Randall Wallace
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Neither Rich nor director Randall Wallace, who has been best known to me for writing Braveheart 15 years ago, give any apparent shit about depicting actual, legitimate drama, and at times the film earnestly shies away from it - for the first hour, the story keeps promising to explore the toll that Penny's obsession with horse-farming takes on her family, half a country away, but it never comes close: a combination of artistic indifference, and a scattershot narrative structure that blazes through the first three years of its story without any attention paid to chronological markers.
Unfortunately, Wallace, who had previously penned Mel Gibson’s 1995 Oscar-winning, global hit “Braveheart,” believes in spelling out every dramatic conflict and every resolution.
The film, directed by Randall Wallace, screenwriter of “Braveheart” and “Pearl Harbor,” and scripted by Mike Rich (“Finding Forrester’), boasts the triple crown of Diane Lane in a great lead role, Margo Martindale in support and an inspiring thoroughbred.
Director Randall Wallace knows how to make an audience cheer (he wrote "Braveheart" and wrote and directed "We Were Soldiers").
That’s not to say that Wallace (writer of Braveheart and director of We Were Soldiers) doesn’t take some significant liberties with the story, or that he doesn’t make some lousy choices.
Maybe the earlier film about a smallish horse had a bigger heart and better writing than Randall Wallace’s third directorial outing—after “The Man in the Iron Mask” (1998) and “We Were Soldiers” (2002) —but his film does tell a decent story (heck, he did write “Braveheart” ) and provides some fascinating insight into the 1969 coin-toss circumstances that would deliver an unborn foal that would grow into a champion.
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced We Were Soldiers (2002)
Visuals Themes
Audiences had never experienced anything quite like the confrontational D-Day re-enactment that begins four minutes into Saving Private Ryan; that they have many times in the film's wake ( Pearl Harbor , Black Hawk Down , Windtalkers , We Were Soldiers , and the Spielberg-produced miniseries "Band of Brothers" each crib from Saving Private Ryan's intermittently harsh aesthetic to varying degrees) demonstrates a paucity of innovators--a Pied Piper mentality--in the American cinema and does unfortunately point to novelty as a chief source of the first act's power.
That's either a relief (no more rippling flags and rugged middle-American barns in need of a paint job, à la "Saving Private Ryan," at least for a while) or a troubling development, depending on how you look at it.
Notwithstanding the intensity of some of the scenes and sequences - that rival "Aliens" and "Starship Troopers" for that wide-eyed reaction to the sight of so many enemy forces storming the heroes' position - the film doesn't quite elicit that horrible "you are there" feeling that permeated "BHD" or "Saving Private Ryan."
If Wallace is trying to up the Saving Private Ryan ante, he certainly never transcends the 101-ways-to-maim-and-kill-a-soldier fireworks.
Saving Private Ryan raised the bar on visceral horror in combat pictures, and We Were Soldiers hurdles it.
After such evocative recent films as "Black Hawk Down" and "Saving Private Ryan," filmmakers who want to address the horrors of war must be prepared to be held up to some high standards.
Both Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down" and Randall Wallace's new "We Were Soldiers," an account of the first significant battle of the Vietnam War, allow us to join complicated conflicts already in progress -- we don't need to trouble ourselves with the how or why of them; we simply need to accept that they already exist.
Which means that Randall Wallace and the rest of the Braveheart crew offered him a lot of money for We Were Soldiers, Black Hawk Down with a Pearl Harbor sensibility.
I will admit that I may have liked We Were Soldiers had I seen it before the cinematic ass-kicking that is Black Hawk Down .
Similar in both theme and plot to "Black Hawk Down," writer/director Randall Wallace's adaptation of the novel sets the American forces in the middle of a vicious and dire maelstrom.
It's no surprise that those movies released after 9-11 are being deployed to boost wartime "morale," even though they were plainly conceived and completed before 9-11: these include The Last Castle, Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down, Hart's War, and We Were Soldiers (films must plainly be "historical" to be counted as serious).
A collaboration of the "Braveheart" team of star Mel Gibson and writer (turned director, this time) Randall Wallace, it's also a harrowingly realistic and gut-wrenching piece of filmmaking -- though it's so similar to "Black Hawk Down" that it's essentially the same movie.
While this representation isn't revolutionary, it is more apparently respectful than that in the best known anti-war movies set in Vietnam -- from the most heartfelt (Platoon), to the most rock n' roll (Apocalypse Now), to the most aggressively intelligent (Full Metal Jacket).
Platoon and Full Metal Jacket wrote the book on squad-based combat, Apocalypse Now explored the darkness at the heart of the human condition and The Deer Hunter canvassed the mental anguish suffered by returning veterans.
With the possible exceptions of Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" and John Irvin's "Hamburger Hill" -- both released in 1987 -- few films about Vietnam have avoided total cynicism about Vietnam while capturing the chaos, horror and bravery of the soldiers.
Some of America’s most memorable films have come out of that pain — Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and The Deer Hunter, for example.
Other Vietnam films - like Full Metal Jacket and Born on the Fourth of July - followed, and although they dealt with the same historical subject matter, those pictures also brought something new to the table.
