Recreation of the first big land battle of the Vietnam War. Lot's of deaths. Mel's a bit annoying. Not for most. 2 Flys Out Of Five

Rating: Null/10 (28 April 2002)

We Were Soldiers, as you'd expect from the title, is a war film told from the American soldier's point of view.
It's 1965 and the U.S. army has escalated their commitment to the Vietnam War.
North Vietnamese Regular Army personnel at Ia Drang in the central Highlands of Vietnam had attacked American troops and then retreated. Chasing them, The American Seventh Cavalry fly into battle, and into an ambush, on their new steeds, the helicopter.
Colonel Custer led a battalion of the same name, the First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, into a similarly risky battle many years before. Will this fight 10,000 miles from mainland America turn into another massacre?
We Were Soldiers follows to large extent actual events of the time. This battle became the first major land battle between the Americans and the Vietnamese of the Vietnam War.
The battalion was led by Lt. Col Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) who is now a sprightly eighty something year old. (He obviously survived!)
Moore was a veteran of the Korean conflict and according to his biography, upon which the film is based, a student of the history of warfare.

He knew how effective the Vietnamese had been against the French only a few years before. And this was the first use like this of the helicopter in warfare.
There's a long lead up to the battle, establishing the American troops as being parents and lovers to their wives. There's a good deal of knee bending. Moore was (is) Catholic.
Then we're into battle with a bang, thousands of them. The firefight is intense and lasted unabated for days. We cut periodically back to the U.S. where we see the wives receiving telegrams informing them of the death of their husbands.
The Vietnamese appear to be well drilled, heroic and surprisingly, neatly outfitted, and we're given some insights into the concerns of their officers as they try to cope with this new enemy.
The Vietnamese were veterans. The Americans were only the latest invaders of their country. The locals had already seen off the Chinese and the French in the previous decades.
Some attempt made to personalize the Vietnamese, even if not much effort was made to get appropriate extras. Not too many 1960's Vietnamese would have carried nearly as much body fat. I'm pretty sure I even spotted a black skinned, Negroid Vietnamese!
And what of Mel Gibson as Lt. Col Hal Moore? Apart from being far too old, today's Hal Moore would be well over 100 years old if Mel was the right age, Gibson's facial ticks, ideal for crazy cops a decade ago, tend to be just annoying in We Were Soldiers.
Sam Elliot as his offsider gets all the good lines. The photographer depicted in the movie wrote the book the film is based on with Hal Moore.
But We Were Soldiers isn't riveting cinema. It's relentless, but those who really like war movies because of the violence will only enjoy it. Mel does Mel well. Has he ever done anything else?
And those of you who might think that the final `victory', the rush up the hill, in the battle looked a bit strange will be reassured by the fact that reportedly it didn't happen.
The Vietnamese in fact moved deeper into their tunnel complex because of devastating air bombardment, principally from B52 bombers. Not because of the no doubt heroic efforts of the Americans on the ground.
The Vietnamese were heavily mauled in this battle.
They retreated and regrouped to fight another day. The Americans were always outnumbered and less motivated on Vietnamese home soil.

A pattern was then set that continued until the Americans finally retreated in disarray from the country on April 30 1975. 2 Bloody Flys Out Of Five