SUPERB WAR FILM - But Beware of Madeleine Stowe's Giant Lips!

Rating: 9/10 (9 March 2002)

"We Were Soldiers" is rather different from the majority of American Vietnam war films. Instead of the drug-taking, baby-killing, officer-fragging draftees that arrived later in the war, here we have the confident professional U.S. Army in its first major battle with North Vietnamese regulars in 1965. This is the famous slugfest in the Ia Drang Valley, recounted in the book the movie was based on, "We Were Soldiers Once. . . and Young".
Mel Gibson does a generically heroic job as the gung-ho Colonel Moore leading his 7th Air Cavalry battalion into this new "valley of death". Unlike the nonetheless fine "Black Hawk Down", this film does a better job with the individual personalities, the human element of the soldiers under terrible fire.
The combat scenes are first-rate as are the effects. Battles are realistic and bloody enough for anyone. The effects of napalm are depicted graphically on an American mistakenly hit by some. The final American fixed-bayonet charge reminded me of the famous charge by the 20th Maine regiment in the movie "Gettysburg" - although they did not have massive air support. American air power was the reason the Vietnamese were stopped, and, eventually, it hardly seemed fair.
The wives of the fighters are shown at length as oak-like pillars of strength, even despite the Army's callousness in delivering death notices by telegrams via yellow cab drivers. Entirely distracting, however, was Madeleine Stowe - a formerly gorgeous lady who now has surpassed even Melanie Griffith for the worst collagen lip-job in Hollywood. Stowe's puffed-up lips made her almost unrecognizable, and clown-like. Too bad.
Especially good in this movie was the sensitive way politics and the Vietnamese were handled. Lyndon Johnson's dark, deceitful shadow hangs over all these needless deaths; in fact, if the movie has a fault it does not adequately show how good men were foolishly used by Johnson and the Pentagon. The Vietnamese Army was depicted as heroic and as human beings; the final comments at the end of the movie by their colonel about how the battle would change nothing in the long run except the number of casualties was thoroughly appropriate.
I recommend people also see/rent "Go Tell the Spartans" with Burt Lancaster. It was a fine and somewhat neglected film of this same period. "Go tell the Spartans we die here obedient to their word" was the last message sent by King Leonidas at Thermopolae against the Persians. And is ironic in the Vietnam context.
For those interested in historical anomalies, Gibson as Col Moore was spotted early in the movie carrying the book "Great Battlefields of the World", that in 1965. Unfortunately, it wasn't published until 1984.
A well-done war movie definitely worth seeing.