Windtalker review -- Final End

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Date Posted: 23:23:20 06/19/02 Wed
Author: Drummond
Subject: Windtalker review

Windtalkers: My quite favorable impressions

By Hunter Gray

June 15, 2002

Exclusive to portside

These are my basic impressions set forth soon after I saw
Windtalkers a few hours ago. They do not comprise a film review
nor are they even a conventional outline of plot and resolution.
For those, and much more, I strongly recommend that the film
itself be seen.

Windtalkers has been in our Idaho town less than a day. I saw it
this hot afternoon, along with about seventy other people -- two
dozen or so being other Indians. Although I got there when the
theatre was darkened, I knew early on that there were other
Natives present since Indian and Anglo perceptions of humor, and
their respective attendant public reactions, can differ
significantly.

But Windtalkers is not, certainly, a humorous film in any sense.
There's some of that -- all humans have that side and certainly
Natives do. But there is not much.

The Navajo Code Talkers were, of course, U.S. Marines in every
sense in the most massive war in human history -- and one
characterized by consistent and generally very heavy ground
combat. From that standpoint, Windtalkers is most certainly a
war film. But it's far more than that which is why I broke my
general practice of not seeing war films [the last one was
"MacArthur" in 1977.]

The military scenes are quite well done -- realistically,
vividly: hospital, various non-combat garrison settings, ground
combat warfare. And there is a great deal of war -- hideous war,
with all of its accompanying chaos, and with its inevitable
tragic blunders and mistakes.

Essentially, the Navajo part comes through very well. Initial
reservation scenes -- set in extreme Northern Arizona at Monument
Valley -- are quite authentic. There is an adequate but too-
swift discussion of the careful creation and intricate construct
of the military/Navajo Code [a vocabulary of 411 terms] based on
the extraordinarily complex Dine' language. [Every Code Talker
had to memorize this in entirety -- and also in such a fashion
that he could function lightning fast with this in combat.]

The Navajo linguistic dimensions are accurately set forth. There
are several instances, not at all central to the basic complex of
film themes, in which the movie makers have obviously taken some
license with Navajo culture.

The levels of human interaction are well handled: men in war;
men with a range of personal reactions to combat; men under
extraordinary pressure and the consequent manifestations of this
vis-a-vis one another. And there are the racial/cultural
dichotomies involving Anglos universally ignorant of Indian
people: reactions initially spanning a range from friendliness
to indifference to wariness and to callousness and to some
bigotry. [No Native person in the military, BTW, has ever
escaped being called "chief."] And then, as events rush down
their increasingly bloody River of No Return, there is the
inevitable transcendence and dissipation of negative barriers --
and the emergence of very basic human solidarity.

The great importance of The Code and the Code Talkers is clearly
delineated and vividly carried via a series of mounting, highly
dramatic and extraordinarily sanguinary combat crises.

Resolution -- and I shall say no more on this but simply suggest
again that one see Windtalkers -- is quite convincingly
effected.

And the acting is excellent in all respects.

For me, Windtalkers has very special meaning in its conveying to
the non-Indian world the humanity and the socio-cultural
uniqueness of Native Americans and specifically Navajos -- in the
context of the critically significant, now historic and truly
legendary Code Talker mission.

A secondary, but very important dimension, is that the vividly
realistic ground combat scenes will remind anyone -- starkly,
brutally -- of the consistently hideous nature of contemporary
warfare. This is the eternally bloody reality that most
Americans, given the now relatively safe-for-our-troops mode of
a bombing war from the far-far-up stratosphere -- e.g., Libya,
Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan -- avoid facing: the pervasively
lethal effects from which those on the ground can never escape.

It would have been good if Carl Gorman, Code Talker and old
friend indeed, who passed into the Spirit World more than four
years ago, had been with me this afternoon when I viewed
Windtalkers.

But, come to think of it, perhaps he was.

Hunter Gray[ Hunterbear ] Protected by Na�shdo�i�ba�i�

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Replies:

Re: Damn, he makes it sound real cool. -- The Serpent, 00:37:36 06/20/02 Thu
- It's in the theaters now -- Drummond, 08:48:38 06/20/02 Thu