On actual combat footage
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US Marines on Tarawa, November 1943, and Nicolas Cage as a Marine on Saipan in Windtalkers (2002)
One of the movie reviews I’ve returned to again and again is Stephen Hunter’s review of the 2002 war film Windtalkers. This film, which purports to tell the story of US Marine Navajo code talkers during the Battle of Saipan, is a turkey. It fails on many levels. Hunter faults it primarily for its over-the-top, balletically choreographed, fireball and stunt-heavy action: “the movie’s stylizations . . . seem singularly wrong. . . . [I]t’s almost an opera, declamatory and dramatic, and the body language has more to do with dance than actuality. It’s highly theatricalized and to a certain extent martial-articized.”
In the middle of this criticism, Hunter pauses to deliver this aside, a passage that has stuck with me for twenty years now, contrasting the film with reality:
I am always amazed at actual combat footage: The soldiers appear so informal and undramatic. They never seem to be in any heroic poses; their minds, if you can infer from their body postures, are concerned with very small things, like “Let’s get over there” or “Let’s get down” or “Gosh, I wish I wasn’t here.” They are beyond rhetoric or exhortation. They look sad and weary, not charged with blood lust. They look like the homeless, and in a sense they are, for whoever would be at home on a battlefield?
I’ve had occasion to think about this many times since (it crosses my mind at least once with the release of any new war film regardless of conflict or period), but especially so with the regular release of combat footage from Ukraine. Witness this trench combat between a group of Russian raiders and Ukrainian defenders as captured by drone. Now watch Nicolas Cage destroy a bunker in Windtalkers. The latter seems insulting by comparison, not only to an audience’s intelligence but to the men for whom the film was marketed as a tribute.
The best war films capture some of what Hunter describes above through a combination of bluntness and understatement. I’m all for making sure the costumes, equipment, and jargon are correct (Hunter rightly credits Windtalkers with getting a few persnickety details right). But without capturing the attitude of real combat—weary, methodical, narrowly focused, “informal and undramatic,” and “beyond rhetoric or exhoration”—a war film will still wear its artificiality right where everyone can see it.
The combat footage still in the banner above comes from With the Marines at Tarawa, the combat documentary par excellence. Watch it at the National Archives YouTube channel here for a twenty-minute example of what Hunter’s talking about.
