Director’s Cut

Hollywood can sometimes be so enthused to cash in on a certain type of film many decent projects looking to explore a worthwhile subject topple under the weight of the cash-grabbing, money-hungry throng. Such is the case with Director John Woo’s Windtalkers, coming to DVD a third time on April 25 in this director’s cut. Though it’s sometimes overly melodramatic, this Nicolas Cage vehicle makes good use of its characters to forge an intriguing story about Navajo code talkers, and the presumed military practice ...f protecting the code and not the man. Cage plays Joe Enders, a soldier with a death wish and a lot of survivor’s guilt for having made it through battle-after-battle, only to receive another medal, while all of his friends die around him. He has grown to hate the medals because they remind him of this fact, and it seems like his whole mission is to die in battle with honor… not to go on living in a world so terrible that it welcomes the horrors of war. Then, he receives a peculiar mission: the U.S. has found luck with a form of code based on the Navajo language. It’s vital the Japanese do not get their hands on any of the Navajo code talkers, and Enders must do everything in his power to protect the code… even if that means taking the life of a fellow soldier to do it.

Such a situation lends itself to great drama; however, this is still a John Woo film, and his enslavement to self-imposed convention does cause the film to have a few problems. For one, I would like to see Woo – just once – shoot an entire film, edit, and release it, without the use of one slow-motion moment. The reason for this: if the technique is an option, he will abuse it with zero regard – or knowledge of – having done so. After seeing film-after-film of his resort to this overused tactic, I’d say it’s time he laid off. He has a good story, and characters viewers can get emotionally involved with – so why does each fallen soldier have to take an hour to hit the ground? Also, just about every war movie cliché there is turns up at some point, whether it be the bigoted soldier with a change of heart, or the loving husband telling his buddy to make sure his wife gets his wedding band “should anything happen.” (On a side note, any time a soldier says a variation of this in a war film, you know “should anything happen” actually means “when something happens.”) Lastly, there is the clunky dialogue, mostly given to Adam Beach as the featured code talker Enders must protect. With these things said, something intrinsic about the film still manages to hold everything together in a respectable narrative. And I think whatever it is, the stellar cast consisting of Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater, Noah Emmerich, Mark Ruffalo, and Jason Isaacs, has something to do with it.