But a Lot of Wind
In my movie reviews, I like to inform as much as give commentary. Often, I see a movie promoted as one thing when it's really something completely different on screen, and I feel the need to clue my readers in. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Windtalkers. Early marketing for this film promised a movie that would tell one of the great, little-known stories of World War II, namely the secret code that was crafted from the Navajo Americans' language that U.S. forces used in turning the tide of the War in the Pacific. The Japanese were never able to break this code, which proved instrumental in giving America and its allies a tactical advantage in identifying and eliminating targets.
Windtalkers should have been about the Navajo men who volunteered for this very dangerous duty. Because the code was so complex, the Japanese made capturing a Navajo on the battlefield and interrogating him a top priority. From the ads, Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater would star as the Marine officers assigned to protect two of the finest so-called "windtalkers."
Unfortunately, the story of the Navajo code talkers is shockingly peripheral to what this movie really is: a Nicolas Cage showcase. The bulk of the movie is about his character, Joe Enders, a shell-shocked Marine sergeant who believes in following orders whatever the cost. Enders, overcome with guilt over losing his entire unit in a previous battle in the Solomon Islands, must once again follow orders that may lead to more death and guilt. His assignment is to protect the code, not the code talker.
The second thing the movie is about is the Battle of Saipan, a strategic island in the South Pacific that the U.S. military stormed and eventually used as a base and stronghold. Director John Woo, as always, is hopelessly and helplessly in love with guns firing in slow motion, blood splattering everywhere, smoke billowing, explosions erupting, buzzing fighter planes, flame-engulfed tanks, flame-engulfed people, and flame-engulfed countryside.
In short, war porn.
Here is my review in a nutshell. Windtalkers is a great Nic Cage movie, a good war film, but a BAD movie about the Windtalkers. I sat down in the theater expecting a movie about the Navajo, their code, how they came up with it, how it was implemented ... not just at Saipan, but throughout the military. I wanted the movie to deeply address the incredible irony of The United States using a people who were hunted almost to extinction on their own soil who were now fighting and dying to save that same tainted American soil.
Instead, I got Nic Cage making his John Wayne picture. I got long, graphic sequences of warfare. I got a menagerie of cliched white soldier types that included: the bigot who learns a valuable lesson about Indians (Noah Emmerich); the guy who doesn't think he's going home to his girl (Martin Henderson); the soldier who wants to survive the war so he can open up a business the audience knows will be successful 60 years later (Mark Ruffalo); and, of course, the stateside nurse who inexplicably falls in love with the injured (and quite sullen) Cage in the beginning of the movie (Frances O'Connor).
All of this is fine and good if it were in a different movie. I love a good, ham-fisted war flick as much as the next red-blooded American male. But I have a dozen movies like that in my DVD case downstairs. "Windtalkers" should have been about ... THE WINDTALKERS!
And there should have been more than two Navajo characters who we follow throughout the story. Adam Beach as young father, Ben Yahzee, and Roger Willie as his older friend, Charlie Whitehorse, do a terrific job in this movie. Beach was one of the driving forces behind the Sundance Film Festival favorite "Smoke Signals" a couple of years ago. Look for it on video. Meanwhile, Willie makes a remarkable acting debut, having been discovered by the movie's casting director at an open casting call in Colorado. But they are secondary to Cage and his story. Even worse, we learn very little about the code itself. At one point, Ben actually uses ENGLISH to relay battlefield coordinates!
So, what it comes down to is this. If you are a Nicolas Cage fan, see this movie. He is quite good in the lead role, and I really liked his chemistry with Beach and with Slater (who plays Whitehorse's Marine protector). If you are hunkering for a war movie with big action and big emotions, this film will exhaust you with its incredible depictions of combat. Some of the sequences are hard to follow. It's not nearly as good as We Were Soldiers in laying out the geography of a battlefield. Several times during the movie, I thought one character had been killed only to have the guy pop up minutes later. But each of the four main engagements occur with startling immediacy. And there is one incredible, bird's eye view of a vast battlefield that is worth the price of admission alone for action junkies.
But I can't help feeling that a great opportunity was missed with Windtalkers. There was the opportunity for a truly original and daring war movie to be made here, and it wasn't. While Woo clearly has great respect for the Navajo and he does tell some of their story, he couldn't break free from his action sensibilities. The door to his Cage was open. I just wish he had dared to walk out.
Windtalkers is rated R for intense, graphic war violence
and language.
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