A very disappointing film...watch Sands of Iwo Jima instead.

Rating: 4/10 (12 July 2002)

Why do Hollywood moviemakers bother to bring together respectable casts, viable storylines, and terrific costumes, and then proceed to make a ridiculous movie?
The story of the Navajo codetalkers deserves a better telling than this movie.
Like many war movies, the portrayal of combat is very poorly done. Anyone who has been in combat, or at least studied it, would find the combat scenes in this movie laughable. From the beginning scene, in which a Marine shoots a Japanese soldier who is hiding in the brush from a distance of about four feet, this movie does not portray a realistic impression of actual fighting (why didn't the Japanese soldier shoot first? he was HIDING in wait, for crying out loud).
There were way too many scenes of groups of both US Marines and Japanese soldiers running fully upright in groups of dozens or more in broad daylight, and of course being gunned down. In actuality, combat is a slow, meticulous, terrifying experience, wherein men reluctantly inch forward cautiously toward (or preferable around) the enemy, shooting at anything and everything. On Iwo Jima is sometimes took days to move forward a fraction of a mile.
Almost everyone that was shot flopped around waving his arms before he fell. Most people when they are shot simply fall down or, if they are already down, stop moving.
About 8,000 Japanese civilians took their lives on Saipan because they had been told by the Japanese authorities that the Americans would torture and brutalize them. It is highly unlikely that, as occurred in the scene with Cage, that a Japanese mother would allow her child to take medication from a US Marine.
How did Kahzee, dressed in a Japanese uniform and holding Enders "prisoner", make it from between the US and Japanese lines without being shot by the Americans? And when he gets there, and eventually gets to the Japanese radio, all he does is dial in the US frequency and speaks in plain, uncoded English to tell the artillery to stop firing on the Marines. If it were that easy, wouldn't the Japanese simply call up the Marines and tell them to stop firing? Wasn't the whole point of sending Kahzee that he spoke the Navajo code?
Why was the one Marine, who fed chocolate to the little girl, wearing the flamethrower in the village? A flamethrower weighs 75 pounds or more, and would only be worn when approaching or attacking enemy positions, not on a casual basis in a "secured" area.
Why did it take radio calls to order in naval gunfire and air strikes on obvious enemy positions? Most of the Japanese were in full view atop hills, and would have been bombarded for days prior to any assault by ground troops.
The special effect explosions in this movie for the most part were absurd. Hollywood special effects people need to put away the naptha -- grenades, bazookas, and even heavy artillery rounds do not produce rolling clouds of flame when they explode. The explosions are sharp and deadly, but visually often not very impressive.
I could go on and on. This movie was a poor war movie and only a fair movie otherwise. Rent the Sands of Iwo Jima or A Walk in the Sun instead.