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Rating:  - Boo for Woo
Windtalkers: a story of a young Navajo Codetalker, fighting on the battlegrounds of Saipan. Windtalkers: Woo's pathetic attempt to elevate Native Americans from Hollywood's Tonto. So, why give this movie three stars? The actors in this movie were superb.
Newcomer, Adam Beach (and his gorgeous smile) did a fine job holding his own against co-star Nicholas Cage (whose slight eye and body movements were underscored by a terrible score). Lovable Mark Ruffalo zips in and out of scenes, provoding a strong character you pray makes it home alive. There are also numerous cameos and small roles given to the old-timers like Peter Stormare and Jason Isaacs add to the movie's strong cast.
While it is obvious that Woo had military consutants, he cheapened it with Hollywood melodrama. Over-the-top war scenes with rolling while simutaneously shooting, arm flailing deaths, and the curses at comrades between gurgling mouthfulls of blood. The abrupt closeups throughout the movie add wonderful cheese; it was perhaps the best special effect in the whole movie! The score's cliche cords threatened to overpower the actors and hindered the movie greatly. Let's not forget about the historically askew storyline, in which Marines are charged with killing codetalkers should they be caputred; it cheapens the history of the U.S. Marine Corps and Native American Codetalkers.
If you're looking for a historically acurate (or close to acurate) drama, Windtalkers is not it. I wouldn't buy this movie, but it's worth the money at Blockbuster. For now, the world still waits for a good movie about Native American codetalkers.
Rating:  - Breaking Windtalkers
This movie would be vastly improved by being dubbed in the Navajo language with subtitles written by Woody Allen.
Rating:  - Natives never got their medals
In the brutal World War II Battle of Saipan, Sergeant Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage) guards and ultimately befriends Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), a young Navajo trained in the one wartime code never broken by the Jananese, the Navajo Code. But if Yahzee should fall into Japanese hands, how far will Enders go to save the military's most powerful secret?
Plenty of Native humor and insight from the Navajo perspective. Solid acting and good film. Pity that none of the Native people have recieved their medals.
Rating: - Pretty Terrible
This is an action movie, not a war film in the tradition of the realistic classics we've been lucky enough to have released in the last decade. This is one of those stories in which you are required to shut your brain off in order for it to succeed. Here in John Woo's pseudo-Schwarzeneggerian version of World War Two, rifles never seem to run out of ammo, a grenade can clear an entire hillside the size of two football fields, and the morality of war is as monochromatic as an old church tract. I say all this with disappointment, because the subject of the Windtalkers deserves its time on the big screen, and it deserves much better than what it had here in this completely stupid insult to modern intelligence and the memory of the men about whom it was supposed to be.
Rating:  - Not what I'd hoped... (a history teacher's review)
With the title "Windtalkers" you'd think it would be centered on the Windtalkers, those Navajo codetalkers in the Pacific Theater of World War II. I'd purposely ignored this movie until I had the time to watch it since I was interested in the topic and have a passing interest in the Navajo culture, having visited the Four Corners area several times and having read a bit about them.
Anyway, I was hoping for a movie that focused on the Windtalkers - why they fought for a society that had conquered thme and now scorned them, what their motivations were, how their culture dealt with the seperation from the Navajo lands, the death and destruction of the war (briefly touched on) and so on. That would have been much more interesting and important.
Instead, we get a movie that should be called "Messed Up In the Head Windtalker Babysitter" - a movie full of cliche characters and soliloquies that just does not work. For that matter, neither do most of the action scenes. The first rule of a war movie is to make you love the character and then put him in all sorts of dangerous situations so you can worry if he's going to die. It's simple - the viewer is emotionally invested in the story. It never happened for me in this one, despite the massive amounts of explosions. War stories are not about the amount of explosions - the great ones are about exploring characters (and by extension, you and me) during a time of extreme duress.
I was glad to see Christian Slater get some work, though.
This one will not be staying in my collection - it is just not good enough.
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