‘We Were’ bored by Mel’s
corny ‘Vietnam Lite’ flick
■ ‘We Were Soldiers’ has little
going for it but good feelings
MOVIE REVIEW
‘We Were Soldiers’
By John Liebhardt
Oregon Daily Emerald
In “We Were Soldiers,” Mel Gib
son plays Hal Moore, the consum
mate soldier’s soldier. Throughout
this two-hour movie, set with one
foot in a military training camp and
the other squarely in central Viet
nam, Gibson is a strong, tough and
generous soldier. He looks the cam
era straight in the eye, gives his
men a pat on the back and tells
them they’re doing just fine.
At home, he’s a loving husband
and father. He’s a man who prays
with his boots on and wears his dog
tags to bed.
Gibson is fairly convincing as the
new-style throwback soldier: Comb
ing John Wayne’s butt-kickin’ quali
ties with Josh Hartnett’s earnestness.
“We Were Soldiers” is also a
throwback film. It juxtaposes the
halcyon days of 1965 before the
Vietnam war got amped up with
the realities of the first major bat
tle between the North Vietnamese
Army and U.S. advisors. At home,
Gibson’s men learn to shoot new
machine guns and jump from heli
copters (which are also new to the
army). The base is the military’s
version of an all-American suburb,
where cars line the streets, kids
run and play and each soldier has
a loving, doting wife who worries
about the laundry and where to get
a good meal around town. During
the first half of the film, we are
pounded with the symbols of
Americana: Baseball, the flag and
lots of churches and crosses. If
these symbols hit us any harder,
they would kill us.
Unlike many other films about
Vietnam, “We Were Soldiers” does
not bother with the soldier’s inher
ent nihilism. There is no smoking
joints, jamming to Jimi Hendrix or
popping rounds at an invisible ene
my. This move is too corny for that
— sort of a Vietnam Lite.
If all of this sounds a bit worn, it
is. The movie is overwrought with
sentimentality, cardboard charac
ters and one-too-many deathbed
scenes where soldiers look into
their comrade’s eyes and say “I am
glad I could die for my country,”
and “Tell my wife I love her, and
my new baby, too.”
With so much going against it,
we are not left with much empathy
or alarm for these characters. Once
we figure that people are intro
duced to have them simply killed
off, the audience can only hope that
the director disposes of these peo
ple in new and inventive ways.
Because director Randall Wallace
also wrote “Pearl Harbor,” one can
immediately notice a strong resem
blance between the two war epics.
Wallace also tries here to fill a large
social canvas, but he fails miserably.
We occasionally drop into the lives
of the various military composite
characters, and we zoom back as
quickly as we came in. 'We meet
Bruce Crandall (Greg Kinnear), the
nutty helicopter pilot who lets his
men call him “snakeshit.” We also
meet Jack Geoghegan (played by the
wide-eyed Chris Klein from “Amer
ican Pie”), the college-boy father
who Gibson meets in church after
Geoghegan’s daughter is born. We
meet Sergeant Major Basil Plumley
(Sam Elliot), who mostly spends the
movie calling people “pussies” and
shooting his pistol.
We even get to see the enemy — a
rarity in Vietnam movies, and a rar
ity in American war movies until
“Pearl Harbor.” Wallace gives us
glimpses of the North Vietnamese
tunnel system, and he gives the
North Vietnamese leadership a
calm and professional demeanor.
Wallace rightly develops the sec
ond half of the movie into a chess
match that pits the Vietnamese
against Gibson and his can-do atti
tude. With the North Vietnamese
swarming, the Americans can’t be
saved by the long-range artillery
and an early version of napalm.
With all of his good feelings and
broad strokes, Wallace must be try
ing to tell us something. However,
other than the obvious “war is bad”
or “soldiers are good men,” nothing
really jumps to mind. Whatever
good intentions he and Mel Gibson
try to infuse in this film, the audi
ence is left feeling a bit empty.
Frankly, they’d like to see some
more of the cool explosions.
E-mail Pulse editor John Liebhardt
atjohnliebhardt@dailyemerald.com.
013635
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