Blowing in the Wind

Rating: 4/10 (16 September 2006)

This showed up on the history channel and with the husband once again off playing poker I thought, OK, time to ingest a little more history. Only to end up retching over yet another Nicholas Cage bad movie.
Now, I just recently saw Con Air for the first time on STARz, so the juxtaposition is unfortunate for his rating, but is he letting his lizard tattoo or Elvis visitations determine his movie selections? Are the script readings done by a psychic? Does he gravitate to stupid characters?
I thought I was going to see something that was about World War II, but actually I got to see a silly film filled with characters I've seen so often I could have written this script myself during a silicon valley traffic jam, and done a much better and far more historically accurate job. They all trotted around after the usual conflicted Sergeant - or is Nicolas Cage always conflicted (see fixations above)? - with a Navajo Indian (instead of a representative of some other ethnic group) thrown in to cause racial tension.
Let's see, we had the bullying racist, who then has his life saved by an Indian (gee, there's a surprise), the panicking recruit who can't take the pressure and trips the mine field (wow, didn't see that coming), the accepting comrade who (symbolically) blends an harmonica with the Indian's flute (but dies saving the Indian's life, ditto, ditto), the young boy who must grow up too soon (ah, the poignancy), the Army lieutenant that treats everyone like tools (not again!), the mystic wisdom that teaches us all a little something, the constantly breathy flute music (used with all cultural lessons) - have we endured this one before?
Not really, because we've never seen quite so many battles, with so many bodies (tossed so high in the air) before, or filmed in Utah while pretending to be Iwo Jima. Was John Woo trying to win some kind of battle-filming contest here? Well, I hope so, because he sure lost a battle with the script.
Of course, we had the added stress for poor battle-worn Nicolas Cage that he might have to shoot his code talker rather than have him fall into enemy hands. Quite the sophisticated plot twist, that! Oh no, will Nicolas get too close and feel bad if he has to shoot his young trustee? More conflict! More angst! Cage's specialty! Makes the story so much better, right?
Better, but not accurate. Reality: the code wasn't the language - it was a derivative, based on, the Navajo language. If someone was captured, the code would be changed. The prisoner might understand the base language, but not the code itself.
Oh, yeah, periodically the Indians, who I believe were the original inspiration for the movie, would get to talk back and forth in Navajo, and we would get to see the translation on the screen. They would say their position (not in actual code). Oh, and one time in the movie, the Japanese noticed the Americans weren't speaking English.
And another time, according to the movie, the Japanese attempted to capture an Indian who was just standing around the front line because somehow they knew he was a code talker. Right. They guessed in the middle of combat that he wasn't Hawaiian or Japanese American, he was an American Indian. And they also had somehow figured out that the language that wasn't English was a derivative of an American Indian dialect, and therefore this man must be a Code Talker. Right there in the middle of the battle. Alrighty then. (It must be similar wisdom that causes me to doubt the veracity of this incident.)
These incidents brought history alive for me, alright.
Reality: Code talkers were translating messages NON STOP throughout the taking of Iwo Jima. Which makes it difficult to understand how the Navajos would have been hacking and shooting away on the battlefield, or standing around the front lines, and going through that growing-up-too-soon stuff. Reality: They were able to communicate three times faster than previous codes had hustled along, but like any other job, the number of messages increased to fill the time available. Seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between busy busy real code talker life and Hollywood. Oh, sorry. That's a duh.
In addition to not understanding the difference between a language and a code (is this rocket science?) the soldiers in the film didn't even wear the right dog tags. Reality: I've got my dad's dog tags from WWII, and you can get a lovely facsimile at the Smithsonian gift store right now. Were they not stylish enough? Was it more exciting to use choke chain dog tags? Every time I saw a soldier I saw an anachronism. As in big fat mistake.
I do appreciate that at least we have a movie in these Politically Correct days where we had two sides to a war: good guys and bad guys. You don't see that very often any more, so points to John Woo for that one area.
But I'm getting away from what was really going on in the movie, which was all about battered, bruised, benighted and badgered Nicholas Cage, who talked to the Navajo like Clint Eastwood talked to the trees in Paint Your Wagon. Not to mention the usual angst-ridden and conflicted stuff he faces. I got very little wind talking, and an awful lot of wind blowing out of this movie.
All it did for the important role the Navajo (and Comanche in the European Theatre) Indians played during WWII was bring them up in conversation - too many inaccuracies to be of any other use.