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100One of the best war movies of the past 20 years.
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88"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. We Were Soldiers doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories.
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88The in-your-face style of We Were Soldiers results in a suspenseful, intense, and exhausting cinematic experience.
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The film's soldiers are more the mom-and-apple-pie, God-fearing lads of World War II movies than the cynical grunts of "Platoon" (1986) and "Full Metal Jacket" (1987).
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83A powerful experience, filled with dazzlingly executed action sequences that generally avoid the rock music and drugged-out conventions of "Apocalypse Now," and even exude a certain core of humanity.
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80This is a good film; strong, honest, strikingly photographed (by Dean Semler) and appropriately devastating.
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80Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight.
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80You don't really watch the film; you survive it.
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80Gibson may get top billing, but it's Sam Elliott who steals all the scenes. As Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley, a man who fires with his own .45 revolver rather than the standard M-16 rifles, he's full of hilariously colorful comments.
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80It succeeds where its recent predecessor miserably fails because it demands that you suffer the dreadfulness of war from both sides. That might not make it a milestone, but it's a hell of an improvement.
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75Probably the best thing you can say about We Were Soldiers is that it does justice to an awful conflict.
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75We Were Soldiers works. The action is well-staged and realistic. And Gibson is a commanding presence in a role that has more shadings and stature than his usual action heroes.
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75This also is the rare combat movie that deals substantially with mourning widows on the home front.
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75It isn't afraid to genuflect to heroes and heroism and has everything it needs to connect with the resurgence of patriotism after Sept. 11.
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75The writer-director bestows honor -- generously, apolitically -- not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too.
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70Isn't a great movie; I'd say it's barely a good one. But it's a war movie that at least acknowledges the distinction between macho and masculinity, always putting the dignity of the latter over the bluster of the former.
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70The battle, expertly shot by Dean Semler, captures the chaos of guerrilla warfare paralleled in "Black Hawk Down" and gives the film a scarring documentary realism.
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70Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.
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70Manages to evoke a complex series of reactions. It both frustrates with its unrelenting sentimentality and impresses with the overwhelming physicality of its combat sequences. These in turn are so powerful they take on a life of their own, sending a message that is probably quite opposite to the one the filmmakers intended.
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70A powerful and moving experience -- once it overcomes its clunky, badly written and clichéd first act.
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70It's square, stiff, and in places cheesy; it's also authentically harrowing -- and blood-showered, blood-drowned.
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70Gibson has the closest thing to a John Wayne part that anyone's played since the Duke himself rode into the sunset, and he plays it damn well.
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63We Were Soldiers feels strangely irrelevant -- a well-acted, well-crafted and inconsequential visit to woefully familiar territory.
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63One admires Wallace's intentions while despairing at his execution. Yet as clumsily directed as his film is, it inspires compassion for Moore, his men and their foes. And in that, there is merit.
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63If the action is graphic and immediate, other aspects of the movie are inexcusably bad.
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63Some scenes achieve dramatic greatness and emotions that reach to the heart's core. Almost as many have the tinny ring of a badly counterfeited coin.
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60Fitfully effective as a battle movie, and Mel Gibson does his rugged best to take center stage without seeming to. But the movie is self-righteous in a way that's frequently unseemly.
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60Leaves all the real risks to the young warriors at Ia Drang and collects easy dividends on their bravery. In the end, it honors them by paying tribute to itself.
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60While the movie is dreadfully clumsy or sentimental around the edges, there's no denying the strength of Mr. Gibson's performance or the power of the savage combat, a 90-minute sequence that's even more graphic than the horrific firefight in Somalia in "Black Hawk Down."
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50The movie never generates the authority it needs to be all that it can be.
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50Who these brave men were and why they fought disappears under the usual clichés, while the astounding acts of courage that occurred at Ia Drang are lost to the dust and din.
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50Ultimately, though, We Were Soldiers fails to bring as much to the table as it at first seems it might.
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50It was a hellish encounter, as well as a portent of the 10 years to come, and as such deserves far better than Mel Gibson's glower and writer-director Randall Wallace's guns-and-Moses platitudes.
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50Yet as art this revisionist movie, grimly effective as some of it is, doesn't hold a candle to the remarkable cycle of pictures in the late seventies and the eighties which captured the discordant character of a tragic war. [11 Mar 2002, p. 92]
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50Though the questionable motives and bad planning of offscreen characters who far outrank Gibson make it difficult to take at face value one soldier's last words -- "I'm glad I could die for my country" -- some viewers will, which may be as the filmmakers intended.
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38It's a shame that the book "We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young" fell into the hands of writer-director Randall Wallace ("Braveheart"), a filmmaker who wouldn't recognize subtlety and understatement if they were to attack him in the street.
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25Rarely have Gibson's tears seemed more fictional than in this supposedly authentic account of a historical event that's far too tragic to merit such superficial treatment.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 34 out of 40
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Mixed: 1 out of 40
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Negative: 5 out of 40
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The action never stops.
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GrahamM.7
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johnh8Well done & affecting, without major flaws.