Hey folks Harry here, Mr Please sent in the following review of WINDTALKERS from a test screening that took place over at MGM last night... It's nice to see MGM actually get a good test screening review from time to time... And from the sound of it, John Woo might very well have a really good film under him again. It should be noted the Mr. Please sent this review to multiple websites so you're likely to see it pop up all over... Here ya go, and the spoilers are marked ahead of time.... ENJOY....
Well, I got a chance to see a test-screening of the new John Woo/Nicholas Cage movie, Windtalkers, last night.
And let me begin by saying that more than anything else I was curious about how this movie would come off. I mean, when I think of a John Woo film I think of amazing special effects and camera work that usually breaks new visual ground. So I really wanted to see how he would approach a WWII story, because in all honesty, I just couldn't get my mind around how this would seem right in that setting.
So as the movie starts, I was really just waiting to be awed by something in the first battle scene. But the really cool part of this movie for me was that I felt like John Woo adjusted his style to accommodate the movie rather than the movie being shot to accommodate him. There were no groundbreaking visuals here, just a lot of dutiful battle scenes that for the most part I thought were done just the way this story needed them to be done.
The basic premise of the story is pretty cool. It is the story of how during WWII, the US military had used all sorts of different codes to relay messages to the troops in battle. On whole, none of there codes had worked as the Japanese were continually able to break whatever they came up with. Then at some point during the conflict they turned to Navajo Indians to aid in their efforts. This turned out to be key to the War effort as the Japanese were never able to decipher the Navajo's communications.
*****Mild Spoilers Ahead*****
Nicholas Cage plays Joe Enders, a marine who's last command ended badly. He ended up being the sole survivor of the battle and lost every man in his charge. During the fight he is injured (damage to his inner ear) and spends some time in a hospital to recover. Here he is befriended by a nurse named Rita. Rita takes a liking to him and ends up helping Joe cheat on a hearing test that will determine whether or not he will be allowed to resume his career.
Eventually, Joe is reinstated to duty. His new job is to protect one of the Indian "Windtalkers" (code talkers). The commander tells Joe that he is to protect the code at all costs and, specifically, to never let the Navajo fall into enemy hands. Should this happen, he is instructed to kill the Navajo rather than risk letting the Japanese interrogate and possibly break the Navajo code.
Joe is assigned to a young Navajo named Ben Yazzie (Adam Beach). Their relationship starts out awkwardly. And because Joe is still in shock from the loss of his troops in battle from before, he sees this assignment as less of a duty to protect Ben but more as a chance to kill the Japanese for what they did to him and his men in the earlier battle.
Ben is really less of a soldier than a young kid trying his best to do his duty to country. And in his first battle, he quickly learns that there is much more to being part of WWII for him than simply talking on the radio. He is confronted with the reality that no matter how much he didn't want to kill, he will have to in order to survive.
It is during this part of the movie that Ben and Joe grow to understand one another. Because they are really at two different ends of the spectrum. Joe wants to kill. Ben really doesn't. But as the movie progresses, they both learn from each other and find a more livable existence.
I don't want to get too detailed about the movie so I will stop with the summary there. Sufficed to say, there are plenty of the same images and plotlines you will find in any other war movie. This isn't a movie that reinvents the wheel. But it's telling is thoughtful and the relationship between Yazzie and Enders really works well for me.
A couple of things I really liked:
Adam Beach is awesome in this movie. I didn't get a chance to see Smoke Signals, but I was struck by his ability in this movie to play the role in such a humble manner. That is to say that his character needed to be the wide-eyed child at the beginning of the film and grow into a more cynical man as time went on. He was tarnished by the war and his character development progressed well. But what I found different about this role was that in so many similar stories, the character becomes jaded. He will begin being witty and come off as the smart ass. Not here. Yazzie is hurt by the war but you always got the sense that he was more humbled by the experience than anything else. I really think Beach was masterful at maintaining this throughout and not giving in to the urge to make this character larger than life.
Nicholas Cage was as good as I have seen him since Leaving Las Vegas. His performance was understated, at least in comparison to the roles he usually takes, and he really deferred to Adam Beach's role. That was what was needed here. He had those obligatory moments of psychosis in the war scenes, but they were appropriate to the story. In so many other roles I have seen him in, these moments seem more about Cage being overly dramatic rather than trying to forward the story. Not here at all. He hit this role dead on for me. I commend him for his efforts.
Also, Roger Willie who plays Pvt. Whitehorse, is amazing. He really had some of the best moments in the movie. His interaction with Christian Slater's character was great. Slater is to Whitehorse as Joe Enders was to Ben Yazzie, his protector.
The only things that really bothered me about this movie were:
The character of Rita. I just saw no real reason to have her in this movie at all. She kept coming back from time to time in flash backs and voice overs (reading the mail she sent to Enders). To me this movie was about the relationships between the men. I really believe that Joe and Ben's story was strong enough not to have to stick some weak plotline about a woman in there. I really hope that they take her role out of the final cut.
And on a much lesser note, like I mentioned before, this movie didn't reinvent the wheel. It is full of moments and dialog that we have all heard before. But it did a superior job of telling a compelling story the way it was meant to be told.
Oh yeah, one last small thing. Peter Stormare played a Sgt in this movie. Now while I have always enjoyed him, I just didn't get his the way he did this role. When he was the Russian Cosmonaut in Armageddon he spoke with the accent. His accent kept breaking through at times in this movie and it was really distracting. Every time he spoke I kept hearing "I do not vant to be ere anymore!!". This is pretty petty on my part though. The movie still kicked some ass.
After a summer of mindless plots and stupid stories, it was really nice to finally have a chance to see something that worked at developing characters and made logical progressions along the way. I wouldn't say this was a great movie, but I would definitely recommend it.
Thanks.
Anonymous Please
