Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Never rises above war movie formula in spite of good acting
Starring Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater, this is a WW2 film about two marines assigned to protect two Navajo marines who use their native language as a code. Adam Beach and Roger Willie, who are actually two Canadian Indians, play the roles of the Navajos. It seems like an interesting twist on a formula war film. And it certainly is. But the film never does rise above the formula in spite of excellent acting. John Woo, who's known for special effects, directs it. This makes for great battle scenes that are easy to follow. It spite of all the gunfire and hand grenade explosions, we always know where the central characters are. The real story, however, is about the hard choices that Nicholas Cage has to make. He's a fine actor and he does it well. But isn't this film supposed to be about the Navajos? Why then, did the film focus on the white actors? The plot seemed implausible also. Two Navajos were assigned to one small unit in the Solomon Islands. As the Japanese are dug in there, they wouldn't have needed to speak in code to call airpower to the big guns. It was obvious from the start that this was a Hollywood version of what could have been a really fine film. There were so many inauthentic touches throughout that I found myself somewhat amused. The film did move quickly, however, and it did hold my interest. But so what? If the story seems wrong, the finest acting can't save it. Therefore, in spite of Nicholas Cage being one of my favorite actors, I can't recommend this film.
Rating:  - Realism and pain
I've seen hundreds of war movies over the years. "Windtalkers" stopped me in my tracks. To my surprise, it was actually painful to watch in its realism. No, I haven't been to war myself -- but my husband, a combat veteran of Vietnam, agrees that John Woo, the director, had caught the tone and the experience of combat perfectly. Yes, the blood and horror, but also the fatalism, and the heroism, and the loyalty to your buddies, and the job of being just a good Marine doing what you know has to be done. Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach and Christian Slater cared a lot about these roles, and it comes through. Seldom have I found I cared enough about a movie character to shed real tears for him or her; in this movie, that was easy. The characters develop very believably and the Navajo mysticism adds a fascinating twist to the plot. They said if you haven't seen "Saving Private Ryan", you don't know what the landing at Normany was like -- well, if you haven't seen "Windtalkers", you don't know what the Marines went through fighting from island to island in WWII. They're right -- some things really are worth dying for.
Rating:  - A MOVING BUT FLAWED PICTURE
Windtalkers manages to stuff almost every hoary war-film cliche into its two hours. We have the "hold on to this ring and give it to my wife in case I'm killed" speech, the wide-eyed soldier's flashbacks to a gory battle, the "I can't take this anymore" harangue by a soldier to his commander, the American-soldier-gives-chocolate-to-a-young-child-of-the-enemy scene, the racist soldier who has his life saved by the minority character and then becomes enlightened, and so on. On top of that, some of the action is so ludicrous that it could just as well have come from a Rambo film.Why then does this film get four stars? Well, damned if it doesn't bring a tear to your eye and a lump in your throat at the end. This is because for all the absurdity and melodrama in the movie, there is a real chemistry between Nicholas Cage and the likeable Adam Beach. When one of the character dies, you know you're being manipulated to blubber, but it works. From the title and previews you might expect that the Navajo cryptographers are at the center of this story, but that is just a gimmick. Yes, Adam Beach gets plenty of screen time, but generally speaking he is used less to illuminate the story of the "windtalkers" than to be a sunny foil against Cage's dark humors and to provide Woo opportunities to make some fairly banal if well-intentioned observations about racism. I for one left the theater wishing that the story of the windtalkers had been more integral to the plot. The action sequences are well done, but Woo plows no new ground after the breakthroughs in staging battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan and in Blackhawk Down. I wish that he had not diluted the realism of the film by injecting elements of action films and martial arts films in the battle scenes, but this is Woo, after all.
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