Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9139 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-02-10
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Collector's Edition, Dubbed, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English, Japanese
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 128 minutes

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

Special Features

• Bravo Special – Behind the scenes ‘making of’ featurette with the cast and crew. Includes interviews with Nicolas Cage and John Woo
  
• Actors’ Bootcamp – Made exclusively for the DVD, this brilliant featurette follows the actors through a gruelling few weeks of real-life marine training that Woo, who drafted in real American army soldiers to appear in the film, sent them on to bring the true essence of war and camararderie to the film.
  
• Fly on the Set Diaries – 4 raw set pieces that observe the construction of 4 key battle scenes, bringing the true nature of filming to life with explosive close-up action. Viewers can also jump to that specific scene in the film.
  
• Audio commentaries – 2 revealing feature length commentaries with Cage and Christian Slater, and Navajo’s Albert Smith and Roger Willie
  
• Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery

Synopsis
WINDTALKERS begins quietly--with widescreen aerial shots of clouds that gradually clear to reveal the beautiful mesas of Monument Valley. A bus collects Navajo volunteers Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach) and Charlie Whitehorse (Roger Willie). It's 1943, and the U.S. has developed an indecipherable secret military code based on the Navajo language. Yahzee and Whitehorse are to be trained as code talkers.
Then John Woo's Pacific war film erupts into violence, with a savage battle that has one survivor, Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage). Badly wounded and feeling guilty at the loss of his companions, Joe recuperates in Hawaii where he is helped by a sympathetic nurse (Frances O'Connor). Joe disguises his hearing loss and he is promoted as Yahzee's battlefield bodyguard. Ordered to "protect the code at all times," Joe must prevent Yahzee from being captured. At first, Yahzee and Whitehorse, whose bodyguard is Ox Henderson (Christian Slater), are subjected to prejudice--particularly from Rogers (Noah Emmerich). But when the unit is shipped to Saipan, the Marines begin to appreciate the code talkers.
Director Woo has created a powerful drama. The visceral battle sequences are strikingly filmed and there is fine acting from Cage, Beach, Willie, Slater, Emmerich, and Frances O'Connor, who portrays the poignancy of love in uncertain times.

Customer Reviews

A good story lies buried in here somewhere
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.

An 'A' for effort, but still fails
When I heard John Woo was directing a war film I was intrigued. After his great popcorn flicks 'face/off' and 'broken arrow' I wasn't sure how he would cope with a serious story line that 'Windtalkers' entaled.
The script was moderate with some new ideas, accurate history (surprising for an American film!) but still with cliches and cardboard background characters. "The racist", "The open-minded one" etc.
The two Navaho's were by far the best characters and acted splendidly but Cage and Slater I think were miscast. Cage is a fantastic actor and Slater is far from bad. But in this film they just plod on almost as if they had no character description and I quickly lost all empathy for them. Shame since its their interaction with the 'Windtalkers' that drives the film.
The special effects in my mind fell flat on their face. You have the normal gunfire with blanks etc but the Naval bondbardment was terrible. The effects were better pulled off in 'the longest day'. And once again there are the typical hollywood mistakes of all explosions have sheets of flame, grenades that don't seem to break skin but throw people ten feet in the air and guns that don't recoil (at one point Cage is holding a 11mm tommy gun firing fully automatic with one hand and keeping it level. Any veteran will tell you how unlikely that is!). The Japanese all seem to die to easily, one shot kills which never seems to happen to the Allies, strange since the Japanese were famed for how tenacious in battle they were. The aircraft looked like they were catoon animated and the list goes on,,
I know it sounds like I am nit picking but I just can't help it. For an action movie it stands quite well, but with the story it was trying to tell, a much director with more passion for drama or realism may have succeded better than Woo. If your looking for a good war film try the sugary 'We were soldiers' or the brutal 'enemy at the gates' instead. But if your looking for an action film with simple drama, watch this,,

Windtalkers
I expected a great film considering the cast. However Nicolas Cage appears to be poorly cast. The special effects come across as special effects. There is a scene where naval ships are shelling the enemy and this looks as if it has been taken from wartime footage and spliced into the movie. This film is not what I expected it to be and a great disappointment. Compared to quality high budget war/action movies that are made today this is not one of them, sorry.