Great battle scenes make up for lackluster script.

Rating: Null/10 (5 March 2002)

The first thing I noticed in "We Were Soldiers" is that, even under intense enemy fire -with soldiers being shot and maimed and the situation seeming completely bleak, not one person started cursing. I can't remember the last modern Vietnam movie that had soldiers with a rated PG vocabulary. Fortunately, the realism of the grisly combat scenes more than makes up for the hokey screenplay -especially in the first third of the movie.
How hokey is the beginning? The scene that stands out the most (not a spoiler in any way) takes place early in the film: The soldiers' wives are gathered together (in picture perfect period dress) talking about issues on the base (in a manner that says "life is perfect, so are we"). What a shock it is to them, when they hear the local laundry mat is segregated! They all look to the -one- African-American female in the room who goes off on a patriotic speech about how her and her husband believe and America and fight for the ideals we all hold dear. ... Well, that's lovely -if this were a movie about the complexities of the African-American experience in Vietnam (like "Dead Presidents" or "The Walking Dead"), instead what we have is a scene shoe-horned so badly that it elicited nothing but groans in a cosmopolitan audience. Then again, Randall Wallace is both Writer and Director... (Wallace also wrote Pearl Harbor)
When you have a bad script, its up to the actors to work with it, and I must say that Mel Gibson, Sam Elliot, and Greg Kinnear all give their plastic lines believability. Gibson's role is particularly well played as the Hal Moore, an educated, religious family man who has a knack for battlefield leadership (the real Moore wrote the book which Wallace adapted). Elliot is a scene stealer as a cliche-ridden Sergeant-Major who's ultra-tough demeanor gives the movie some of its biggest laughs.
Once the movie steps into Vietnam, the movie starts to achieve something. The battles are brutally realistic. People get shot to pieces, burned alive, blood is everywhere -life really starts to mean very little when bullets fly through the air. The sheer intensity of the violence gives the movie its impact, a comparison to Saving Private Ryan would not be out of line. In a way, it gives the movie an unintended thematic arch: The movie begins as a somewhat sappy, patriotic march for America, but by the end of the battle the brutality and carnage of 3 days under fire makes the earlier bravado seem naive. I believe a little bit of "change-of-heart" was intended (after all, this was the first major US engagement in what turned out to be a living nightmare), but not the level that the actual movie creates. I can't imagine anyone who would see "We Were Soldiers" and decide to join the fighting forces. Mel Gibson may have seemed like a noble fellow, but those battle scenes showed hell on earth. Kudos to all those involved in crafting the battle scenes.
Still, incredible battle scenes and likable performances can only do so much. In the case of "We Were Soldiers," they make the movie very watchable, and recommendable -as long as you're not expecting screenwriting excellence.
One final, positive note: The film goes out of its way to portray the North Vietnamese not as barbaric monsters but rather as determined, intelligent opponents. It even dedicates itself to both American and N. Vietnamese fighting forces. The attempt, while not totally seemless, deserves acknowledgment.