What was the point?

Rating: Null/10 (16 September 2002)

I was actually surprised how much I enjoyed this movie. The characters were engaging. The combat scenes were awesome and highly realistic. The special effects were top-quality and the place really looked like a battlefield. The performances were brilliant and the whole movie told an important message in displaying the horror and confusion of war.
But I suppose I've said more than enough about Black Hawk Down. And now it seems I have to find some plausible way to judge this pathetic excuse for a war movie. Come on! This was horrible viewing from the first minute!
Mel Gibson made his second mistake in choosing a movie. The first was also a war movie, namely The Patriot, which was even worse. I realize he chose it probably because it was going to be a Randall Wallace movie.
Randall Wallace once wrote a brilliant script that became Mel Gibson's biggest success ever, Braveheart. That story was compelling and momentous. Afterwards, however, Wallace succumbed to clichés when writing new scripts. He wrote Pearl Harbor and the less said about it the better.
At least this movie doesn't stink as much as Pearl Harbor did. However that's hardly a compliment. If they intended to show a realistic view of the Vietnam War, they did a shockingly poor job. The battlefield looked like they were fighting the Vietnam war at Montana. It didn't look like Vietnam at all! The special effects were mediocre. They even attempted to capitalize on Black Hawk Down by crashing a helicopter which paled in comparison to BHD.
By the way the whole point those soldiers were sent to that battlefield was to simply kill some enemies without any previous strategy and knowing it was a death sentence. This can be attributed to lazy writing.
Mel Gibson did his usual outstanding performance. However when stuck with a boring character you can only do so much. Commander Hal Moore was the perfect hero with the perfect family and was never wounded in a firefight despite standing tall amongst wounded soldiers in the heat of battle barking orders.
At least Marc Blucas (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) got to die a very early death. I never liked his characters either on the movie or Buffy.
Another negative point I must comment on: I could predict who was going to die in the battle, because they always reused the annoying cliché "Tell my wife I love her". If a soldier had a family or friend back home you could count the minutes to his eventual gruesome death, except for the movie's star hero, of course. And the endless minutes of Madeleine Stowe and Keri Russell delivering the letters to the wives of deceased soldiers wasn't compelling or dramatic in any way. It was excruciating.
Many people seemed to think this movie contained way too much blood and gore. Personally I think this movie deserves an award for being the war movie with the least amount of gore and blood that I've seen in my life. The war looked like summer camp in this movie. It paid no respect to the real events. After seeing Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down this was a real letdown! There was little or no blood nor gore. In war movies that's essential. If people complain about blood and gore simply by watching THIS MOVIE they probably didn't see the bodies falling down from the World Trade Center on September 11th.
The ending was even worse! After over an hour's worth of chaos and massive losses, American forces performed the miracle of overrunning the Vietnamise mountain and winning the battle. There's no plausible way this could have happened. This was the ultimate surprise in the history of unrealistic war maneuvers translated to a movie audience. Historically the only way American forces really affected Vietnamise forces was by flooding the whole jungle with loads of napalm. The movie's ending betrays history itself.
I hope Mel Gibson never considers doing a movie like this ever again. (I'm looking forward to Signs opening next Friday. It will bury this movie out of my memory)
Randall Wallace should go back to writing scripts for movies like Braveheart and never attempt directing or writing an American war movie ever again. Pearl Harbor and We were Soldiers were more than I could swallow.