>>> Summary of Opinion

Randall Wallace delivers another good-looking movie with strong war action and lovingly photographed Huey's in action. It's not quite as visceral or involving as would have been intended but it's heart feels in the right place.

>>> Plot Teaser

A recreation of the first battle of the newly-created helicopter infantry division in Vietnam. The battle is astonishingly fierce as they land just yards from a 4,000-strong battlation of highly-professional Vietnamese troops and the battle rages for days. On the ground, Colonel Hal Moore repeatedly disobeys orders to return as he stays with his men and fights until the battle is over. He promised that he would be the first on the battlefield and the last to leave.

>>> Principal cast and crew

• Director: Randall Wallace
◦ Mel Gibson: Lt. Col. Hal Moore
◦ Madeleine Stowe: Julie Moore
◦ Greg Kinnear: Maj. Bruce Crandall
◦ Sam Elliott: Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley
◦ Chris Klein: 2nd Lt. Jack Geoghegan
◦ Keri Russell: Barbara Geoghegan
◦ Barry Pepper: Joe Galloway
◦ Don Duong: Lt. Col. Nguyen Huu An
◦ Ryan Hurst: Sgt. Ernie Savage
• Producer: Randall Wallace
• Writer (Original Book) "We Were Soldiers Once… and Young": Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.)
• Writer (Original Book): Joseph L. Galloway
• Writer (Screenplay): Randall Wallace

>>> More comment

Randall Wallace has delivered a good-looking war movie that is strongest when not attempting to make the moments of war generate greater impact. Sometimes when he tries, it works. More often, it feels clumsy.

He paces the film quite well and, impressively, doesn't spend too much time in the boot-camp and slow build-up segments. We get to the battle at just the right moment and the realization that the battle is going to be a nasty, all-out one is well conveyed.

He also doesn't make the mistake of having blokes blub in your face and with his star Mel Gibson delivers a strong emotional scene where Mel's crying is shown only from behind. This really is the only way blokes crying should be done on-screen. Blokes crying generally look like they're laughing but with the back turned, the impact of the emotion is not undermined by the fact that the hero looks like he's wetting himself with mirth. Clint Eastwood also did it with "The Bridges of Madison County" (to the best of my knowledge, the only time to date that Eastwood has cried on screen and it's devastating when he does it).

Mel's heart doesn't really seem to be in this project (his accent, particularly, appears and disappears) but he is still a compelling and charismatic lead. A 90% Gibson is still better than just about anyone else in the business. He has a strong emotional scene at the close of the movie during a conversation with Barry Pepper's journalist (which is also very well-handled by director Randall Wallace). He also gets a super-cool Six Million Dollar Man slo-mo charge in which he looks fantastic.

Sam Elliot does his I've-had-three-brillo-pads-for-breakfast thing. One suspects he milks grizzly bears for his morning coffee. Madeleine Stowe is good as are all the major players.

>>> Clichés present and correct. Sir!

The standard war movie clichés are trotted out. So American soldiers get a quiet death despite supposedly being under intense machine-gun-battery fire.

They also do the dropped-to-their-knees thing even though a person who is shot simply collapses or topples over straight (for proof, see any fainting-at-the-wedding video on "You've Being Framed" or similar camcorder shows).

The violence is also spectularly gory (one Vietnamese gets a particularly impressive and gory slo-mo shot through the head) whereas watching any American cop-video show will know that gunshots frequently do not produce luxurious spurts of blood. Surprisingly it is almost only the violence that gets this movie is 15 BBFC classification. There are no English sexual swear words (a handful are in French at the beginning) that I could detect in the movie and no sexual content.

Partway through the battle, the American soldiers are told to use "one-shot-one-kill" tactics. Surely they would be doing that anyway. No-one gets taught to 'shoot loads, kill no-one'. Perhaps I'm being mean and he was cancelling an earlier tactic of covering and flanking fire.

The combat soldier (Greg Kinnear's helicopter pilot) blowing up at an obnoxious pencil-pusher and pulling a gun on his own countryman. See how stressful war is. On the same thought, Greg also gets the pretend-to-vomit scene (see how stressful war is) where he splutters about one teaspoonful of liquid out of his mouth. Haven't Hollywood filmmakers seen anyone vomit? It is a spectacular and unmistakable sight and is almost never done justice in the movies. I want to see distance records and the violent spasmodic convulsions it takes to eject the contents of your stomach through a metre of throat and mouth passages. But I never do. Boo.

>>> Rising to the occasion

The mention of God in war movies is not unusual but this movie deserves praise for highlighting that fact that both sides would be praying to a supreme deity, both sides would have faith that that deity would be protecting them and ensuring them of victory. Gibson's character then highlights the ridiculousness of this situation by then asking God to help him slaughter as many of the enemy as possible. Whether this was to intentionally highlight the nonsense of religion's involvement in war or just as a throwaway gag is not known.

Nice to see that the Vietnamese are not portrayed as savage village idiots but as soldiers every bit as intelligent and professional as the American 'heroes'. Also good to see is the acknowledgement that even though the movie may make you think the American's won the battle, they actually lost it. They gained no ground and lost a lot of soldiers and were forced into retreat.

