Directed by:
John WooCinematography:
Jeffrey L. KimballComposer:
James HornerCast:
Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Peter Stormare, Noah Emmerich, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Van Holt, Martin Henderson, Roger Willie, Frances O'Connor, Christian Slater (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
Honour Was Their Code. On December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. For the next several years, U.S. forces were fully engaged in battle throughout the Pacific, taking over islands one by one in a slow progression towards mainland Japan. During this brutal campaign, the Japanese were able to break coded military, dramatically slowing U.S. progress. In 1942, several hundred Navajo Americans were recruited as Marines and trained to use their language as code. Marine Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage) is assigned to protect Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) - a Navajo code talker, the Marines' new secret weapon. Enders' orders are to protect his code talker, but if Yahzee should fall into enemy hands, he's to "protect the code at all costs". Against the backdrop of the horrific Battle of Saipan, when capture is imminent, Enders is forced to make a decision: if he can't protect his fellow Marine, can he bring himself to kill him to protect the code? The Navajo code was the only one never broken by the Japanese, and is considered to have been key in winning the war. (20th Century Fox AU)
(more)Reviews (4)
John Woo is a director of action films and clearly does not feel comfortable in any other genre. War, in his interpretation, lacks sufficient impact. The only problem, but a crucial one at that, is that he behaves as if he is shooting his next action masterpiece and tries to insert almost balletic scenes into the film, which then have no chance of appealing to me when it is because soldiers have just been killed. The brutal dose of detachment, characteristic of his previous works, seems plainly laughable here. When the main hero in The Killer or Hard Boiled stands against multiple adversaries, it is exaggerated but also stylish. But when Nicolas Cage charges into the trenches like an unguided missile in Windtalkers and starts mowing down enemies without suffering any injury, I can only shake my head. On top of that, the Japanese are portrayed as complete idiots here, popping out of hiding with their weapons lowered and their hands flailing, running directly in front of American cannons. The refined form and planes passing by the camera or a series of exploding tanks take your breath away. However, the content is desperately trivial.
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Even as a simple but effective action movie (see Broken Arrow), Windtalkers would be too slow and ponderous by today’s standards. However, it doesn’t want to be a simple action movie, so it mixes Native American spiritualism and humanism into the firefights and explosions. And it does so to such an extent that the result tastes like a rotten apple. That Native spiritualism is actually quite unbelievable and is in contrast with the gratuitous nature of the heroic action scenes (slow-motion shots of Nicolas Cage after his successful one-man-show action scenes). The gratuitous action scenes also conflict with the whole humanistic level of the film, which is diminished by the depiction of the Japanese as a race worthy of damnation. In short, it is neither proper action in the style of Black Hawk Down nor “something more” in the style of Saving Private Ryan. Someone here either didn’t know what they wanted to make or they just fucked up.
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A solidly directed film that became a huge flop. It’s hard to say what went wrong. Perhaps it needed a better script, but what it certainly lacks is at least one scene that would grab the viewer by the heart, though some scenes, especially the ones that present the Indians more closely, e.g. while making music, are sensitively filmed. And Nicolas Cage? He's not a bad actor, I can easily believe him as a soldier, but he is, let's face it, a bit jaded of late and doesn't have the potential to help hold a film commercially anymore.
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I'm pretty disappointed in this. Pretty much. The action doesn't have the bite that the other John Woo films have, Nicolas Cage doesn't really fit, and the story of Christian Slater and Roger Willie was much better and more emotional than the story of the main characters. If I wanted to compare it to Woo’s Hong Kong work, it would be even less so. As it is, it's a slightly above average war movie and a big step down in John Woo's career.
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