A Historian Review for Accuracy: See True Whispers Instead

Rating: 1/10 (29 July 2018)

There are already many reviews panning this film for simply being poorly made, badly acted, directed, and written, unbelievable, and gory and exploitative. A smaller number of reviews rightly consider it an insult to the memory of WWII veterans and more specifically Native vets and Navajo Code Talkers.
I'd like to focus my review on its many historical inaccuracies. The biggest one is that its central premise is wrong and appallingly offensive, the false claim that Marines assigned to be bodyguards to Code Talkers were ordered to kill them rather than let them be taken prisoners. Not only is it utterly wrong, it's near impossible to imagine any Marine killing another Marine, or any Marine officer giving such an order.
The claim ignores that some Code Talkers were, in fact, captured. The scriptwriter also seems to have not known that the famed code was not just two Navajos talking to each other. The original 28 Navajo Code Talkers composed their own complex code. Navajos who were not Code Talkers could not understand nor reveal that code.
This code was never written down until after the war, committed solely to memory, a great intellectual feat. Imagine the main character in The Imitation Game never writing down a code he'd written, for example. The Navajo code was also never broken, nor were any transmissions ever incorrect. This was a huge strategic advantage, and the entire USMC in the Pacific Theater came to depend on the code.
None of that is mentioned in the film. It would have been far more accurate and interesting than this film focused almost solely on Cage's fictional character. The Navajo Nation did make their own film, a documentary, True Whispers. See it instead.
There are also many good books discussing the Code Talkers: Chester Nez's Code Talker (autobiography); Doris Paul's and Nathan Aseng's Navajo Code Talkers (two separate books); Jere Franco's Across the Pond; and my own book Medicine Bags and Dog Tags.
Thanks for reading this far,
Dr. Alton Carroll
US, American Indian, and Latin American History
Northern Virginia Community College