Director Randall Wallace also provides a cool quiet-then-loud scene where some American soldiers whisper instructions into their radio. It's night-time. You can hardly hear them even with the sound turned up. What are they communicating? The answer arrives in the form of a flare that lights up the area and shows a load of highly surprised Vietnamese soldiers exposed by the bright light. He uses the same group later as Vietnamese soldiers actually tread between the camoflauged American soldiers lying on the floor before they open fire.

Another good scene is where Madeline Stowe's Mrs. Mel Gibson gets understandably upset when a your-husband-has-died telegram delivery man calls by, not to deliver a your-husband-has-died telegram, but to ask directions. I'm do not know how accurate it was for Mrs. Mel Gibson subsequently to be delivering the your-husband-has-died telegrams but it was a well-handled and unusual scene.

Don't think I've seen soldiers wazzing on a mortar launcher before either.

The napalm strikes near the climax of the battle are nicely done with the really cool effect of air vortices in the smoke. Ridley Scott used the same effect after he blew the truck up in "Thelma and Louise" and it looks equally cool here.

Even though you can guess it was going to happen, pulling the skin and muscle off Jimmy's legs has genuine visceral impact and his special effects make-up is spectacular and highly disturbing.

>>> Shot in the foot

The laundromat scene ("whites only") makes you wish you'd brought some rotten fruit to pelt the screen with. Clumsy is not a strong enough word. It would have been so much better if the scene ended with the realization. Instead, a load of empathizing and how-I-keep-my-self-respect speeches take over.

Nightmare celtic male soloist over the final assault which spoils the rather cool synthesized music that appears in the middle of it and, frankly, spoils the entire scene. Why is it celtic? Because Mel's in it?

>>> Technical merits and demerits

A number of the digital animation effects are, frankly, a bit rubbish given that this is a major film starring an A-list actor. They don't convey the weight or natural flying gait of a helicopter and tend to stick out a bit compared to the real ones used to much greater effect in a number of very cool scenes. I do like me helicopters. The (I guess) CG jet dropping napalm suffers from a similar problem and generating a realistic sense of weight, speed and movement. They appear to have used real propeller planes but CG'd the jet planes. Commendably, you can't tell whether they generally had half-a-dozen helicopters or they multi-pass composited a single helicopter.

Missile and bullet tracer fire are better done but are also not quite right. And, to be harsh, guns don't generally have muzzle flash in real life but, as an audience, you'd feel a bit cheated if it wasn't there.

A much better use of special effects technology is in a scene where a soldier dies and we look into his eyes as his iris expands due to the muscles relaxing control.

There's also a great scene where a soldiers get a close-up hit from a incendiary grenade in super slow motion which looks incredibly dangerous and, as bits of his face are on fire from burning material stuck to him and he has another soldier cutting bits of his face off with a knife, one presumes this was accomplished using a mixture of live-action special effects and digital animation. It works really well.

The full-scale live special effects are terrific. Of special note is the helicopter crash which feels full-scale (and was created by dropping a real helicopter, cool) and highly dangerous.

As a general rule, the use of digital effects to make scenes look larger doesn't, for me, tend to work. Computer graphics make things look small for some reason and it is the exception that a Hollywood digital visual effect is convincingly spacious. For example, what was the last time you played a video game and came up to the end-of-level boss and genuinely thought "Wow! That guy's huge." Or the last time you stood on top of a cliff or wall in a video game and looked down and got anything like the feeling when looking straight down out of your own bedroom window. Digital effects are outstanding at the small details but are still struggling when it comes to convincingly delivering panoramic viewscapes and conveying the sheer size of things.

>>> DVD

The DVD menu takes ten years before you can select an option and this is rubbish. Once there, the menu is fine with clear options.

Picture is anamorphic and generally pretty good with an absence of artefacting in the background of dark scenes but is also on occasion noticeably soft. A reasonable encoding job.

Sound encoding is rather more impressive in places with strong use of the surrounds in the necessary places (director Randall Wallace likes helicopters flying around and so do I) and good punch to the violence.

The making-of documentary is entitled "Getting It Right" and opens with a surprisingly affecting piece of archive footage with the real Colonel Hal Moore struggling to come up with the words to describe the men under his command. He comes up with one, "tremendous", but is so emotional he can't elucidate as he clearly wants to. This is the beginning of an above-average making-of doc which doesn't outstay its welcome. It won't make you want to go out and make a movie like the best ones but it does convey the feeling of authentic effort in the production. Unfortunately, the rubbish celtic solo turns up here aswell. The doc is presented in 4:3 format and encoding artefacts are frequently visible. The movie clips therein are sensibly presented in letterbox format so your TV won't be switching between 16:9 and 4:3 constantly.

There are promotional materials for the movie in the form of TV, theatre and radio spots. I didn't watch these.

There are deleted scenes which I also didn't watch.

Director Randall Wallace provides a commentary track. He starts by telling us that the bugler who gets his throat shot out at the start is his son and continues to deliver a generous commentary. It will only be of interest to people interested in the movie and movie-making and holds no entertainment value.