Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Our very own JED THE HUTT went and saw this at a recent test screening, and he’s still trying to recover from the shock of it so he can write a review. Like “Roark,” our reviewer today, Jed is a fan of Woo dating back to his first exposure to THE KILLER. He’s seen everything, and he’s still madly in love with the classic HK Woo films. But when he talked to me after seeing WINDTALKERS, he sounded shaken. He didn’t just hate it. He called it “unreleasable” and was in genuine shock over how much he thought it didn’t work. The film hurt him.
And then we have the review below.
I have no idea what to expect. I know I thought the script had enormous potential. I also know I’ve heard horror stories from inside the production about how MGM fucked Woo around from the moment the film started shooting. I pray for the best with this film, sincerely, but will be bringing you Jed The Hutt’s review soon so you can compare it to this glowing cascade of praise:
Hello Harry,
Call me Roark. I've just returned from John Woo's latest effort, WINDTALKERS, and I'm here to give you my read on it.
Until I heard about this project, I considered Woo's American career to be the prime example of an old fable - he was the elephant that no number of blind Hollywood "wise" men could understand.
Woo, at his best, is a romantic: his films are about giants clashing over conflicting ideals. He takes ideas, and their consequences, seriously. His movies reflect that.
Now drop this artist in the middle of a community that permits - nay, encourages - the likes of Michael Bay and Simon West to keep working, and it's no wonder that his work since arriving has failed to live up to his Hong Kong masterpieces.
Hey, this is the guy who does super-slow-motion violence! Let's have him do that with Van Damme! Hey, this is the guy who pits two stars against each other! Let's have him do that with Travolta and Slater! He gives good action, let's put him on M:I-2!
If you say that his US films don't measure up to BULLET IN THE HEAD or THE KILLER or A BETTER TOMORROW, if you say that they don't even measure up to HARD-BOILED or ONCE A THIEF (Hong Kong version) or HEROES SHED NO TEARS, then you commit sublime understatement. Is that Woo's fault? I say no.
Little minds, if we may put it so kindly, have great difficulty understanding genius.
And being fair, let us all admit that Woo has, in his US years, been leaning on the same devices he created in HK, to poor effect. One more dove/pigeon/winged-thing-with-feathers flying through a frame in slow motion for any reason whatsover is going to elicit a groan from me, no matter how well used. (Actually, not quite - see my note at the end.) I don't say that he's perfect, I say only that he's better than those that surround him, if he puts in the effort.
So when I heard about WINDTALKERS for the first time, my hopes began to take flight. In summary, at any rate, this story has the strength to carry the weight of Woo's recurring themes without buckling under and becoming silly.
So how did it come out?
John Woo has never made a better movie.
I'll explain why, but there are massive spoilers ahead. If you don't want to be spoiled, then settle for this: WINDTALKERS is a masterpiece. It will not win any Oscars, because it's too good. Remember how Hitchcock never won an Oscar (not counting that "lifetime achievement" token)? If Woo keeps making them as good as this, neither will he - for the same reason.
Okay,
beyond this point,
you're on your own.
The film opens in John Ford's Monument Valley, dissolving through beautiful helicopter shots for the credits, before showing young Navajo Ben Yahzee's (Adam Beach, in a damn solid performance) departure for military service. He is going off to training as a "codetalker," one of a corps of Navajo speakers who used their language as the basis of a radio code that was unbreakable to the Japanese. After establishing his character and his friendship with another Navajo, Charles Whitehorse (Roger Willie, who reminded me of Graham Greene in a very good way), there's a dissolve to lapping water.
Bloody lapping water. A dead US soldier, his face frozen in terror or agony, floats past, staring at the sky. A camouflaged leg steps into the frame, with a quiet splash. A machine gun burst, and two or three Japanese soldiers fall dead out of the foliage on the bank of the stream.
Right then, Woo had me. The pacing, the control over image and sound, everything about this was RIGHT. And it only got better.
