 Review: We Were Soldiers
By Brent Shepherd
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Paramount Pictures
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Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers.
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Once, when discussing the bloody, visceral 20-minute D-Day sequence that opens his epic Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg said that he couldn't bring himself to make another movie that romanticized what happened to Allied soldiers on June 6, 1944. "The truth of D-Day," he said, "is long overdue." And while Spielberg received some criticism for his savagely realistic portrayal of the horrors of war, Ryan
With that spirit in mind, there's a moment toward the end of writer-director Randall Wallace's new film We Were Soldiers in which Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) tells UPI correspondent Joe Galloway (Barry Pepper), "Go home and tell people the truth about what happened here." ("Here" being the Ia Drang massacre of November 1965, in which Moore led a force of fewer than 400 American soldiers into the Vietnamese highlands against 2,000 North Vietnamese and somehow prevailed despite being the away team and suffering devastating casualties almost as soon as they touched down in the landing zone.)
Moore's directive to Galloway (the only civilian ever awarded the Bronze Star for valor), eventually led to their collaboration on We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, the book that serves as the source material for this film. Moore, who retired in 1977 as a three-star general, has spoken openly about his disgust for the kinds of movies Hollywood has made about the Vietnam War. He disdains Oliver Stone's Platoon and claims that he walked out of Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now, regarded by many as the greatest Vietnam War movie ever made. As an officer who fought quite literally alongside his men and watched them die under the most horrific circumstances, he was adamant that Hollywood would not turn his book into a movie that reduced the Vietnam conflict to hours of boredom, pot smoking and Jimi Hendrix 8-tracks followed by seconds of terror. Fortuitously, his and Galloway's book ended up in the Wallace's hands. Using his Oscar-nominated Braveheart script as a calling card and purchasing the film rights to their book with his own money, Wallace finally persuaded them that he shared their commitment to the history of the Ia Drang massacre and the memory of the men of 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry.
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 Paramount Pictures
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We Were Soldiers.
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We Were Soldiers is not a perfect movie, but then, neither was Saving Private Ryan. Like its predecessor, Wallace's movie occasionally lapses into standard Hollywood war-movie cliches. For example, there are not one but two "tell my wife I love her" moments, and a few of the soldiers seem a little too clean-cut and thus a little too obviously doomed from the start, like those disposable red-jerseyed crew members on Star Trek whose life expectancy is the next commercial break. (In this same respect, the film's overly earnest marketing campaign almost turns out to be its worst enemy, because the opening 20 minutes or so is like watching the film's trailer with a little filler thrown in. That becomes a virtue, though, because the film dispenses with most of its melodrama at the outset, enabling it then to focus unerringly on the battle at hand.)
As Moore's second-in-command, Sam Elliott's Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley comes off a little too much like, well, Sam Elliott ; at one point standing fully erect like a Wild West gunslinger, picking off North Vietnamese soldiers one at a time with his .45 as they attack the 1st Battalion's position from all sides. (In respectful deference to the real-life Sgt. Maj. Plumley, I'm trying really hard to buy Elliott's performance, though, because of a beating my hero William Goldman once took for a few remarkable sequences in his adaptation of A Bridge Too Far. Disbelieved and denounced by critics as "so much Hollywood horseshit" to borrow a favorite appellation of Goldman's; the incredible incidents in question had in fact taken place exactly as reported in Goldman's source material, the book of the same title by Cornelius Ryan.)
In another sequence, Galloway puts down the M-16 with which he had been protecting himself and picks up his camera to document the carnage around him. We see him walking and shooting against a backdrop of his own black-and-white photos. I suspect (although I've been unable to confirm it) that these are actually Galloway's original photos from Ia Drang, and not production stills. If that's true, I only wish Wallace could have come up with a better way to present them. Instead, we see Barry Pepper in what looks like the Vietnam War version of one of those Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies where the pie-eyed couple walks in place while the neon lights and theater marquees of Broadway hover past overhead. These are relatively minor concerns, however. Make no mistake: We Were Soldiers accomplishes its mandate: it is a moving, powerful and gut-wrenching film that does not soft-peddle the Ia Drang massacre or the sacrifices made by soldiers on either side. Like the book, the film pays tribute to the North Vietnamese soldiers against whom our boys fought and for whom Moore has expressed great respect and admiration. They are not depicted here as savages but as equals; a disciplined, relentless war machine fighting under brilliant military leadership.
Having established Moore early in the film as a student of war, some of Wallace's most effective moments depict Moore and his North Vietnamese adversary trying to outthink each other, predicting the other's next moves in the ultimate high-stakes chess game. What is most remarkable to me is that Wallace is the same screenwriter who gave us last year's deplorable Pearl Harbor, a film that turned one of the most pivotal events in world history into a Harlequin romance novel adaptation in which stuff gets blowed up real good. My best guess is that he succeeds here because of his tenacious dedication to the source material, sticking to the details of the horrendous three-day bloodbath and refusing to harness the movie with more than its fair share of melodramatic elements. (By contrast, the melodrama in Pearl Harbor seemed to be impeded by the battle scenes.) As it stands, I largely blame Jerry Bruckheimer, Michael Bay and the Powers That Be Disney for the $200 million travesty that is Pearl Harbor. All their impassioned sound bytes about creating a movie that would honor the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice on December 7, 1941, ended up being just so much bluster and lip service.
In We Were Soldiers, it would seem that Wallace is not only paying penance for his involvement with Pearl Harborbut he's also managed to make a better, more sincere, more realistic film at half of Pearl Harbor's price tag, if not less.
Certainly, the new breed of ultrarealistic war movie poses a risky proposition for filmmakers and studios. The battle sequences depicted in films like We Were Soldiers, Saving Private Ryan. and Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, can alienate audiences as easily as they can enthrall them, but when effectively executed, the payoff can be truly meaningful. For my own part, I have uncles who fought at Normandy, in Vietnam and during Operation Desert Storm, so I have perhaps a greater-than-average appreciation for movies that strive to show us the truth and remind us that the sacrifices made by our soldiers are not something to be taken for granted.
If a little bit of melodrama is required to make the realism go down more easily, then I suppose I can live with that. But please, let's keep it to a minimum, OK?
About This Author:
Brent Shepherd is a writer and former editor-at-large of scr(i)pt magazine. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
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