Custard

Rating: Null/10 (9 March 2002)

Spoilers herein.
My dad was a man like this. I saw the film in an audience filled with men and women like this. I've worked with many people like this. The smartest among them know that wars are fought over ideas, and struggle to understand those ideas as intelligent warriors.
One understanding is the notion that ideas take on a life of their own and act selfishly to reproduce themselves, adapting as required. One way that ideas battle each other is in films, because films invent society. And so we have the ideas behind this film and the recent `Black Hawk Down,' battling for a subliminal control over how we think of war.
And it is a battle royale. Both films use a state of the art visual vocabulary, much advanced since even `Pvt Ryan.' And both films depict an air cavalry mission gone wrong resulting in a stranded, outnumbered group of rangers. Both center the motivation of the men of looking out for the guy next them. Both emphasize the `no man left behind' principle. But `Black Hawk' is a film about situations. Situations create war and the mistakes therein. In that film, the characters are deliberately confusing and there is lots of attention given to spatial definition and position. `Black Hawk' is first a cinematic being with visual sense to which a narrative is applied.
`Soldiers' exists in a different world altogether. In this world, men drive events and cause wars. Their commitment (shown here as nobility) is the engine. Personalities matter, even to the point that the killed are listed in the credits. So this film spends lots of time on character development (such as it is) and interactions among (mostly between) them. `Soldiers' was born as a text, to which is here appended illustration.
World of difference between these two views, one could say religions. This conflict of ideas is as profound a war as any. And we are the participants, and some of us combatants.
You define yourself in large part. And a large part of that is in deciding what you think is funny, another area where movies battle for your soul. That's tough, but at least you can engineer how you approach war movies, and which ones you reach out to.
I see that we are polarizing around the old John Wayne issue, with Mel Gibson taking that role. As for me, `The Thin Red Line' is the deepest, most visceral war movie.