So Close And Yet So Far

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2002)

"We Were Soldiers" has all the elements of a great film. Unfortunately, it misuses those elements and fails in certain fundamentals. The primary problem with the film is lack of focus. For example, we are early on hit over the head with racial discrimination in the south during a meeting of officer's wives. Why? This is irrelevant to the film, which is about a particular battle, and not about the experience of living on a southern military base in 1965. This is a politically correct scene which was obviously inserted to show how much the people making the film "care". It serves no other purpose. The cutbacks to stateside to watch the telegrams delivered, apparantly while the battle is still raging, are distractions from the film's focus, which is the battle. I don't care about the wives. It is self evident that they mourned their husbands. There is no need to show this in a film about a battle. It would be appropriate in a film about dependants. Then we have the Rambo qualities of Colonel Moore and his Sergeant Major, who both stand upright during most of the battle hitting everything they shoot at. The Sergeant Major is particularly deadly with his pistol. That men might stand erect and escape such a battle unscathed is more plausible than that Colonel Moore and his Sergeant Major were so deadly with their weapons. Finally, the film self destructs when it attempts to make us feel sympathy for the North Vietnamese by equating them to us. They were the enemy. They represented immoral values, namely communism. They were not morally equivalent to Americans. This is actually an insult to Vietnam veterans. It says that they were killing good men with proper values. That makes the Vietnam veterans immoral, which they were not. Instead of making a film which shows the heroism of American soldiers, we are presented with a weak film which says that our soldiers are no better than our enemies and that our soldiers should hate themselves for winning! The one quote from Colonel Moore exemplifies the poor scripting in this film. "I will never forgive myself for living when so many of my men died." Well, Colonel Moore was a professional soldier, and most of his men lived! He did his job. Are we to believe that he expected no casualties? The statement he makes is appropriate to the sole survivor of a battle, not the leader of a victorious unit in which three fourths of the men lived. In conclusion, skip this film and see something better, such as "Black Hawk Down".