Windtalkers

Rating:
Summary: Want to get that six-pack without actually exercising?
Review: ***PROS***

- Good story

That's it. After two minutes of 'CHAAAAAARGE!!!!!', excuse me, *ahem*, "realistic Woo, er, war scenes", I had to actually stop the tape because I couldn't breathe, I was laughing SO hard! While this does save this film from the dreaded one-star rating, because I morbidly appreciate 'so-bad-it's-hilarious' filmmaking as much as the next guy, it doesn't save this movie from being a complete and utter failure. You remember those annoying scenes that whispered "Woo-was-here" from Face/Off? Well, those Woo-scenes plague this film pretty much from start to finish.

Want to watch a GOOD Woo film? Watch Face/Off instead.

Rating:
Summary: Major Disappointment
Review: I made the mistake of thinking that this movie would be cerebral and complex similar to the British-made movie, Enigma. I looked forward to seeing the Navajo star in a story about their skills as Code Talkers, and how they were able to outwit the Japanese and win battles for the Americans. Wow, what a disappointment. Instead, I saw a movie that simply used a few Navajo as excuses to show madness and mayhem on a grand scale. After sitting through the first half hour and being regularly bombarded with the cinematic equivalent of humans being fed through a meat grinder, I started to fast forward through the battle scenes, looking for those all too brief moments of conversation which only amounted to Nicholas Cage working through his own issues, over and over and over, ad nauseum. And if his eventual demise is just payment for his past decisions, I think we would all be better off not being acquainted with this wreck of a human being. Why the producers decided to misname the movie "Windtalkers" is a mystery. Frankly, the Native Americans who served this country during WWII deserve to have their story told, but this was definitely not the vehicle. See this movie only if you have a perverse desire to see humans ripped to shreds in a gratuitous display of senseless violence that repeats itself every five to ten minutes throughout the movie. My final word: Yuck.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely great!
Review: I have to say, this movie really is absolutely great! The battle scenes, the emotions, the characters, they all tie in together extremely well! This movie really displays a realistic perspective of war. What else can I say? If you have seen Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2, you should definitely see this movie!

For those of you who hate Windtalkers, you're nuts!! This movie is awesome and thrilling in every aspect! Some people may erroneously think that Windtalkers should have been about the importance of the Navajo code and how it helped the U.S. achieve victory in major Pacific battles, why is probably why they may not like the movie as much. Windtalkers isn't necessarily about the Navajo code, it's more or less about the importance of friendship and the immorality of war.

Some people may say that Windtalkers doesn't have a plot, that it's just fighting and talking. You don't see the plot in the movie, because it's not about one or more people trying to accomplish a certain physical task (like Tears of the Sun or Saving Private Ryan). It is more related to inner conflict. The plot, instead, is how Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage's character) tries to cope with his new assignment as guarding Navajo codetalker Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach's character) and killing him if Yahzee is about to be captured. At first, Enders tries to stay apart from Yahzee to avoid being friends, but as time passes by, he finds himself drawing closer and closer to Yahzee and eventually befriends him. Enders ultimately sees Yahzee's true character and finds himself unable to kill him if capture is imminent. Enders would, instead, decide to save his life. All other events in the movie, including the beginning where Enders loses all of his men, influence Ender's conflicting thoughts and emotions.

I won't spoil the ending for you if you haven't seen it yet, but you will be emotionally drawn to the movie when you see it.

Rating:
Summary: A pretty good film depicting the battle for Saipan in WWII
Review:

I've been on Saipan. The terrain is lush jungle surrounded by the clearest ocean I've ever seen. The water was so clear you could see the crabs scuttling on the bottom fifty feet down. The last time I was there was 55 years ago, on my way back to CLUSA after two years in China and on Guam, also in the Marianas.

This was a good movie. It centered around our Navajo code-talkers, which we used in WWII in the Islands. Talking in their own language, they confounded the Japanese code breakers, and were quite effective.

That's about where the realism ends in this movie. It's true that the bullets flew fast and furious, and that many thousands of American Marines died on the beaches and in the jungles. Some of the scenes here were obviously shot in the American Southwest. There was no desert on Saipan, nor on its sister island, Guam.

