, and Gibson's stolid hero is one of the most preachy, self-righteous prigs I've ever had the misfortune to watch. This is a true story, so reality must intrude, but most of the people who die in this movie are ill-characterised extras, ripped to shreds so the name actors can grimace and make speeches about how bad a thing war is.

While some of the emotional meat is very subtle - Gibson is shown tucking two dead soldiers into their bodybags with the same care and affection he tucked his kids into bed towards the start - much of it is jaw-droppingly naïve and designed to get the audience weeping. I'm sorry, but I remained stony-faced. An unapologetically catholic central character is already a problem for me from the outset, but this is a pious, stuffy, and rather prim film which pales in comparison to the rigour and sheer bloody-mindedness of 'Full Metal Jacket' or 'Platoon'. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but
it's a somewhat unnecessary one - better than 'Pearl Harbor' (which Wallace scripted), but a long way behind 'Black Hawk Down'.

Summary: