The truth is out there....

Rating: Null/10 (17 March 2002)

My comments here are largely in response to criticisms of this movie which are based on incorrect information. A lot of the criticisms of this movie can be easily refuted by simply reading the original book by Lt Gen Hal Moore and Joe Galloway. There's even a nice new movie tie-in edition out.
[For the record, I was born in 1956, the same year as Mel Gibson; we were the last year group to carry draft cards but nobody was actually drafted, so whatever motivations the Gibson family might have had for moving from upstate New York to Australia, there was no draft for Mel to actively avoid. In my case, I was still an ROTC cadet when Vietnam ended. I didn't go to Vietnam, but I had my share of being called a baby killer and having my uniform spat upon-- by my own college classmates!]
There are some people out there for whom the US military is the most evil entity in the world, and who dismiss as propaganda any film that presents the US military in a positive light. Since September 11, I've come to the realization that nothing will change the minds of these individuals until al Qaeda strikes again in a way that affects them personally. So be it! I'm not going to waste time and energy on that line of thought.
***SPOILERS!***
I do think it was kind of odd the way they shifted the narration from Moore in the book to Galloway in the movie, then milked the ending with Moore coming home in a yellow cab, trying to leave the viewers wondering until the last possible moment whether he lives or dies. Well, in that case, they should have saved the credit `Based on the book... by Lt Gen Harold G. Moore (Ret) and Joseph L. Galloway' for the END credits instead of the opening credits right after all the generals started throwing Moore's name around. DOH! (And this is the only real `DOH!' I have for this movie!)
If anyone thinks the inclusion of black and oriental soldiers in Moore's battalion was a concession to political correctness, I assure you that PFCs Willie Godbolt and Jimmy Nakayama were real-life men, not some fictional tokens. There was a little dramatic license in the depiction of Godbolt's death, but I assure you that the way Nakayama's death was depicted was EXACTLY as written by Moore and Galloway in the book. I refer you to Chapter 13 (pages 209-212 of the movie tie-in edition).
***END SPOILERS.***
There was an earlier comment about how the 7th Cavalry theme is an Irish war song, but they could have used a less mournful version. Well, not to embarrass anyone, but that someone could mistake the SCOTTISH air SGT MACKENZIE for GARRYOWEN is indicative of the PC cultural illiteracy that pervades the American public. Just for everyone's information, SGT MACKENZIE is a recent work written by Joe Kilna MacKenzie of the Scottish music group Clann An Drumma, in tribute to his great-grandfather who was KIA in World War I. I must concede that Randall Wallace and Mel Gibson must have thrown it into this movie as a reminder that it is "from the people who brought you BRAVEHEART". But this funeral dirge is the musical antithesis of GARRYOWEN, the trademark song of the 7th Cavalry and a rollicking drinking song about tearing up the streets and raising hell in County Cork, Ireland. The irony is that I'm pretty sure most Americans know the melody of GARRYOWEN, but thanks to the politically correct demilitarization of American culture in the decades since Vietnam, and particularly the demonization of the 7th Cavalry as a bunch of genocidal maniacs, most Americans don't realize that they know it. Fortunately, to jog your memory, all you have to do is log on to any web page about the 7th Cavalry; I'd say about 90% of those web pages have a MIDI file of GARRYOWEN that loads and opens automatically.
For anyone who dismisses the scene between Moore and his daughter, where she asks, `Daddy, what's a war?' as sappy and cloying, again I refer you to the book: Chapter 2 (page 37 of the tie-in edition).
There are a lot of comments about how the Ia Drang Valley couldn't possibly have looked the way it was depicted in the film because it wasn't jungle enough. (The same criticisms were made about THE GREEN BERETS, also set in the Central Highlands on the Cambodian border.) That assumption is a frightening indication of how the mindset of previous batch of Vietnam movies has superseded reality. Not only do Moore and Galloway devote most of Chapter 4 to describing the terrain, Moore himself scouted around several Army posts nationwide and personally selected the area at Fort Hunter Liggett where the battle scenes were filmed.
There was another comment about how the final bayonet charge supposedly never happened and was invented. Please reference Chapter 16 (pages 249-253 of the tie-in edition); okay, so the close air support was provided by fixed-wing aircraft rather than by the Hueys of Snake Crandall and Too Tall Freeman. Dramatic license, perhaps. But Moore himself WAS there where the fighting took place, and you can't say that it was invented or that it never happened.
Because of the limitations of the medium of film, dramatic license, time compression and composite characterization are unavoidable in even the very best efforts at adapting a movie from true historical events. (GETTYSBURG and BLACK HAWK DOWN are the other two war films made within the past decade that have succeeded in doing so, and WE WERE SOLDIERS is up there with them.) Even putting aside these limitations, anyone questioning the historical accuracy of this movie needs to read the book first before saying anything!