“12 Strong” is “We Were Soldiers” in Afghanistan, accurate, flag-waving and intentionally and myopically incomplete.
The movie’s attempts to tie in the war at home don’t work, in stark contrast to Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers, in which separate timelines were juxtaposed by intercutting the sequences set in Vietnam with sequences involving the soldiers’ wives which took place as much as a week or two later.
The film, directed by Randall Wallace, screenwriter of “Braveheart” and “Pearl Harbor,” and scripted by Mike Rich (“Finding Forrester’), boasts the triple crown of Diane Lane in a great lead role, Margo Martindale in support and an inspiring thoroughbred.
But Kinnear and English actress Kelly Reilly (of the Robert Downey “Sherlock Holmes” films), who plays patient Burpo’s wife, manage to depict a family in financial and spiritual crisis with some subtlety despite dialogue that’s often way too on-the-nose.
War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
Directed by Matt Reeves
influenced by We Were Soldiers (2002)
Visuals
This scene looks like something out of “Platoon” or “We Were Soldiers” or “Full Metal Jacket” — and it’s hardly the only time “War for the Planet of the Apes” will remind us of a superbly crafted Vietnam war film.
As a movie about the power of faith and the rigors of battle (see also Gibson’s work in Gallipoli, Mad Max, We Were Soldiers, Braveheart, The Patriot, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto), Hacksaw Ridge plays to Gibson’s established strengths, making it a perfect comeback vehicle.
Yet Hacksaw Ridge is the goriest war movie ever to come out of Hollywood; the violence is grislier than the climax of the Gibson-starring We Were Soldiers , in which the skulls of North Vietnamese soldiers ruptured like jelly-filled jars under machine gun fire, and comes at much greater length.
The director admires men who combine holiness and heroism, such as “Braveheart’s” William Wallace and Lt. Col. Hal Moore in “We Were Soldiers.”
Gibson's telling of the real-life story of Desmond Doss, who refused to handle firearms but served heroically as a combat medic in the US army in the Pacific in World War Two, harks back to themes in a number of Gibson's previous films, not least The Passion of the Christ and We Were Soldiers (which he starred in but didn't direct).
If you like this, try: “We Were Soldiers” and “Sergeant York”…
Of course, the cynic might recognize that in this gruesome set-piece Berg is trying to place himself in the modern-day pantheon of war-film directors, to invite comparisons to “Black Hawk Down” — the film closest in spirit to “Sole Survivor” — as well as “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Thin Red Line” and “We Were Soldiers.”
If you like this, try: “Act of Valor,” with real-life Navy SEALS playing fictional versions of themselves and “We Were Soldiers,” about the early days of the American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Tears of the Sun isn�t as intellectually stimulating as Three Kings nor is it as stoic (We Were Soldiers) or half-witted (Behind Enemy Lines) as the films clearly used as a blueprint.
If we can see this sort of close combat done well in a film that is really about it, like Mel Gibson's " We Were Soldiers ," why do we have to see it done merely competently, in a movie that is not really about it?
What keeps it one step below We Were Soldiers, Behind Enemy Lines and Windtalkers, however, is the fact that its preposterousness cant be softened by the claim that its based on a real war story.
Nestled snugly between the belligerent warmongering of We Were Soldiers and the apolitical pretense of Black Hawk Down , the new Bruce Willis vehicle Tears of the Sun is a startlingly active embrace of both liberal and conservative principles without the cleverness or the gumption to effectively acknowledge either one.
We Were Soldiers, Hacksaw Ridge, Lone Survivor — their soldiers may be brave or weak, gung ho or skeptical, stoned or not, but they do their duty.
Consequently, I’m not sure how audience will receive a movie so lacking in cynicism and rooted in hyper realism, closer in tone to “Saving Private Ryan” and “We Were Soldiers” than to the sort of war movies Hollywood cranked out in the ‘40s and ‘50s.
Father Stu is essentially Heaven is for Real for TradCaths.
Shadowlands, Any Given Sunday, Amistad, the execrable First Knight � these films are different beasts entirely, and we are left to question why the success of a high-budget blockbuster was entrusted to men such as these when the likes of Randall Wallace (Braveheart, The Man in the Iron Mask) would doubtless have jumped at the chance to return to familiar territory.
War makes men glorious - or it is supposed to - and war movies almost always do (especially lately, in films such as We Were Soldiers).
Although he's appeared in two pictures since "Titanic" -- "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "Celebrity" -- this is the first role he's taken since superstardom tapped him with its mighty scepter.
Missing is star Ewan McGregor, but he has been replaced by none other than Leonardo DiCaprio, in his first post-Titanic role (The Man In the Iron Mask, which was released after Cameron's blockbuster, was filmed before it).
Leonardo DiCaprio (in his first starring role since the unintentional 1998 laugh-riot, "The Man in the Iron Mask") stars as Richard, a young man traveling through Thailand who, through narration, tells us that his name is the only thing we need to know about him.
What the film does have going for it - at least until the story and most credibility drops out from underneath it - is Leonardo DiCaprio ("Titanic," "The Man in the Iron Mask").