Cage's character, Joe Enders, is leading a handful of men through hell. Only a corporal, he's the highest ranking survivor, and thus in charge. After several of his men die in a hellish firefight, the remaining survivors debate whether they should hold position as ordered, or retreat. Enders decides to follow orders. Everybody but him dies, the last one in his arms. His dying words: "You bastard." Enders falls to a grenade, and the film next shows him in a hospital in Hawaii.
This is the man given the responsibility of "protecting the code," I.e., protecting Ben Yahzee and, if capture seems imminent, killing him to keep the code out of Japanese hands.
And so, finally, Woo grapples with a big theme, a difficult moral question, and attempts to define right and wrong in hellish circumstances. His best films did this head on - BULLET IN THE HEAD, THE KILLER, and A BETTER TOMORROW. (The movie Woo fans will compare this too is BULLET, gone Hollywood. The analogy is both apt - good people make gut-wrenching decisions in the hell of war - and inapt - WINDTALKERS has nothing like BULLET's flaws.)
The theme, or question, I would this way: can killing your friends ever be the right decision?
WINDTALKERS answers with a terrible, uncomfortable honesty: Yes. A qualified yes, but still, yes.
Dropping this question solidly on the shoulders of a man already responsible for the deaths of every man in his unit throws it into stark relief. Enders is a man who cheats on his hearing exam (his eardrum was perforated by the grenade's explosion) to get back into the war. He doesn't know it yet, but he wants to die. His guilt controls him, he needs to purge it, and he doesn't know how.
The other white man guarding a "codetalker" is Sgt. Peter "Ox" Anderson played by Christian Slater. The college audience I was with jeered the first time Slater graced the screen, but his performance here is fine. At first, Ox is overeager and a bit of a simp - a seemingly weak performance, but as the movie progresses, you realize that that is the character, and it makes what happens later on all the more powerful.
Ox doesn't mind talking about his orders, isn't bothered by them, and makes friends with his codetalker, Whitehorse. All of this in direct contrast to Enders. Slater's performance is open, honest, even naive. Cage is so withdrawn that his expression might be called blank through most of the film - except we in the audience know exactly what is going on behind those eyes at every moment.
In the penultimate battle, Ox Anderson and his codetalker Whitehorse become surrounded by Japanese, and he is finally faced with the horror of his responsibility. He puts a gun to the face of his best friend, and has to decide whether or not to pull the trigger.
He doesn't.
And then a Japanese soldier lops off his head with a sword, and the enemy captures Whitehorse.
As they drag the struggling Navajo away, Enders comes on the scene - out of ammo. He and Whitehorse stare into each other's eyes for what seems an eternity, and then he pulls the pin on a grenade, holds it, and... throws it, killing both the Japanese soldiers and Whitehorse.
In the next scene, he confesses this to Yahzee. The resulting scene is....
Do you remember the scene in BULLET IN THE HEAD in the POW camp? The one where the weakest character out of the three friends, Jacky Cheung's character, has to shoot an American POW in the face or be killed? Where everybody is screaming at him to do it, even the American who knows he's about to die? Do you remember how goddamned hard it was to sit through that scene?
This one's harder.
Let me digress for a moment or three.
As I've implied, there are a lot of other films you can compare WINDTALKERS with:
BULLET IN THE HEAD, obviously. BULLET was merely a warm-up exercise for this, though.
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN's use of horrific, senseless brutality will be brought up ad nauseam when discussing WINDTALKERS's big battle scenes. WINDTALKERS is superior, to my mind, because it uses similar terrible images to opposite ends.
Old WWII movies, because of the different characters in the unit. Yet, WINDTALKERS indulges in only two half-cliches, and each is well handled. The worst one I will deal with in a moment, but the other cliche is the soldier who's afraid. When he gets excited, he hyperventilates and has to breathe into a bag. How did this guy get past boot camp? But the character is well drawn, and well acted, so it doesn't matter so much.
