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 Windtalkers (2002)Rated: R for pervasive graphic war violence, and for language. Runtime: 134 mins. Director: John Woo Writer: John Rice Joe Batteer Tagline: Honor was their code. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, PeterStormare ....complete cast Genre: War/Action/Drama Most memorable quote: "Is it English? It sounds like they're talking under water."
Review by Frank Wilkins
In the beginning of World War II, the Japanese were able to crack virtually every code language used by the allies. From 1942 to 1945, The United States Marine Corps created a secret communication code based upon the Navajo language. Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its syntax and tonal qualities make it unintelligible without extensive exposure and training. By May of 1942, the Marine Corps began recruiting and training Navajos into their ranks as code talkers. Kept under wraps until the 1960's and not recognized by the US Government until 1992, the story of these Navajo code talkers is riveting and deserves to be told to the American people and the world in a respectful and gracious manner. After watching Windtalkers I actually felt sorrow that their story was told in such a disrespectful way. Windtalkers starts in the Arizona desert as the Navajo soldiers bid farewell to their loved ones while boarding busses on the way to war. We then meet Sergeant Joe Enders (Nicholas Cage) who, after losing all of his men in a battle in The Solomon Islands, is a psychological mess as he recovers from his wounds in a Hawaii hospital. Segeant Enders is later informed of his new mission, to protect Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), a Navajo code talker during the forthcoming invasion of Saipan. The directive, although purposefully left vague, was to protect the code at all costs. In one of the few script nuances, it was not made clear whether or not this directive meant to kill a code talker if captured. Disappointingly, director John Woo clearly made the conscious effort to focus his attention more on the depiction of battle than the story of the Navajos but he didn't even get that part right. Many of the battle scenes were overdone, melodramatic and heavily laden with pyrotechnics. I quite often felt like I was watching a Steven Segal action flick with explosions in the background as silhouetted figures fly through the air, rather than a war movie. While I know that all of our men and women who fought in that war were brave, they weren't stupid. How many soldiers will jump into the line of fire to rescue a fallen comrade when three or four have fallen doing so in front of your eyes? While his intentions were to give a graphic realism of battle with blood spurting and limbs flying, it is a bit ironic that closer attention was not paid to the technical aspects of warfare. A hand grenade of the time was a fairly lethal antipersonnel weapon but was rather ineffective when used against tanks and heavy armor. Yet they were depicted many times as capable of disabling tanks with a fiery explosion that was way more than what could come from a device of this type. I found myself wanting to know more about the code talkers, the code itself and what the Japanese thought of it. Windtalkers is more about Sergeant Enders' hardships than it is about the Navajo Code Talkers. We did see a brief scene of the Japanese listening to the code saying, "Is it English? It sounds like they are talking underwater". But the attention would quickly return to a scene of Sergeant Enders shooting his pistol three or four times, killing at least six Japanese soldiers dead at his feet or firing hundreds of rounds from his Thompson machine gun wiping out an entire Japanese platoon. While there was a shallow attempt at character development, it was more focused on Sergeant Enders and his guilt than it was on Ben Yahzee and his colleague Charlie Whitehorse (Roger Willie). At times, Windtalkers engages, but always finds a way to step forward and fall flat with its formulaic predictability, lack of character depth and unrealistic depictions of military battle. By the war's end about 450 Navajos served as Marines and the notion of the Navajos' heroism has been put before the public, but we'll have to wait to hear their real story. We might forget that they were Americans who enlisted in the Marine Corps to fight for their country doing what they could to help defeat the enemy. And by the way, the Navajo code was never broken by the Japanese. It eventually became declassified under Department of Defense Directive 5200.9. Frank Wilkins Read viewer comments here Read or post comments about this film on the Screen formats: Widescreen Anamorphic 2.35:1; Full Screen 1.33:1 Subtitles: English; French; Spanish; Closed-captioned. Sound: English: Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1; French: Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround Other Features: Color; interactive menus; scene access; trailers. 
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