A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Windtalkers

Date Viewed: 6/28/02

Details:

Nicolas Cage (Sergeant Joe Enders)

Christian Slater (Sergeant Peter 'Ox' Henderson)

Adam Beach (Private Ben Yahzee)

Roger Willie (Private Charles Whitehorse)

Frances O'Connor (Nurse Rita Swelton)

Director: John Woo

Score: John Horner

Score: 1/2

The Review: Navajo is the most widely spoken language of the Athapascan linguistic family, and native to the Americas. Although it is unrelated to Hopi, which itself is infamous for its odd and non-Western treatment of time and continuity, Navajo is unusual enough that when it became necessary in the Pacific theatre of WW-II to replace the military codes continually being broken by the Japanese, it served as the nucleus for what became the crux of communication among the Allies. It was the underpinning of the "code-talkers," a small and wide-flung cadre of native Navajo who were enlisted to serve as radiomen and translators of the code that was created and laid on top of the language itself. (See several on-line pages on Naval history about the code-talkers, and a bibliography.) The code was never broken, and there is much pride in that statement.

But that didn't stop the Japanese from trying. If one is to believe the film, from the incept of this code the Japanese tried to capture and rip the secrets of the code from its only practitioners, the Navajo soldiers themselves. This is the background for Windtalkers, situated against the push west- and north-ward across the central Pacific onto Saipan, one of the Northern Mariana Islands east of the Philippines, an island critical to the Allies advance toward Formosa. The battle to wrest it from the occupying and native Japanese (one of the turning points in the war) grinds out in typical John Woo fashion -- gritty, hyper-realistic, images of violence: an unflattering, and probably accurate, rendering of the war in the Pacific.

The point of view is through Nicholas Cage's character of Sergeant Enders, a Marine with residual hearing damage and some degree of post-traumatic shock-related flashbacks from his unsuccessful first attempt at leadership, and his sole survivorship of that battle. He is one of two Marine sergeants who are sent back into the fray partnered with a Navajo code-talker, as guards -- not for the individual, but for the code. This conflict is the source of much of the tension as we see Ender's character evolve; he's "a damn good Marine" (meaning he's apt to follow orders), and does not want to encourage any friendship with his partner (an excellent Adam Beach) in the event he has to carry out his orders. This is in contradistinction to Christian Slater's character, who takes the opposite approach and openly befriends his code-talker (Roger Willie), establishing a relationship that is (literally) musical.

There is some amusing "future prediction" when the troop is shooting the breeze on a long walk, talking about what they're going to do when the war's over. Among a series of stock answers, one of them says, "I'm going to pick ripe strawberries and mix it with my family recipe for yoghurt -- you know, that stuff that comes from Scandinavia? -- and sell it to people."

Enders' dead-before-it-grows almost-relationship with the WAV nurse (O'Conner, who may be familiar as the mother in A.I.) was disappointing: yes, it firmly established Enders as a curmudgeon, but you really want this connection to succeed, to show at least a glimmer of humanity. He is an unlikely hero, neither attractive nor likeable. The acting is pretty good, and the film powerful and moving, but I cannot give it highest marks because I just cannot identify with Cage's Enders.

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