- Actors: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Peter Stormare, Noah Emmerich, Mark Ruffalo
- Directors: John Woo
- Format: Anamorphic, Box set, Closed-captioned, Colour, Director's Cut, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
- Language English, French
- Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese
- Region: Region 1 (US and Canada DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 2.35:1
- Number of discs: 3
- Classification: R (Restricted) (US MPAA rating. See details.)
- Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
- DVD Release Date: 20 May 2003
- Run Time: 134 minutes
- Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
- ASIN: B00008PBZW
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 154,338 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 Ryan and Black Hawk Down.
On the DVD: Windtalkers contains 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
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good story lies buried in here somewhere,
By
This review is from: Windtalkers [DVD] [2002] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC] (DVD)
From mid-1942 to the end of the Pacific war, approximately 400 Navajo Indians served in all six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute units as "code talkers". Their job was to transmit military traffic by radio and telephone in their native language. It was a code the Japanese never cracked. This is the inner kernel of the script for WINDTALKERS.
Nicolas Cage plays Sgt. Joe Enders. He's already demonstrated his ability to follow orders. In the Solomon Islands campaign, his unit fought to the last man - Enders himself - to defend some piece of scummy swamp. After recovering from injuries, Joe is assigned as guardian to a newly enlisted Navajo, Pvt. Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), who's a rookie radioman in a Marine recon outfit that's part of the assault on Saipan. Joe's orders are to protect the Navajo code "at all costs", which means, in effect, that Enders must be ready to kill Yahzee rather than allow the latter to be captured by the enemy. Director John Woo has buried the nugget of a pretty good story in so many dead bodies and special effects that it's virtually lost to view. Woo must have been trying to outdo WE WERE SOLDIERS and BLACK HAWK DOWN in body count. Even when the beleaguered Marines discover they're almost out of ammo, they still manage to mow down the onrushing Japanese in scores. Joe Enders himself, suffering the guilt and rage from being the only survivor of his former Solomon Islands unit, is a one man killing machine seemingly capable of storming Tokyo single-handed. The hapless Ben finds himself put in harm's way as he's forced to trail along after his minder and watch the carnage. The combat action isn't even always plausible. At one point, a Marine infantry column in a valley is having the bejeezus kicked out of it by Japanese artillery entrenched on a ridgeline. Somewhere between the two, the last of our heroes' recon unit is scrambling to recover a radio - the last one on Earth apparently - with which an air strike can be called in to paste the bad guys. Are you telling me that the larger Marine detachment in the valley didn't have its own communications gear to call for help? I'm awarding three generous stars to WINDTALKERS solely on the strength of Cage's gritty performance as the vengeance-obsessed Enders. And although Beach has extensive screen time as the naive Navajo who must become a warrior while under fire, he rarely serves as much more than a foil for Joe's wild-eyed blood lust. The battle sequences themselves are fairly good, though those in the other two films mentioned in this review are a cut above by far. Quantity doesn't necessarily equate with quality. If anything, this film may inspire the viewer to do additional research on the role of the World War II Navajo code talkers. That, I guess, is something.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Really disappointing, no matter how much second chances you give to it,
By
This review is from: Windtalkers [DVD] [2002] (DVD)
It could be such a great movie. The story of code talkers AND of the terrible and tragic battle of Saipan in one movie - and they had Nicholas Cage, who, contrary to all his haters, is a good actor (remember a little movie called "Moonstruck"?). But the way this film was made... oh, brother... I couldn't believe it. First, the director messed up a potentially passionate story by showing the recruitement, training and arrival of the Indian code talker to the front in possibly the dullest, colourless way possible. Expect a looooong introduction. Then, Nicholas Cage character was made in a depressed, half suicidal idiot. Good grief, he plays a man with a mission here, an intelligence officer, charged to protect an invaluable asset (the Indian code talker) - there is no way that in time of war somebody so depressed and dejected could be assigned such a mission. Except in direst of circumstances - and to invade Saipan US Marines and US Army had lots of ressources, including good officers. The fighting scenes on Saipan - they are exactly like in the worst Chuck Norris movies from the 80s. A short message to moviemakers in Hollywood: "Hello, guys, Spielberg with "Saving Private Ryan" and Ridley Scott with "Blackhawk Down" already revisited war movies - and the kind of cheap stuff we were OK with before, we, the viewers, we do not buy it anymore". I fully agree with some of the previous reviewers - in this film Japanese soldiers act like total morons, and they get killed by bushels from a single burst of machine gun. This is ridiculous. The fighting scenes on Solomon Islands in the opening scenes (featuring Nicholas Cage) are EVEN worse! The ending was supposed to be sad and touching - but at that moment I was so tired of "Windtalkers" that I was just relieved that it is over. I give this movie two stars just because I simply like Nicholas Cage, no matter how bad is the movie he is in. Also Adam Beach, the Canadian actor who comes from the Ojibwa nation, gives a great performance and he saves some scenes from the total disaster. But it is still a disaster. Do not waste your money and one evening.
2.0 out of 5 stars
interesting story but poor screenplay, CGI and acting,
By Carno Polo "adventure traveler" (Rome, Italy) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Windtalkers [DVD] [2002] (DVD)
This movie is a disappointment. Cage does his part pretty well, but most others seem unnatural characters, it all seems a bit too fake. Too many episodes are beyond the limits of credibility. CGI (computer generated imagery) is pretty ridiculous, worse than a first generation videogame, it would have been acceptable in the 1980s but not twenty years later.The merit of the film, nonetheless, is to have publicised a little known aspect of the Pacific War, and it is a tribute to the valor of the Navajo.
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