My Dad was a Marine officer who worked with the code talkers

Rating: Null/10 (23 June 2002)

Possible mild SPOILERS- you really can't talk about this movie without revealing some of the action because it's the sort of movie people have to know something about to decide whether to see it)
My family has been looking forward to this film for some time because my Dad was a Captain in the Marines at the time and spent some time with the Navajo code-talker operation. He has a wonderful documentary that was put out a few years ago on the subject and this dramatic presentation naturally peaked our interest. But my parents wanted me to see it first because Mom hates violence and Dad has some trouble seeing, which makes it hard to follow some movies. Perhaps there are people out there with the same sensibilities who might like to know what I told them.
The film is an excellent drama with wonderful, Oscar-caliber acting. Nicholas Cage's forte is playing world weary types and he gets the role of his career here, (much better than in "Leaving Las Vegas"). he's a guy who was never any good at anything until he became a soldier. Even that wouldn't have worked out except there was a war on and he found he was very good at killing people. But he's not so impressed at that, especially after his squad is wiped out-except for him in the opening battle. He winds up with a symbolic injury- an inner ear problem that effects his sense of balance. He hates war but isn't any good at anything else so he feels compelled to return to it. He doesn't fight out of patriotism or beliefs because he doesn't have any. Maybe he never did.
Adam Beach is just the opposite, a real "Sunny Jim" type with a family, a religion and a country he believes in. Page starts out having utter contempt for him and doesn't want to be his friend because he might have to kill him. As the film progresses, they move closer and closer to each other from decidedly different directions as Cage finds his humanity reawakened, (or awakened), as his admiration for Beach grows, while Beach has to find it in himself to hate someone enough to kill them. They wind up comrades in spirit as well as in arms and watching these two actors perform this gradual transformation is one of the best pieces of acting I have seen in a movie in a long time.
But you have to be able to sit through the movie first. The plot has it's contrivances and turns from merely dramatic to almost absurdly melodramatic at the end. To John Woo's credit, he keeps the blood and gore to a bare minimum, considering all the death he depicts. You never know when a terrible fire fight is going to break out and when they do, an awful lot of people die in front of you. Probably a hundred people do "the dance of death" while being riddled with bullets, (including one guy who pirouettes several times for some reason). A couple dozen guys go flying through the air after explosions, one of them landing without his foot. Improbably, a guy gets beheaded with a samurai sword in the middle of a modern battle. In the worst scene, a marine with a flame-thrower is offering some candy to a crying girl in what is supposed to be a "secure" village. A battle breaks out, his tanks are ruptured and he gets incinerated right in front of the girl- and us. Even if you are used to action or horror movies, there's a certain amount of battle fatigue that sets in here.
I had to tell my mother she would not enjoy watching this film, even if she might be impressed with the acting. I told Dad that, due to his vision problems, there would be long stretches where there was nothing but noise and he would not know what was going on. There are also subtitles that would have to be read off to him. I suggested the documentary he had was a better way to remember the code takers. One of the weaknesses of the film is that there really isn't enough about the code talking program. it's already been thought of and is already underway when the film begins. There's a brief early classroom scene but the real story of the code is not told here. It's really just a plot device to set up the moral dilemma the Cage character faces. A dilemma, by the way, that is pure Hollywood, according to my Dad. The only people they were told to kill were the Japs.