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Like
the Viet Nam war, We Were Soldiers has no plot. And
also like the Viet Nam war, the movie drones on incessantly
with half of America saluting it and the other half protesting
that it should be ended.
The
number of isolated incidents Hollywood can potentially mine
for movies about WWII or Viet Nam or the Gulf or, more recently,
the war sloganed as "Dumb President Dumb War",
is limitless - but seriously, bozos, what's the point? After
the hundredth explosion and twentieth empty promise of,
"We will leave no one behind!" and fiftieth guy
who dies saving his friend's life, can I now claim my membership
in the "Inured To War Movies" Club and get on
with my wretched life? In other words - I get it!
Put the fake blood down and step away from the Huey. So
it's a "true" story - who cares? There's
some running and shouting and explosions - and then there's
some running and shouting and explosions. But it's a True
Story! - SO WHAT?! Rhubarb rhubarb harumph harumph. (I didn't
get a harumph outa that guy!) Tagging any story as "true"
doesn't guarantee that it's worth telling. I bought fourteen
rolls of toilet paper today and spoke to a CD replication
plant in Santa Ana. True story. Where's my funding?
Braveheart's
descendant, writer/director Randall Wallace injects human
involvement to the point where we shudder to imagine the
loss of even one human life - on any side. But this
has become a tenet of modern movie-making - the war film
ironically decrying violence. 'Twould be a Profound Testament,
were it not for All Quiet On The Western Front, or
Paths Of Glory or The Deer Hunter or Saving
Private Ryan or a hundred other previous films with
deeper and larger hearts.
And
yet, unbelievably, some slick-tongued agent was able to
finagle some studio executive into conning some corporate
funder into coughing up money to beat out the same old story
with different names.
I'm
not even saying that this was a 'bad' movie (in that Roger
Corman/Ed Wood sense of the word), just that it was... 'unnecessary'
(in that John Woo/Michael Bay sense of the word).
Despite
its overall pointlessness, there are many surprisingly good
points to this movie. The film-makers actually bothered
to translate the Vietnamese, which humanized them considerably.
Most movies of this ilk callously regard "the enemy"
as faceless, unintelligent guerillas who just deserve to
die - but the choice to portray the Viet Cong making military
decisions, giving pep talks to their boys in... uh, green?
tope? (what was the color of their uniform?), allowing
the Vietnamese protagonists to express feelings of horror,
indecisiveness, heroism, humanity, almost evened
out the insensitivity shown to that race in every previous
war picture to date… Too late the apology - if this
movie were made in an age where war pictures were taken
seriously, rather than mushed out in production-line fashion
after September 11, 2001, maybe it would have made amends.
Instead, it becomes indistinguishable amongst the bilious
fad fodder like Black Hawk Down and Behind Enemy
Lines.
Another
plus was the portrayal of the euphemistic "friendly
fire"; I'm sure that in the course of every major battle
where no one knew which way was down, up or pan-dimensional,
innumerable scores of troops must have been cut down by
their own men, although, we realize that in showing this
one scene, the movie-makers absolve themselves of
the implication that this type of incident was commonplace.
It is handled, as we would expect Hollywood to handle it,
like a mistake that happens as rarely as Dennis Miller resorts
to fart jokes for cheap laughs.
Of course, all the maudlin attempts at heartstring-tugging
were shoveled effusively down our throats, such as the birth
of Chris Klein's baby and his subsequent hollow prayer,
"I don't know what god's plan is for me - I hope it's
to protect orphans and not make any" - let's qualify
that statement with the word "American orphans",
cos you sure as shit made a lot of Vietnamese orphans out
on that field today, you mannequin-faced hypocrite.
Then
there was the montage of Madeline Stowe delivering a sheaf
of bereavement letters from the government to unfortunate
housewives in her locale - touching… if I wasn't focusing
on how crooked her wig looked, or the sixty-frame dissolves
and close-ups of extras trying to look soul-broken, when
you know that they're overjoyed to be adding this two-second
onscreen dissolve to their resume as "Bereaved Housewife".
Especially
moving was a scene where Barry Pepper, who had just made
his acquaintance with Jimmy The Good Gook, was trying to
lift the napalmed Jimmy aboard the rescue chopper by grabbing
his legs. The jellied flesh of Jimmy's shins peel off in
Pepper's hands, revealing bone; Jimmy screams (through half
a face - although I'm not sure he would have even felt
his shins peeling away while his nerves were still trying
to deal with the fact that the whole left side of his body
had just been cauterized), victim of the Hollywood foreshadowing
gambit, which states that if a minor character admits something
joyous (such as Jimmy's wife "having a baby today")
for no plot purpose, it is purely a tool to leverage audience
emotion later.
Then
came the unintentionally amusing montage in which Barry
Pepper dynamically shoots his camera instead of his gun
(an aspect made veeery obvious to the cabbagehead
public via the previous scene, in a closeup where he drops
his gun to replace it with his camera - found later, hanging
miraculously unscathed from a tree branch); that look of
determined fortitude, overlayed with 70-ml movie-camera
image stills, as he turns every which way in slomo, a hero
of the shattered plains, a darkroom chemist gone wild -
oh, be still my joyous aperture!
We're
aware of his massive range of acting chops, but for this
movie, Mel Gibson just cupped one hand and skimmed the surface
froth of that deep, deep mug. And speaking of mugs, this
movie may have salvaged a few reasonable moments were it
not for Mel's egregious mugging at every foreseeable opportunity.
His unabashed mugging was to this movie as Chuck Heston's
was to Soylent Green. He delivered many monologs,
all testosterone-drenched in red-whaht-en-blue; he made
a lot of empty promises (most of them concerned with "leaving
no one behind" blah blah) he oozed a lot of compassion
and ultimately, should have quit the movie business after
making Braveheart.
We
should probably brace ourselves for the next filmic propaganda
right about the time an American bomb goes off in some defenseless
Middle Eastern backwater…
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