Windtalkers

Despite some of the sentimentality that is also Woo's stock-in-trade, I was moved and absorbed throughout. more

It's the best new battle film since "Black Hawk Down," a movie it surpasses in sheer feeling and bravura style, if not in nightmarish panic and suspense. more

Cage is superb as a hollowed-out, ferocious man of action chasing his demons recklessly with machine gun firing away. more

Windtalkers is the best of Woo's American movies, and the one with the sturdiest and most direct links to his earlier pictures. more

Well matched both to the material and each other, Cage and Beach capture Windtalkers' true struggle, the fight to hold on to values like honor, friendship, and tenderness in an environment that demands otherwise. This is as much a Woo trademark as the carefully orchestrated gunplay. more

Even though we can see it coming, this gruff, inarticulate, half-embarrassed love between men, arrived at after many setbacks, is one of the stories that action movies never tire of telling and that many of us, even though we may laugh it off the next day, still find moving.

Windtalkers blows this way and that, but there's no mistaking the filmmaker in the tall grass, true to himself. more

Imaginative and frequently thrilling, and the love-hate relationship of its protagonists is quite compelling; Woo is always at his best in portraying the complexities of male bonding under intense pressure and violence. more

While I don't always have the stomach for Woo's viscera or the heart for his pure, angelic heroes and impure, diabolical villains, I found myself responding to the context and subtext of Windtalkers while closing my eyes through what one might call its text. It's two-thirds of a great film. more

Capably made and certainly impresses by carrying its length, but it doesn't expand 60 years of World War II screen literature by very much. more

Windtalkers is the story of two American soldiers (one played by Christian Slater, the other played by Nic Cage) who are assigned to protect two Navajo soldiers who work as windtalkers, transmitting messages past Japanese codebreakers using their code based on Navajo language. Yes, there's a lot of violence. Yes, it's grim. The bodyguards, Cage and Slater, are instructed to kill the windtalkers rather than let them fall into enemy hands. This is a big war movie, not quite on the scale of Saving Private Ryan, but somewhere between something that grand and magnificent and, say, Behind Enemy... more

As a nephew of a Navajo Code Talker, I would like to express my thoughts on WINDTALKERS. First of all, if the focus of a Navajo Code Talker movie is supposed to focus on the Navajo Code Talkers and their involvement in WWII, why is the movie centered around Nicolas Cage's character while Adam Beach and Roger Willie play supporting roles? Second, since a lot of folks are not informed about this part of WWII history, wouldn't it have been a much better movie if they showed the origin of the Code Talkers before they faced the horrors of war in the Pacific Theatre? My uncle stood proud among... more

Sure, it's overly melodramatic, and at times historically inaccurate, but if you've ever wanted to see John Woo try his hand at making an epic war film, this film is probably what you would have imagined. Woo reteams with Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater to bring you the story of Navajo American Indians who became code talkers for the United States during the battles in the Pacific. If this DVD is what I think it is, then it is Sony re-releasing a single-disc edition of the Director's Cut that was found on the 3-disc set released by MGM in 2003. Unlike many other "new cuts" released by... more