image courtesy of IMDB
Rating:
6
Year of release: 2002
Company: MGM
Genre: war
Running time: 133 min.
Director: John Woo
Script: John Rice, Joe Batteer
Producers: Terence Chang, John Woo, Tracie Graham, Alison Rosenzweig
Cinematography: Jeff Kimball
Editors: Jeff Gullo, Steven Kemper, Tom Rolf
Music: James Horner
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Peter Stormare, Noah Emmerich, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Van Holt, Martin Henderson, Roger Willie, Frances O'Connor, Christian Slater
Rated R for gory violence and language
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Windtalkers
Nicolas Cage. Image courtesy of IMDB.
As Windtalkers premiered, there was a news story in which John Woo stated that he will not be doing action films any longer. While viewing Windtalkers, one gets the sense that Woo had already left the genre before finishing this movie. It certainly has enough blood and guts to satisfy the most die-hard gorehound, but ultimately Windtalkers just doesn't feel like a John Woo film.
Don't get me wrong -- it's not a bad movie. In fact, compared to many of the duds that hit the box office during the summer season, Windtalkers is pretty good. But compared to Woo's excellent work in Hong Kong, and even his stronger US efforts, Windtalkers ends up feeling a bit flat.
As per most recent war movies, Windtalkers starts off with a bloody battle sequence. It is in here that we first notice the film's flaws. The editing and cinematograhy come off as uninspired and wooden. Obviously, the film-makers have tried to capture the feel of Saving Private Ryan, with lots of quick cuts and shaky hand-held camera work. But anyone who has seen John Woo's work knows these kinds of sequences are not one of his strong points, and when Woo goes to one of his cinematic stand-bys like slow-motion, the two styles tend not to mesh together very well.
US soldiers battle in Saipan. Image courtesy of IMDB.
There is little of the fuidity that characterizes Woo's "bullet ballets". I'm not saying that we should have seen Nic Cage diving with a pistol in each hand in slow-motion, but a little more cohesiveness in the chaotic battle scenes would have been helpful. James Horner's score also sounds awfully out of synch with the action at times, sometimes coming off as almost cheerful, even when people are screaming in agony.
Perhaps the film-makers knew the limitations of this scene and the battles that follow, and saw fit to try and keep the viewer's attention with lots of explosions and flying limbs. However, these additions come off as cheap filler, as very bad-looking CGI planes drop bombs and badly touched-up stock footage of ships shooting cannons are used. It still amazes me how films with huge budgets like this (projected at over $100 million) can still have special effects that look so cheap. The CGI, in particular, looks out of place and hurts the realistic effect the film-makers were obviously going for.
At any rate, one can only see so many flying body parts before they start to lose their shock effect. Honestly, by the time the tenth limb came jostling off, it just seemed gratiutious. To its' credit though, the battle scenes in Windtalkers are still fairly exciting stuff -- it's just that they went a bit overboard with them.
Adam Beach and Nicolas Cage. Image courtesy of IMDB.
For how badly the war scenes are done, the exposition in Windtalkers is much worse, and that is the film's ultimate downfall. The story (loosely based on real events) revolves around the Japanese/US conflict in World War II, with the Navy developing a new code based on the Navajo language. Several Navajos are sent into the field to test the code, where they are paired with a Marine whose job it is to protect the code at any costs. The pair in question for this film are Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) and Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage), who are put together as the US is making its' final assault on the island of Saipan.
This is pretty normal war movie stuff, and it could have turned out better if the script didn't use each and every cliche in the book. There's the hard-ass captain, the racist soldier who turns around after seeing Ben in action, the coward, the tough guy, and so on. There are also several very cliched scenes, like the one where all the guys get around a campfire to tell stories, or the soldier who gives a ring to another soldier to give to his wife.
When the script isn't predictable, it's almost laughable. One particularly bad scene has Ben going behind Japanese lines to secure a radio because "he looks like a Nip". Of course, the Japanese (who are really nothing more than moving targets in this movie) fall for it. This kind of stuff might work in a Die Hard-type movie, but in a "realistic" war film? Forget it.
Overall, Windtalkers just has a "been there, done that" feeling to it, especially since there have been so many war movies recently. This movie goes so much by the book that you can easily pick out who is going to live and die. One expects to turn their brains off a bit while watching a "summer blockbuster", but they shouldn't have to be brain-dead to really enjoy it. A little more thought and originality in the script would have gone a long way into making Windtalkers into more than just another war movie.
Nicolas Cage. Image courtesy of IMDB.
If the performances in Windtalkers would have been better, then perhaps the cliches would have been easier to tolerate. Sadly, though, Windtalkers is full of dull acting work. I truly think John Woo cannot direct acting in English. His Hong Kong works -- while melodramatic -- always had great undercurrents of emotion running through them, but his US movies have had almost none of this. The most blatant example of the poor directing is Adam Beach's performance.
I realize that he is supposed to be playing a naive kid, but Beach comes off more of a California surfer Keanu Reeves-type, and is incredibly annoying and unbelieveable in parts. Nicolas Cage once again does his whole "talk real slow, so it looks like you are actually saying something" schtick that I am getting really tired of; at least he doesn't try to do an accent ala Con Air. The supporting cast tries to do what they can with the script, but since almost all of them are killed, any attempts to flesh out their characters seems a bit hollow, and just tends to drag down an already long movie.
I never thought I would say this, but perhaps if some of the action was trimmed out of Windtalkers, it would have been a better movie. In particular, there is one battle scene towards the end that really adds nothing to the film except upping the already high body count. Recently, there has been a trend in Hollywood to release films which, in my opinion, are just too long for their own good.
Adam Beach. Image courtesy of IMDB.
There is something to be said for a bit of simplicity in film-making. We don't need to know every nuance of every character. Sometimes, straight-forward storytelling is the way to go -- not every movie can be Citizen Kane or should attempt to do so, and Windtalkers is a prime example. If the film-makers had trimmed out some of the "fat", it could have been a tight, well-paced war movie. But instead, Windtalkers becomes a bit too bloated and complex for its own good.
I think if John Woo ever wants to recapture at least some of the feel of his Hong Kong work, he really needs to start editing his movies again. Woo has said in interviews that the most vital thing he learned early on was the importance of editing, a skill which seems to diminish with every new film he does. Even if he does choose to forgo action in his future projects, Woo really needs to just back to basics, instead of trying to re-do the same kinds of things, when the end results are getting poorer as time goes on.
All in all though, despite its flaws, Windtalkers is still a fairly entertaining film if you don't go in expecting the best work John Woo has ever done. Everything is done well enough; I will be honest in saying that perhaps I expected too much from Woo. Taken on its' own merits, Windtalkers still manages to provide some solid, if unspectacular, enetertainment. It's just too bad that the last movie of Woo's career in action movies goes out with a whimper instead of a bang.