There are other flaws in the film, all of them minor. Some of the effects don't integrate well with the backgrounds (especially the battleships, which look like stock footage from another movie). The character of the Nurse, played by A.I.'s Frances O'Connor, disappears at the end of the film - it felt like a scene or two was cut. The final act has a few false notes, perhaps also due to cuts made for time (about two and a half hours in the cut I saw).
The single biggest, most irritating cliche, though, is Noah Emmerich's (the best friend from THE TRUMAN SHOW and a fine actor) thankless role as the Racist Soldier Who Learns Better. Now, absolutely and with no argument, there were a lot of racist white guys in the 1940s. And I don't dispute some of them were in the Marines. But this cliche is not just overdone, it is dishonest.
Most racists take their view out of a feeling of personal inferiority. The "I may not be a very good guy, but at least I ain't no [ethnic slur]" attitude. In reality, what happens when this attitude's butt is saved by the ethnic guy he hates? He hates him MORE, because he's just had his inferiority served up to him on fine china, with garnish, and that's something that he cannot forgive without losing his false sense of superiority.
That said, this example of the cliche is actually not too offensive because it is handled, especially in the end, with a subtlety of both writing and performance that it does not deserve. Hey, at least there isn't any whore-with-a-heart-of-gold.
Here endeth the digression.
These flaws, and a few others, are minor and easily overlooked. John Woo has returned to form - no, John Woo proves with WINDTALKERS that he is better than ever before.
What really marks this movie off from his other American work is something that I admired about most of his HK films. There are no villains here. The conflict is between basically good men, each trying to do the right thing, clashing because their honestly held ideas are at odds.
The greatest flaw in BULLET IN THE HEAD was turning one of the main characters into a villian. That doesn't happen here.
Even the Military, so often portrayed as hopelessly corrupt and evil in Hollywood films in the recent past(excepting the last year or so, naturally), is nothing of the kind. Enders's orders make perfect sense. If the enemy get the code, thousands of people will die and the war may be lost. Allowing that to happen would be a monstrous wrong.
And killing a friend to keep that from happening?
I said early on that the movie answers this with a qualified yes.
I've already told you that Enders kills one of the codetalkers, after the man was captured. And he is responsible for the deaths of his men at the beginning.
Well, in one of the final battles, Enders kills another one of his men. That man was carrying flame thrower tanks on his back, which get hit by a bullet. He falls to the ground screaming, his flesh charring black before your, and Enders's, eyes. Enders raises a pistol, his face contorts, and he forces himself to kill another friend.
It was the only thing he could do. His only other choice was to let his friend's agony go on needlessly.
And after that, he makes a decision. Instead of "just following orders" (a phrase overused in the film, I'm afraid), Enders takes responsibility for himself. He tells the remaining Marines "No one else is going to die."
He means it.
So the qualification to the "yes" is this: Only if that is the very best you can make of a BAD situation, then it is the right thing to do.
So the answer to the thematic question is, in typical Woo fashion, surprisingly optimistic: even in the WORST situations, you have choices, and the choice you make matters.
That's not a very Hollywood answer. And it's refreshing.
-- Roark
NOTE: I wrote before I saw the movie that I didn't want to see any birds flapping along in slo-mo, because it was a VERY tired device for Woo. Well, there is one scene early on where we see Seagulls flapping along in slow motion. But, since Nicholas Cage is sitting on a beach watching seagulls, contemplating things, this counts as an exception to my declaration. It works in the context of the scene, and is about as different as you could ask for from M:I-2's overuse of pigeons and doves. I stand (partly) corrected.
Big words. BIIIIIG words. I hope this is all true. I would love to see John Woo finally given the respect he deserves in this country, and it would be nice to see MGM turn out something genuinely great.
*fingers crossed* Time will tell.
"Moriarty" out.
