Not much plot and lots of overdone battle scenes

Rating: 4/10 (21 February 2011)

Windtalkers (2002) is a World War II action flick with plenty of overdone action and not much of a story. At 2.25 hours in length, it overstayed its welcome by an hour or so for me.
The windtalkers referenced in the title are Navajo marine codetalkers dispatched to the Pacific theater during World War II. They were trained in a special code based on the Navajo language, and distributed among units in an attempt to provide coded radio transmissions that couldn't be understood by the Japanese. This was accomplished both by using the Navajo language and also using coding within that language to add a complication that the Japanese were never able to overcome during World War II.
Sounds like an interesting story, right? Maybe so, in another movie. The only real reason to include the codetalkers in this movie was to provide a focal point for a storyline about bigotry and personal biases among some of the troops. That's also a legitimate storyline for a movie, but it's been done many times before with other targets. The title seems to hint that this movie will go beyond that aspect, but it doesn't. Actually, even the storyline about bigotry doesn't matter much in this movie. Everything is just an excuse for action battle scenes.
This movie is all about the battle scenes, and it contains a lot of bad ones. I guess this is supposed to have been a modern, therefore realistically portrayed, Pacific Theater World War II movie. The photography and noise and gore are done with modern techniques, but not the story or scenes. All of the worst battle clichés of war movie history have been brought together and updated. Hand grenades, artillery shells, land mines, everything explodes with giant fuel-laden fireballs. There are slow motion sequences of soldiers successfully diving away from exploding artillery shells and fiery eruptions. There are enemies too stupid to recognize infiltrators of a different race and language.
And always, always, always, there is the crazy protagonist who goes nuts in every battle and charges headlong into the enemy fire unscathed as bodies are being torn apart on all sides of him. No marine-issue semi-automatic rifle for this guy-- as a Sergeant he has a sub-machine gun and indiscriminately sprays hundreds of pounds of rounds in all directions, never running out of ammunition. While in the middle of one heated battle he over-ran an enemy foxhole with a dead soldier at the bottom and stopped for a few seconds to spray a couple dozen bullets into the body while screaming triumphantly. Why not? His magic gun isn't going to run dry.
The movie is supposedly about the codetalkers, or at least about how the Navajo code was used, but that hardly gets addressed. The code is used in a couple instances when a non-code English transmission would have been fine, but when two American soldiers transmit from a Japanese radio at an over-run enemy post and might be expected to use code to provide verification, everything is done in open English. Of course, the Japanese radio also conveniently had Arabic numerals on the frequency tuner so they could change to the correct transmission frequency.
If you like this type of battle footage, I recommend that instead of devoting your time to watching the movie straight through you just drop in somewhere in the middle and watch a few minutes of battle. If you want more than a few minutes you can either continue with the movie or just keep re-watching the same few minutes you already saw. There won't be any difference.