Movie Review: Windtalkers

Windtalkers (2002) 

Directed by John Woo 

Written by John Rice

Starring Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Stormare, Christian Slater, Noah Emmerich

Release Date June 14th, 2002 

Published June 13th, 2002 

War is hell and now so is watching war movies. The drive towards more realistic violence have made for some very hard-to-watch films. Saving Private Ryan set the standard, followed by films like Enemy At The Gates, We Were Soldiers, Black Hawk Down and most recently John Woo’s Windtalkers. Though it purports to be about Navajo Indian code talkers, Windtalkers as they were called, the film is actually about violence and war movie clichés. 

Nicolas Cage stars in Windtalkers as Joe Enders, a borderline crazy marine. When we are first introduced to Joe he is attempting to hold a position that is, to the rest of his platoon, already lost. Joe’s entire platoon is killed but he survives and returns to battle with a new assignment. Joe is to ship out to Saipan where he and his platoon will protect the military's new secret weapon, a pair of Navajo Indians whose native language is used as code to transmit Japanese troop movements without the Japanese being able to spy on it. 

The Navajo soldiers are Ben (Adam Beach) and Whitehorse (Roger Willie). Rounding out the platoon is your typical cast of recognizable character actors whose names become interchangeable though their faces are semi-recognizable. Christian Slater, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Stormare, and Noah Emmerich, amongst others, are the interchangeable soldiers.

Director John Woo is the absolute wrong choice to direct this film. With his penchant for stylistic violence, Woo forgets that the story is the code talkers and not video game style pyro technics. Adam Beach and Roger Willie get the short shrift from a story that would be better served by a smaller budget and a more centralized script. If the film would have focused more on the development of the code and the Navajo characters the story would be far more interesting. Of course it would have been far less commercial.

My guess is that the original story was about the code talkers but producers with dollar signs in their eyes got a hold of it, signed on big name star Cage and big name director Woo and put aside the real story in favor of one that played up Cage’s character. Once again, typical Hollywood greed ruins a good story. Navajo Code talkers were real, and the code they created helped the U.S win the war in the Pacific. There is a really good story to be told about them, Windtalkers is not it. -