Hagiographic

Rating: 6/10 (4 March 2002)

We Were Soldiers has a few powerful moments and lots of sloppy cinematography.The way Moore was portrayed, many a time, I thought I was watching a hagiographic film. He may well be that saintly but the script went overboard in that respect. The fighting scenes were graphic but not very realistic.
*** SPOILERS***
Witness for example the last sequence when the Americans fixed bayonets and charged (I wonder if that actually occurred): exactly when they were running into a machine gun nest, suddenly, helicopter gun ships appeared out of nowhere to clean up the field (and somehow, the Vietnamese never heard them coming!) in a Rambo-like sequence. In another case that cannot be possibly historical, the bespectacled enemy soldier charged Moore and his entourage to be shot just when he was about to stab our bigger than life hero. Any sane soldier would just have stopped and shot everybody, or came on with gun blazing, but this one got a convenient brain cramp.
***END OF SPOILERS***
So in short, very disappointing though sometimes emotionally brilliant movie. And by the way, it is totally misleading to state that the battle pitted 400 Americans against 4000 Vietnamese. The truth is, 400 supported by air power and heavy artillery on the defensive against an enemy with no heavy weaponry actually is a winning odd in any battle.