The most obvious innacuracy is the depiction by Nicolas Cage of a Marine sergeant standing up in plain sight, with a Thompson submachine gun holding a 20-round magazine, firing literally hundreds of rounds, mowing down Japanese soldiers (who also have weapons in their hands)like there was no tomorrow! Man! With two more guys like him we wouldn't have needed a Marine Corps! They could've taken all the islands in the Pacific by themselves. No wonder the code-talker he was assigned to protect (unless he had to kill him, depending on circumstances) stood around with his mouth open in amazement.

Like all of the other movies that are trying to portray what that war was like, played by actors who have never seen combat, written by writers who have never seen combat, and directed by directors who have never seen combat, it is perhaps better than should be expected.

I think that the best film of that era was a color documentary made by the Navy called "The Fighting Lady," about the U.S.S. Enterprise, showing real men flying real airplanes, many of whom were actually killed in combat. It was a propaganda movie made during the war. Lt. Robert Taylor, USNR (remember him?) did the voice over.

The best fiction depicting actual warfare was The Bridges at Toko-Ri, written by Michener, who actually spent time on the flattop with the men involved. Of course the reason I like them is because they depicted Naval Aviation, which was my bag. The problem with The Bridges is that the movie shows our jet fighters, the F9F Panthers, hitting the bridges, whereas the actual airplanes used (yes, such a battle was really fought) were propeller driven attack planes known as ADs.

The lead was played by the late William Holden, and the only inaccuracies devolved around his buddy-buddy relationship with an admiral who wasn't his father, and the portrayal of his wife (Grsce Kelly) coming to Japan to be with him. A navy Lieutenant should be so lucky!

But that's another movie. I don't think I've ever seen a movie that accurately depicts a ground-pounder's life in action (and yes, I've seen Saving Private Ryan) Nor do I want to. The poor bastards.

Of those that I have seen, this is one of the best. It is to fact as a Western movie, with all its fast draws and gunfights is to the way it really was in the West. How do I know how it was? My grandmother came to Oregon on a wagon train, and I am old.

Joseph (Joe) Pierre, USN (Ret)

author of Handguns and Freedom...their care and maintenance
and other books

Rating:
Summary: Vomit
Review: I couldn't be more disgusted. a single well-trained soldier would survive just fine. Apparently someone working on the film told all the actors to charge and never take cover. The military advisor to this film must be as frustrated as myself. John Woo has really fallen far. Windtalkers, Face Off and Mission Impossible II don't even come close to his more famous HK films made with Chow Yun Fat. They're contrived, but not enjoyable. Woo has gone too far. This movie makes films like Battle of the Bulge or Anzio look GOOD in comparison!!

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed!
Review: Like many of the reviewers here, I did not like this movie. When the Navajo Code was declassified, I was eager to learn more about these unsung heroes of WWII. When this movie came out, I was just as eager to see it but when I finally did, I didn't even finish watching it. I was so disgusted about how the movie was advertised to be about the Navajo, but instead it concentrated on the two "stars" of the movie.
Sure the movie could have been good if it weren't for the lopsided advertising.

Rating:
Summary: Out of John Woo's element
Review: I have been John Woo's avid fan for years. I have been following his works since his directorial effort in HK namely, "A Better Tomorrow" starring Chow Yuen Fatt. John Woo is a very good story teller especially when it involves the unspoken honour of brotherhood, the final showdown between the good & the bad (especially when one's wittiness is matched by the other's deviousness). Compounded by his signature-style slow motion sequence, we have modern classic action movies in the making. Among his works in Hollywood, he was at his best in MI2 starring Tom Cruise, Face Off starring Nicholas Cage & John Trovolta, Broken Arrow starring John Trovolta & Christian Slater. Other works of his such as Hard Target starring Jean Claude Van Demme is rather pedestrian. I'm sad to say that Windtalkers belongs to the latter category. Mind you, this is John Woo's first exposure to combat movie. When his work is to be compared with Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan or even HBO's special, Band of Brothers, Windtalkers doesn't fare so well. John tries to squeeze as much action packed sequence into the movie & not compromising upon the character building exercise. All I can say is that there is too much battle repetition, & all characters in the movie are two-dimensional. In the end, when the main characters are slowly been killed off by those faceless Japanese soldiers, we don't feel for them. I'm feeling sorry for Nicholas Cage & Christian Slater as they are trying hard to save this movie from sinking further. Nicholas has got a demented face the whole time & one can't help but wonder if he's playing his character or if he's doubting his involvement in this movie. The actors who played the Navajo's codebreakers are genuine & fresh in their roles & they are convincing in their performance. This movie is over 2 hours long & one could wish for a tighter script. Even the love interest of Nicholas Cage doesn't go anywhere. Their relationship isn't explored fully but simply gone with the wind. A mediocre effort from an A class director. He's definitely out of his element & just hope that we haven't seen the best of his works yet!

