To describe Hollywood war movies as a "mixed bag" would be an understatement. Every country with a functioning film industry and enough bloody history to make movies about will inevitably make a self-aggrandizing war movie, but Hollywood has honed it to an art form. Yet Hollywood is also full of what some may proudly self-identify as bleeding-heart liberals, who want to make anti-war films in some fashion, though how they go about it is varied and sundry. As such, Hollywood tends to go through cycles. Propaganda films were the money-makers during World War II; the cynical post-war years, however, weren't so thrilled at the prospect of another fight so soon after the last, especially when that fight ran the risk of someone hitting the big red button and everybody dying. By the time of Vietnam, most of Hollywood was profoundly against it, and economics suggested that trying to propagandize a broadly unpopular war was a money loser. When Hollywood did finally get around to talking about it, the war was just about over and Hollywood tended to care more about what the war did to the people who fought in it than the virtues of the war itself.
Then a couple of different things happened: one, the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy beach landings happened, reminding a nation torn apart by Clinton-era politics of its finest hour; Steven Spielberg released Saving Private Ryan, jamming the Hollywood propaganda/anti-war lever firmly at the propaganda end; and finally, crucially, terribly, 9/11 happened.
This is the story of We Were Soldiers, a profoundly post-Saving Private Ryan movie that doesn't know what it wants to be, except maybe really Catholic.
(In fairness, it was filmed entirely before 9/11, but I think it's clear that 9/11 had some impact on it during the post-production phase.)
Based on a book by retired Lieutenant General Hal Moore and war correspondent Joe Galloway, both of whom were present at the battle of Ia Drang, the first major American conflict of the Vietnam War, We Were Soldiers bounces around between Hal Moore and his men, their wives back on base, and, curiously enough, the North Vietnamese army themselves who were the main combatants in the fighting. The film is almost predominantly focused on Moore and his 7th Cavalry Regiment, with a lot of hash being made of their use of helicopters to quickly enter battle. The wives get comparatively fewer scenes, with most of their appearances in later acts centering entirely around a storyline where the Army had yet to set up its casualty notification service and were simply hiring taxi drivers to hand off the notifications, so Hal Moore's wife personally takes control of the situation and delivers notifications herself so it'd be less impersonal. I don't know how true that last detail is, but it is true that her complaints prompted the Army to establish the casualty notification teams that Americans are now familiar with.
Even less focus is given on the NVA troops, but their scenes are odd: their few moments that aren't them in direct combat are all about making them seem noble, even honorable. In combat, though, they're almost dehumanized, just faceless enemy to be stacked like cordwood.
We Were Soldiers is a Vietnam War movie that desperately wants to be a World War II movie. It's got the stirringly emotional music, a script that is as pithy as it is unsubtle, a fetishization of the inherent nobility of the war dead (up to and including a soldier's last words being "I'm glad I got to die for my country") and copious amounts of pain and suffering as made popular by Saving Private Ryan's blood-soaked Omaha Beach sequence. All of it is a frothy soup to manipulate the viewer with, its intention all too obvious give its release six months after 9/11. The attempt to sort of "both-sides" the conflict at least has some basis in Moore's post-war reconciliation with Nguyễn Hữu An, who commanded NVA forces at Ia Drang; while the more nationalistic might see this unlikely friendship as betraying the American troops who were killed in the conflict, at the end of the day opposing soldiers on the ground have much more in common with each other than they do the politicians who send them off to die. The survivors of Iwo Jima recognized this; it might have been the principal lesson of World War I (World War II happened in part because some people didn't get the memo.) So while it makes sense that they would include it, it's still weird to see in the context of post-9/11 jingoism, especially since it's still so jarring against the rest of the film.
I don't think I hate We Were Soldiers. It's very much a Mel Gibson joint, for better or worse; he and director Randall Wallace have been frequent collaborators, going back at least to Braveheart; We Were Soldiers has Wallace's hallmarks all over it. Gibson's weird TradCath tendencies also show through in the film, though Moore was at least also Catholic. But he's still an excellent actor, working alongside a cast well-versed in the language of war cinema. There's some genuinely good cinematography alongside hokier elements like dramatic slow-mo (I feel like the scene where they wash blood out of a helicopter would be more impactful if it was played at regular speed) and cheesy dialogue. For better or worse, it's a Hollywood war movie, with all that implies.
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