great battle scenes, weak script

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 2003)

There's been such a surfeit of war pictures coming out of Hollywood in the past few years that it's small wonder `Windtalkers' failed to ignite many box office sparks when it was released in the summer of 2002. Famed action director John Woo has served himself well by mounting spectacularly effective and brilliantly orchestrated battle scenes, but the writers, John Rice and Joe Bateer, have let him down big time in the story department. Woo has flooded the screen with moments of uncompromising graphic realism, only to have them mitigated by trite dialogue, predictable ironies and corny melodramatics. Both the director and the men who actually lived through the events of this true-life story deserve better.
`Windtalkers' does have history going for it. In World War II, the Allied Forces in the Pacific needed to come up with a brand new code that would be `uncrackable' by the Japanese. The military decided that it would base that code on the Navajo language, thus precipitating the need to recruit young Navajo men to come to the battlefields as `code-talkers.' The film focuses on one such man, Ben Yahzee, and the officer, Joe Enders, whose sole duty it becomes to protect Ben in battle and keep him out of the hands of the Japanese. Joe, naturally, balks at the idea of having to perform `babysitting' duty on the front line, and he is not afraid to show Ben just how he feels about the situation in the early stages of their relationship. Joe has other problems as well. Recently injured in battle himself, he also struggles with the guilt accrued from having led all the men of his previous platoon to their deaths while `following orders like a good Marine.'
There is certainly plenty in terms of character and conflict for the screenwriters to work with here, yet somehow they never find a way to bring those characters or conflicts to convincing life. Joe's initial reluctance to accept Ben is as predictable as his inevitable change of heart at the end. And `predictable' is really the key word here in describing much of this film. Are we really surprised when the most vocal racist in the group  who says `Injuns' aren't much different from the Japanese they're all fighting  has his life saved by the very man who's been the target of all his ridicule? And don't we just know that a soldier will be gunned down the moment he offers a piece of chocolate to a distraught little Japanese girl? Or how about the fact that the two men, one white, one Navajo, who have been literally making beautiful music together  one on the flute and the other on the harmonica  demonstrating colorblind brotherhood in action, are cut down right next to one another in the same battle? Thus, the unsettling, cluttered `messiness' of the battle scenes is undercut by the too carefully contrived nature of so much of the actual narrative. By trying so hard to move and uplift us, the film feels manipulative and calculated when it needs to feel most sincere.
`Windtalkers' might have been a more compelling film were it not for the lackluster, wooden performance Nicholas Cage delivers in the lead role. Cage has never been very adept at conveying complex emotions and his inability to provide any depth or shading to the psychologically tormented Enders goes a long way towards minimalizing the film's impact. Adam Beach, on the other hand, brings a fresh-faced likability to the part of Ben, the Navajo, who, in many ways, takes on the Private Ryan role in the story.

For all the amazing battle scenes in the film, `Windtalkers' may just be one war film too many for us to cope with.