We Were Soldiers

(Randall Wallace, USA, 2002)

Of all the cinema's popular genres, I find war films the hardest to watch and discuss. And in the wake of the September 11 attacks it is especially hard to watch American war films.

No form of filmmaking is closer to a country's official propaganda line. It doesn't matter whether it's an old war being depicted – always at stake is how we are meant to feel about the possibility of war right now.

For many years, movies have been torn between pro-war and anti-war impulses. And yet even the most militant anti-war film faces a big problem: its intended message can be so easily subverted by the violent, rousing spectacle of war itself.

War films shove their audience into many contradictory positions as we watch them: revulsion, outrage, excitement, despair, patriotism and anti-patriotism.

Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers depicts an early episode from the Vietnam War, a battle in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. Like Black Hawk Down (2002), this film deliberately picks an episode in American history that is not in the least a glorious pinnacle of the nation's military efforts.

There are tragic errors and miscalculations in this campaign, dubious priorities on the part of those who survey the field and give the orders from a safe distance. Where the compassion of this film flows to is very clear – to those who must stand and fight.

We Were Soldiers is a long way from angry '70s films about the madness of war, like Apocalypse Now (1979). There are no fanatics, psychotics or even rabid patriots here. All the men under the command of Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) are young, innocent, anxious to please. They come to fight (as a voice-over tells us) not for their flag or their country, but each other.

The film is all about family: the family formed by the soldiers, and their blood families back home at base camp. Moore becomes the supremely benevolent super-father: to his kids, to his men, and seemingly to children everywhere.

This is a film that gets you in. It's hard not to be moved by the depiction of loss and grieving. It is as if Wallace wanted to answer some of the standard criticisms of war films. He gives a lot of time to women and children, for instance, playing down any macho fantasies of blood-brotherhood. He dispenses with the odious movie convention whereby the enemy – in this case, the Vietnamese – is merely a faceless, soulless, collective killing-machine. He gestures toward the futility, in political terms, of this conflict, and emphasises the suffering that it caused, sometimes recalling Terrence Malick's great war film The Thin Red Line (1998).

A handy way of distinguishing between films in this genre: how do they depict the American flag? Malick eschewed it, Black Hawk Down brandished it – and We Were Soldiers, taking an each-way bet, features a tiny, almost derisory flag replica, eagerly photographed by hungry journalists and commented on wryly by the Vietnamese army leader.

But how far does Wallace go in criticising the American war machine? Or are these criticisms really just token elements, a kind of sleight of hand which serves to disguise what is, finally, the same old, jingoistic call to arms? The character of a war reporter and photographer, Galloway (Barry Pepper), seems to be the director's alter ago: he sees the human truth and tragedy of it all, and brings that message back home. But Galloway's vision would seem to be selective and rather romanticising (pointedly, he is not shown shooting the most horrifying miscarriage of the campaign), just like Wallace's.

The film gradually guides us toward cheering American victory (note Moore's jokey soliloquy beseeching God to ignore the "heathen prayers" of the foreign enemy), while it denies real humanity to those on the other side. We are only allowed to glimpse the mirroring family lives and sufferings of these anonymous characters (as with the detail of a Vietnamese soldier's personal diary) – a touch which, troublingly, manages to be both poignant and evasive at once.

And as for truly criticising why this war or any war should be fought at all, forget it – this is a film of pathos; and pathos too, I'm afraid, can also be propaganda.

MORE Wallace: The Man in the Iron Mask

© Adrian Martin April 2002