We Were Soldiers (2002)
Directed by Randall Wallace
The year is 1965 and America is at war with North Vietnam. Commanding the air cavalry is Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Gibson), a born leader committed to his troops. His target: the Ia Drang Valley, called "The Valley of Death." As Moore prepares for one of the most violent battles in U.S. history, he delivers a stirring promise to his soldiers and their families: "I will leave no man behind...dead or alive. We will all come home together."
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What critics say influenced We Were Soldiers
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.