Windtalkers (2002)

John Woo's Windtalkers arrives with a genuine historical curiosity in its pocket: the Navajo code talkers, whose unbreakable language served the Pacific campaign, and who here are played by Native actors, Adam Beach and Roger Willie, instead of by men in bronzer. This is a meaningful gesture of representation, and the film deserves credit for it. It also, per the critics of 2002 and the critics of now, promptly hands the picture to Nicolas Cage. The Navajo remain the subject and the supporting cast simultaneously. Hollywood has managed this trick before, and it remains a strange thing to watch.

To its credit, the film does not pretend racial hostility is absent from the Marine Corps. Private Chick calls the code talkers names, and the screenplay lets that ugliness sit on screen without a comforting resolution. But the framing is unmistakably the white sergeant's conscience, his guilt, his redemption, and the Navajo characters exist largely to occasion it. The film also invents the order to execute the code talkers if capture is imminent, a plot device with no historical basis, which earned it a place among the most inaccurate military films ever assembled. Historical consultants labored over uniform stitching while the central dramatic engine was fabricated.

Curiously, for a picture with things on its mind, it rarely lectures. Woo has said he wanted friendship and understanding; the studio wanted explosions, and the studio largely won. The result is a conventional battlefield exercise with a conscience buried under artillery. It lost a great deal of money, which the industry treated as a verdict on the subject itself. The code talkers were honored eventually, by history and by a Congressional Gold Medal, none of which the film needed to invent. The closing Navajo ritual in Monument Valley is sincere. So is the confusion surrounding it.