Stars: Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater, Adam Beach, Noah Emmerich, Peter Stormare, Mark Ruffalo, Brian Van Holt, Frances O'Connor, Roger Willie

Director: John Woo

Summary: Set during World War II, this is the story of two US Marines who are assigned the task of protecting Navajo Marines. The Navajo have been training to use a secret military code based on their own language. Will the Japanese be able to break the code...

Set during World War II, this is the story of two US Marines who are assigned the task of protecting Navajo Marines. The Navajo have been training to use a secret military code based on their own language. Will the Japanese be able to break the code. WINDTALKERS begins quietly with widescreen aerial shots of clouds that gradually clear to reveal the beautiful mesas of Monument Valley. A bus collects Navajo volunteers Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) and Charlie Whitehorse (Roger Willie). It's 1943, and the U.S. has developed an indecipherable secret military code based on the Navajo language. Yahzee and Whitehorse are to be trained as code talkers. Then John Woo's Pacific war film erupts into violence, with a savage battle that has one survivor, Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage). Badly wounded and feeling guilty at the loss of his companions, Joe recuperates in Hawaii where he is helped by a sympathetic nurse (Frances O'Connor). Joe disguises his hearing loss and he is promoted as Yahzee's battlefield bodyguard. Ordered to protect the code at all times, Joe must prevent Yahzee from being captured. At first, Yahzee and Whitehorse, whose bodyguard is Ox Henderson (Christian Slater), are subjected to prejudice particularly from Rogers (Noah Emmerich). But when the unit is shipped to Saipan, the Marines begin to appreciate the code talkers. Director Woo has created a powerful drama. The visceral battle sequences are strikingly filmed and there is fine acting from Cage, Beach, Willie, Slater, Emmerich, and Frances O'Connor, who portrays the poignancy of love in uncertain times.

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John Woo's reputation as the world's best action director hits a major breakdown with Windtalkers, an overlong, over-silly, overwritten and overacted entry in the current American craze for war movies that combine extreme patriotism with hordes of Yankee extras getting bloodily cut to pieces until a final uplifting victory. US Marine Nicolas Cage--with a scarred ear and a fed-up look--is given the job of looking after Navajo Adam Beach, whose complex language is the basis of a code being used to fool the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II. His orders are to protect not Beach but the code, (including orders to kill Beach if it looks like capture is imminent) which makes for an uneasy progress from hatred-at-first-sight through growing respect to agonised male bonding.

From an interesting historical footnote, Woo and his collaborators spin out an unlikely and repetitive platoon story, with an all-cliché bunch of grunts spitting out hardboiled dialogue between the noise and violence. The Woo touch is evident; from the astonishing pullback from a butterfly over bloodied waters to the thick of hand-to-hand fighting, but too many of the battle scenes are just more explosions-and-body-parts along the same lines of Saving Private Ryanand Black Hawk Down.

On the DVD:Windtalkerscontains an 11-minute TV filler making-of featurette; footage of the entire cast (except Cage) romping through the research process at Actors' Bootcamp; plus on-set diaries, i.e., B-roll footage of the crew working on four big action scenes. Of the two commentary tracks, the first offers a lot of mutual stroking with the occasional insight from Cage and Slater, the other offers Navajo actor Roger Willie and real-life codetalker/technical advisor Albert Smith. The language options, for soundtrack and subtitles, are English and (oddly) Czech. --Kim Newman

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	2002
Release Date:	February 10, 2003
Runtime:	128 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	22896 D V D R
Keywords:	War, English, Windtalkers
Genre:	War