WE WERE SOLDIERS
"You've got to tell the American people what happened here," says Lieutenant
Colonel Harold Moore (Mel Gibson) to UPI reporter Joe Galloway (Barry Pepper)
at the height of the Vietnam War's first and bloodiest engagement, the Battle
of Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley. Years later, the two would
collaborate and do so, not in this fulsome, trite, exploitative movie but in
their Pulitzer-winning account, We Were Soldiers
Once . . . And Young. In the fine Hollywood tradition of
A Beautiful Mind, writer/director Randall Wallace keeps the title of the
book (or most of it) and the names and a few facts and fabricates the rest or
transforms it into the hoariest and most transparently manipulative
clichés.
Gibson's Moore is a demigod, a devout Catholic husband and father (when he's
not speechifying or shouting orders or leading the charge, he's praying) of
five who shines his patriarchal aura onto the newly formed First Air Cavalry,
the helicopter-riding troopers who would transform modern warfare. Don't ask
why (Moore's daughter does, and even she's unconvinced by the explanation), but
they end up in Vietnam's Central Highlands facing an enemy three times their
size. With superior firepower, incredible courage, and canny tactics they
survive, but little of the tension, horror, bravery, and cool-headed strategy
comes through the bullshit and bravado of Wallace's lugubrious, hamfisted
direction (in one of the most astonishing cuts in recent memory, the action
shifts from US troops mowing down the enemy to a close-up of Moore's Stepford
wife, played by Madeleine Stowe, vacuuming). Unlike Black Hawk Down,
which gets all the details right but passes on the politics, this passes on the
politics, screws the facts, and goes directly to the unreflected flagwaving
fervor. It's a latter-day The Green Berets but without honesty,
innocence, or John Wayne. At the AppleValley, Campus, Entertainment, Hoyts
Providence 16, Showcase, and Tri-Boro cinemas.
Issue Date: March 1 - 7, 2002
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