Bloody beyond belief, Windtalkers, John Woo's World War II action movie, hard-pumps the red stuff in all directions, even spraying it straight at the camera lens where it lands in scarlet splatters. Mining the uncommon trenches of history, screenwriters John Rice and Joe Batteer unearth the story of native American Navajos used by the Americans as radio operators to communicate in Navajo, the code that was never allowed to be broken. By assigning Marine Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage) to protect Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) with instructions to safeguard the code at all costs, Woo takes the screen in his hands and recreates the bloodbath at Saipan. Slater plays one half of the other Navajo-Marine pair. Softening the hard lines on the "us and them-ness" of Americans and Injuns in Japan, Windtalkers also bayonets the big issue—intellectual property rights. Will Enders, who says he'd rather kill Japs "than baby-sit an Indian", murder Yahzee if he has to protect the code?
Revisiting the respect, conflict, and friendship between two men, that he earlier did in The Killer and Broken Arrow, this time Woo camouflages the theme as war. Sadly though the centre of gravity shifts from the Navajo to Enders, Cage, who turns into a hardwood one-man war machine and takes on all the "Nips/Japs" to exorcise the ghosts of his lost battalion before he turns sappy at the climax. A montage of every WWII movie made and more, Windtalkers shows the director wanting to go down on celluloid as the greatest action director ever. He sends limbs ripping skywards and shows bodies bursting into flames, in sequences gorier than Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, and adds 300 explosions for effects. Standing in the jungle, the loudest scream for peace comes from the camera. Teaming up with the director once again after MI2, cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball follows butterflies flying over a blood-stained river, Enders etching a church on a floured kitchen table with his rifle, and a Marine impaled on a barbed-wire fence, being stamped almost to death by his fellow soldiers. These and the sounds of finality when a dead Marine's dog tag is broken off are just some of the most evocative scenes that belong to Woo. Abused by American critics for its cliched jingoism and not being revisionist enough, you might expect to see Navajos as corn-eaters and turquoise bead-stringers saying Ho! But while it does turn into a white man screenplay centred around Enders, the movie does have complexities about death, ghosts, ash and war. Skipping the panoramics, Windtalker's battle scenes are pure dynamite. Watch Windtalkers to see Woo using just 99 stuntmen to explosively pull off an uncommon WWII movie, gut-wrenchingly.
