Choppering into the Little Big Horn

Rating: 7/10 (3 May 2002)

If LtCol Harold Moore did not actually exist, it would be necessary for Hollywood to invent him. A tough-talking, straightforward leader of men, equal parts swagger and heart, he loves his troops like his own children, refuses to leave the combat zone while his boys are in the sharp end, and sheds tears for the fallen in between barking orders into a radio handset and shooting charging enemies through the head. The crazy thing about Moore, and about "We Were Soldiers" in general, is not how much is Hollywood hokum, but how much seems to be but isn't. Moore is a real person and he was by all accounts (including, but not limited to, his own) a tough soldier, a shrewd commander, and the kind of crazy SOB who would be the first to go in and the last to leave.
"We Were Soldiers" is the story of Moore and his 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry (Custer's old unit) in the Ia Drang valley, the first major confrontation between American and Vietnamese troops. This alternately brilliant and exasperating movie is based on a book by Moore and UPI reporter Joe Galloway, with the cumbersome but oddly poetic title "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young". It begins with Moore's assignment to the Army's first dedicated air cavalry unit, which is among the first US combat troops sent to Vietnam. What starts as a mission to destroy an enemy force that attacked an American base becomes a brutal siege as the Cav are surrounded and trapped, 395 men pitted against nearly two thousand of the enemy.
Moore is played by Mel Gibson, who adeptly portrays both the paternal kindness of a decent man and the manic glint so common in good infantry officers. Unfortunately, the movie focuses so much on him that it loses some of its big-picture scope. After a while it begins to seem that Gibson is everywhere; no firefight can commence unless he fires the opening volley, no act of valor passes without a shot of Gibson's eyes welling up with pained pride at the sacrifice of his soldiers. A little of this is good, too much of it is bad. Moore probably was larger than life, but Gibson's Moore almost threatens to be larger than the movie.
The supporting cast is led by Sam Elliott, whose Sergeant Major Plumley is destined to take his place among the greatest flinty NCO portrayals in film history. Barry Pepper plays Galloway, and delivers the movie's intro and epilogue, though he doesn't appear until late in the movie. The movie parallels the story of the battle with that of the officers' wives, led by Madeleine Stowe as Julie Moore. The wives' story is given some short shrift (and some very clumsy scenes), though it is in parts so wrenching it is almost a relief to return to the war zone.
One memorable passage in Moore's book likens the sound of a bullet hitting flesh to that of a canoe paddle slapping wet mud, an image that is at once comical and horrifying. We have come to expect graphic carnage from our war movies these days. However, instead of the rapid-fire speed-lapse photography seen in "Saving Private Ryan's" unforgettable Normandy sequence, writer/director Randall Wallace offers more straightforward depictions of the businesslike horrors of close combat: he doesn't use a lot of camera tricks to communicate the concept of chaotic violence, he just fills the screen with chaotic violence and lets us watch it in its unflinching fury. And call me an air-show junkie, but he has some beautiful sequences of Hueys diving over hilltops, flying in through smoke, etc.
Most latter-day war movies give a nod to the enemy, making him human, not a faceless monster. For all this movie's flag-waving sentimentality, it's actually better in this regard than most. The Vietnamese are not fearless stoics; we see a young NVA infantryman panting and wide-eyed with fear as he charges the equally afraid Americans (something even anti-American screeds like "Platoon" never showed). It's also instructive to watch Moore and his opposite number (Don Duong) moving among their troops doing similar things: offering encouragement, making stirring speeches, and plotting the demise of the other.
This is a battle picture, a movie that exhaustively analyzes a single big-picture event in a war. While movies of this type have been made for years, this is one of the very few to come out of Vietnam. The pantheon of great (and not-so-great) Vietnam movies all have one thing in common: they portray specific events that did not, strictly speaking, actually take place. Those movies are more about Vietnam as a general phenomenon than about anything that quantifiably happened there. In this way, "We Were Soldiers" represents something quite daring: Wallace has made an early-40s WWII movie about the Vietnam War.
And that's part of the problem: the movie has far too many places where it goes for overblown sentiment and emotional manipulation, often hokey to the point of embarrassment. The fact that many of the cliches are true and many of the corny Hollywood moments are based in fact does not excuse slathering them in high melodrama. This is doubly a shame because these scenes overshadow some stunning moments that work better for being small: none of the shots of Moore's eyes misting at the loss of his men can match the power of a scene that shows him standing by himself, his back to the camera as his shoulders shake with his unseen sobs. This is a good movie, but it misses its chance to be a great movie because it doesn't trust us in the folding seats to adequately grasp the point.
When "We Were Soldiers" goes wrong, it makes you want to roll your eyes. But when it gets it right, it cuts straight through to you with a sound like a canoe paddle slapping wet mud.