Vietnam War movie takes us where we've already gone before

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At the beginning of "We Were Soldiers," a voice-over instructs the audience that it will be journeying to "a place our country does not remember and a war it does not understand."

The voice is talking, of course, about Vietnam. And yet one has only to look at how crowded the Vietnam War movie genre is to realize that neither the war nor the place can really be considered forgotten.

So when that opening voice tells us we are going somewhere misunderstood and overlooked, it comes across less as a sincere statement and more as a boastful promise — a promise that this movie will take us somewhere new, somewhere beyond the celebrated insanity of "Apocalypse Now," somewhere more heartbreaking than the miserable jungles of "Platoon."

When it comes to keeping this promise, "We Were Soldiers" disappoints. The film feels formulaic, its plot and pacing typical Hollywood war-movie stuff, while the performances elicit more of a sense of déjà vu than awe — certain scenes are so referential they feel like "Apocalypse Now Redux, Redux, Redux."

This is too bad, because "We Were Soldiers" was meant to be not just a gripping war movie but also a tribute, as the promotional materials put it, "to the nobility and uncommon valor" of the real-life soldiers who fought a ferocious 1965 battle in Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley.

The movie does succeed as a tribute to those soldiers — their heroism is hammered home repeatedly and clearly — but the fact that the film breaks little new ground (except, perhaps, in the realm of extended graphic violence, which is not that laudable an accomplishment) takes away from one's ability to appreciate it as a tribute. The great Vietnam War films use the individual soldier's story as a way of talking about the horror of war; this film seems to use the stories of many heroic soldiers as an excuse for shooting a big-bang battle sequence.

A beefy Mel Gibson plays Lt. Col. Harold G. Moore, who leads the men in his Seventh Air Cavalry into the first major Vietnam War battle between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces. The battle turns out to be more of an ambush, with some 2,000 Vietnamese soldiers staked out on high ground above the 400 Americans.

The bulk of the movie covers the long, brutal firefight that ensues. We see faces burned beyond recognition by napalm and grenades. We see blood and guts blowing, in slow motion, out of the torso of a man who has been shot from behind.

And we see the hero Moore, in a key scene, standing fully erect amid a hail of bullets while lesser soldiers duck for cover. It's a compelling image, but one that so closely resembles Robert Duvall's defining moment as Col. Kilgore in "Apocalypse Now" — the "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" moment — that it's begging for comparison.

And when "We Were Soldiers" asks to be compared to the pantheon of Vietnam War films that have come before it, the answer it gets is not very favorable.

Eli Sanders: 206-748-5815 or esanders@seattletimes.com.