Too much Gas

Rating: 6/10 (21 June 2005)

The Navajo men who helped America defeat Japan get some much needed credit by this movie, but they deserved better than this. The problems with this movie include bad special effects, an in-cohesive story, clichéd ideas and lack of strong climax. I've seen some explosions from artillery and it doesn't look like what is presented in this movie--unless of course the Japanese soldiers where all hauling cans of gas with them in the jungle. Most large explosions were very gaseous in nature. Big flames and lack of explosive intensity mark the typical boom in this movie. The story was all over the place. Was it about the sarge (Cage) or was it about the code-talkers? It should have been about the code-talkers, but Enders was a huge distraction to the story line. It wasn't Cage's fault. They could have played him as that type of character without digressing from the code-talkers. Also, there were some good battle scenes but the Marines had many heroes and not just one guy doing everything in each battle. Since they were showing the battle of Saipan, why not at least show what the Japanese civilians did? Many of them,taught that the Marines were savages, tossed themselves off of cliffs in effort to avoid Americans. Already, others have discussed the clichéd lines and scenes. There are many. Enough said. The climax was predictable.In case you want to see the movie, I will just say it was weak because of the problems in the story development.This is not the worst war movie there is. It was OK if you ignore Cage's character as much as possible and give attention to the code-talkers. That is a challenge, but at least you would learn something about them.