Rating:
Summary: great battle scenes, weak script
Review: There's been such a surfeit of war pictures coming out of Hollywood in the past few years that it's small wonder "Windtalkers" failed to ignite many box office sparks when it was released in the summer of 2002. Famed action director John Woo has served himself well by mounting spectacularly effective and brilliantly orchestrated battle scenes, but the writers, John Rice and Joe Bateer, have let him down big time in the story department. Woo has flooded the screen with moments of uncompromising graphic realism, only to have them mitigated by trite dialogue, predictable ironies and corny melodramatics. Both the director and the men who actually lived through the events of this true-life story deserve better.

"Windtalkers" does have history going for it. In World War II, the Allied Forces in the Pacific needed to come up with a brand new code that would be "uncrackable" by the Japanese. The military decided that it would base that code on the Navajo language, thus precipitating the need to recruit young Navajo men to come to the battlefields as "code-talkers." The film focuses on one such man, Ben Yahzee, and the officer, Joe Enders, whose sole duty it becomes to protect Ben in battle and keep him out of the hands of the Japanese. Joe, naturally, balks at the idea of having to perform "babysitting" duty on the front line, and he is not afraid to show Ben just how he feels about the situation in the early stages of their relationship. Joe has other problems as well. Recently injured in battle himself, he also struggles with the guilt accrued from having led all the men of his previous platoon to their deaths while "following orders like a good Marine."

There is certainly plenty in terms of character and conflict for the screenwriters to work with here, yet somehow they never find a way to bring those characters or conflicts to convincing life. Joe's initial reluctance to accept Ben is as predictable as his inevitable change of heart at the end. And "predictable" is really the key word here in describing much of this film. Are we really surprised when the most vocal racist in the group - who says "Injuns" aren't much different from the Japanese they're all fighting - has his life saved by the very man who's been the target of all his ridicule? And don't we just know that a soldier will be gunned down the moment he offers a piece of chocolate to a distraught little Japanese girl? Or how about the fact that the two men, one white, one Navajo, who have been literally making beautiful music together - one on the flute and the other on the harmonica - demonstrating colorblind brotherhood in action, are cut down right next to one another in the same battle? Thus, the unsettling, cluttered "messiness" of the battle scenes is undercut by the too carefully contrived nature of so much of the actual narrative. By trying so hard to move and uplift us, the film feels manipulative and calculated when it needs to feel most sincere.

"Windtalkers" might have been a more compelling film were it not for the lackluster, wooden performance Nicholas Cage delivers in the lead role. Cage has never been very adept at conveying complex emotions and his inability to provide any depth or shading to the psychologically tormented Enders goes a long way towards minimalizing the film's impact. Adam Beach, on the other hand, brings a fresh-faced likability to the part of Ben, the Navajo, who, in many ways, takes on the Private Ryan role in the story.

For all the amazing battle scenes in the film, "Windtalkers" may just be one war film too many for us to cope with.

Rating:
Summary: Loved it!!
Review: While certainly not the best war movie out there, this one is definitely high on the list. Especially refreshing was the fact that the story takes place in the usually neglected Pacific Theatre, where most books and movies concentrate almost exclusively on the ETO. While it is based on factual events, some things were rather unbelievable, but those can probably be attributed to artistic license. Overall, it was a very enjoyable movie, and I would recommend it to any fan of war movies.

Rating:
Summary: Special Edition a slight let down
Review: This special edition 3 disc set could have easily been pared down to 2 disc. Disc 2 only runs 40 minutes total and the 3 features on that disc do not go into a lot of detail about the real code talkers and "the music of windtalkers" is basically a 5 minute commercial for the soundtrack CD. The commentaries and behind the scenes footage are interesting to watch and listen to but compared to the excellent 3 disc editon of BLACK HAWK DOWN, this dvd is a slight let down.   The filmmakers could've thrown out Disc 2 completely. definitely a "padded" job. Overall it's worth getting even if you have the old version of the DVD because of the rebate. Good movie...so-so special edition. The whole package just seemed a little watered down to me.