Review: ‘Soldiers’ unlike other war tales

Geoff Carter

Friday, March 1, 2002 | 9:23 a.m.

In telling the story of one fateful battle, "We Were Soldiers" embodies so many different kinds of war-movie standards that you sometimes forget which era it belongs to. It has its roots in "The Green Berets" but looks like "Black Hawk Down." It is at once antiwar and patriotic, and at once very unique and cliched almost to a fault.

Based upon a memoir by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and reporter Joseph Galloway -- played in the film by Mel Gibson and Barry Pepper, respectively -- "We Were Soldiers" recounts the first major encounter between the United States and North Vietnam, a bloody and relentless skirmish in Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley. Both sides were trying to figure out what the other could do.

They found out. Not long after landing, Moore's troops were battling for their lives. They were punished by 100-degree heat, had only a basic idea of the terrain and were outnumbered 5-to-1. By the following day they were in danger of being overrun -- a situation code-named "broken arrow" -- and jets carrying incendiary bombs were dispatched. It took a third day of fighting to secure a victory, and a pyrrhic victory at that.

The film version of Moore and Galloway's account was written and directed by Randall Wallace, who wrote "Braveheart" but also the terrible "Pearl Harbor." The latter film tried too hard to be an epic, sweeping romance in the classic Hollywood tradition, while the former was just about blokes tearing each other apart; "Soldiers" falls neatly between the two.

Case in point: the cliches. Wallace isn't the least bit afraid to have a dying character say, "Tell my wife I love her," or "I'm glad I could die for my country," because that's probably exactly what was said under the circumstances. Nor does he have a problem with showing the horrific effects of a misplaced bomb -- the first instance of friendly fire in Vietnam, and not the last.

But the way these events are presented is remarkable. In the middle of a combat sequence, Wallace cuts back to the homefront, where Moore's wife, Julie (Madeleine Stowe), delivers death notices to other wives on base. (One of the most dumbfounding elements of the story -- an overwhelmed war department using cab drivers to deliver the notices -- really happened.) As in "Saving Private Ryan," characters die before we know they've been hit.

And perhaps for the first time in an American film, North Vietnamese troops aren't portrayed as some alien entity. They are shown thinking, mourning their dead, crouching in real fear. Ridley Scott showed no such balance in "Black Hawk Down," in which he portrayed the enemy as an unstoppable, non-individual mass of evil; half the time they were interchangeable with sharks or zombies.

Moore had too much respect for his adversary to paint him that way, and Wallace respects Moore's respect, to the film's credit. True, only two North Vietnamese are given a touch of personality -- the beleaguered Lt. Col. Nguyen Huu Ann (Don Doung) and a soldier with a picture of his wife in his pocket -- but that's two more than have been given this courtesy in the history of war films.

Gibson plays Moore as true as he's ever played anyone, and his strength seems as real as the explosions rocking the screen around him. He's supported by a sharp cast, including Sam Elliot, Greg Kinnear and Chris Klein, though everyone involved works hard. You get attached to the characters just by reading their faces -- fearful, saddened, horrified, determined. None of them seem relieved when it's over, and probably none of them were.