Realism versus reality

Rating: 4/10 (8 July 2002)

My wife and I went to see Windtalkers on Saturday night. I have been studying World War II, and for the past six months have been plodding my way through 3600 pages of Winston Churchill's History of the Second World War, so I thought this movie might be interesting. For the most part, I was disappointed.
Windtalkers is a story about the U.S. military's use of a top-secret code based on the Navajo language. Because the Navajos could cipher and decipher messages faster than via telegraphic codes, this was supposed to bring a great advantage in battlefield communications. Each Navajo coder was "protected" by a marine assigned to him, but according to the movie, it was actually the code, not the coder, which was to be protected "at all costs".
The thing that I found most disappointing about the movie was its depiction of battlefield conditions. While a great deal of effort was clearly made on depicting realistic battle scenes on the level of hand-to-hand combat, the overall understanding of battle tactics was missing. In one scene, the Marines had invaded Saipan, and individual troops on the ground were being bombed on the battlefield by Japanese Zeros (fighter aircraft), while no U.S. aircraft were in evidence. It is well-known that as a prelude to any land invasion or advance of troops, from D-Day to the Gulf War, that air supremacy must be achieved first. On an island like Saipan, The enemy air force would have been completely annihilated before a Marine set foot on the beach. As another example, the movie depicted heavy Japanese 14" or 16" guns (of the type used in WWII for coastal defense), being used to fire at troops on the ground, instead of targetting the enemy (our) warships which were firing at them. This is just plain silly.
I was willing to overlook these flaws, however, for a good story. Here again the movie fell short. There was very little character development, which left one wondering why characters behaved the way they did. This was especially the case with our main character, played by Nicolas Cage. Nothing was told of his beliefs, such as why he volunteered to return to battle, even enlisting the aid of a nurse to fake a hearing test, after he had been wounded in action. All in the all the story development was flat and left me less than satisfied.