Windtalkers (2002)

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

There are already many reviews panning this film for simply being poorly made, badly acted, directed, and written, unbelievable, and gory and exploitative. A smaller number of reviews rightly consider it an insult to the memory of WWII veterans and more specifically Native vets and Navajo Code Talkers.I'd like to focus my review on its many historical inaccuracies. The biggest one is that its central premise is wrong and appallingly offensive, the false claim that Marines assigned to be bodyguards to Code Talkers were ordered to kill them rather than let them be taken prisoners. Not only is it utterly wrong, it's near impossible to imagine any Marine killing another Marine, or any Marine officer giving such an order. The claim ignores that some Code Talkers were, in fact, captured. The scriptwriter also seems to have not known that the famed code was not just two Navajos talking to each other. The original 28 Navajo Code Talkers composed their own complex code. Navajos who were not Code Talkers could not understand nor reveal that code.This code was never written down until after the war, committed solely to memory, a great intellectual feat. Imagine the main character in The Imitation Game never writing down a code he'd written, for example. The Navajo code was also never broken, nor were any transmissions ever incorrect. This was a huge strategic advantage, and the entire USMC in the Pacific Theater came to depend on the code.None of that is mentioned in the film. It would have been far more accurate and interesting than this film focused almost solely on Cage's fictional character. The Navajo Nation did make their own film, a documentary, True Whispers. See it instead.There are also many good books discussing the Code Talkers: Chester Nez's Code Talker (autobiography); Doris Paul's and Nathan Aseng's Navajo Code Talkers (two separate books); Jere Franco's Across the Pond; and my own book Medicine Bags and Dog Tags. Thanks for reading this far, Dr. Alton Carroll US, American Indian, and Latin American History Northern Virginia Community College

An incredibly realistic portrayal of what would happen if real soldiers fought like Call of Duty gamers! Don't bother to take cover or to form a firing line, just run & jump all over the battlefield like mad, shooting everything you see on the fly!! This movie even has humiliation kills, with a soldier knifing multiple armed enemies dead. And if you get killed, don't worry...er...oops, my bad. Unfortunately, in real combat there are no respawns, although the soldiers in this movie don't seem to realize that.What a movie!! In fact, Activision could learn some things from this movie on how to make their C.O.D. games more exciting!!Still, I give it 5 stars cause the action scenes in this movie are truly spectacular!

John Woo's Second World War film is, it has to be said, no equal for his 1980s classic HEROES SHED NO TEARS, which pushed the boundaries of cinema whilst at the same time offering a decent war-time actioner. WINDTALKERS reunites two of Woo's previous heroes – Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater – into what is a generally effective war film, chronicling the lives of those courageous men who risked and more often than not sacrificed their lives in battle against the enemy. Woo charts the expected friendships, post traumatic stress, injuries, and racism with moderate success, and he's helped by a good quality cast – especially the unknown Beach as the sympathetic Native American hero. Cage is introspective and tormented, which is something a little different from his usual characters; I liked him, and I also liked Slater's work here immensely.But things never change and, as usual, the cinematography and action sequences are what work best in this movie. Woo offers tons of bomb-laden action and doesn't shy away from the full horrors of warfare either – there are decapitations, throat-slittings, and limbs being blown off, all shown in unflinching detail. The film does become a little repetitive as it shows Cage machine-gunning dozens of the Japanese enemy but hey, COMMANDO was a repetitive movie and still stands as one of the action genre's best. The special effects are tremendous – especially the CGI bombers flying over the lush countryside – and war fans will be left happy with what is a pretty good genre effort, and pleasingly old-fashioned in this post-modern era.

To me, any war or sci-fi movie is a guaranteed winner. The construction of sets and direction or battles sequences and special effects all have to be at very high degrees in order to look even remotely real. In order for a war or sci-fi movie to be bad, the sets, special effects, and battles scenes all have to be poorly done. I have encountered some sci-fis that had poor CGI, but I have not yet seen a badly made war movie. Even heavily clichéd war movies have realistic violence and spectacular action sequences. I noticed Windtalkers got bad reviews, but everybody must admit it was good for what it had.Windtalkers is about a group of soldiers (including Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater, Mark Ruffalo, and Noah Emmerich) during World War II who must protect two Navajo soldiers from the Japanese, as they are the only ones that understand the codes in Navajo language. I am not a history guru nor an expert on any wars, so I very much enjoyed this. John Woo is an action master that did great action scenes and the acting is great by almost all. There was some bad acting, but most were good. Nicolas Cage was good, as this was before his string of bad movies like Ghost Rider and Bangkok Dangerous. He is our main character who is similar to Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now and Charlie Sheen in Platoon--all men are haunted by the horrors of war. The story is a little slow, but is sugarcoated with great action. Also, there are nice shots such as the opening scene as the camera hovers around mountains in the desert. The music, provided by legendary James Horner makes every little thing that much greater. What I saw critics and general reviews poke at the most was the fact that the Navajo soldiers were minor characters and that there was no "windtalking" or codecracking. That would be my biggest complaint. It is clear that this draws influence from previous war classics, mainly Platoon and Saving Private Ryan, and this may be inferior to those, but it is still and great flick.