Movie Reviews

By Nicole Rodriguez

Soldiers surpasses its competitors

By Nicole Rodriguez

TSC Writer

There are so many war movies coming out these days that it's becoming hard to tell them apart. If it were left up to the media, We Were Soldiers would be considered no different than its predecessors Hart's War and Black Hawk Down.

Like the other films, Soldiers tells the story of a few specific Americans and their experiences in battle. Specifically, it is centered on the true story of Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson), who led over 400 soldiers into the first on-land battle of the Vietnam War.

The movie progresses quite stereotypically: director/writer Randall Wallace switches between scenes of heroic Americans in battle, heartbreaking war telegrams arriving back home, and a final showdown in the tunnels with Vietnamese soldiers.

The most obvious flaw of this movie is the rather cheesy scripting that dominates the opening sequences. However, you have to take into account that it was penned by director Randall Wallace, who was responsible for Pearl Harbor's unbearable dialogue.

Rather unimpressive is the way Gibson's character is portrayed as the flawless, patriotic hero. True, Colonel Moore was probably a wonderful man and certainly an admirable military officer, but nobody can be as perfect as Wallace portrays him in the opening sequences. In fact, it's actually kind of annoying (think Ben Affleck in Harbor).

These setbacks could have spelled the end of the movie. However, as it is, We Were Soldiers pulls through and ends up being an incredibly powerful motion picture.

The cast, headed by a very charismatic Gibson, reaches all new heights in their talent, especially in the supporting characters.

Chris Klein (American Pie) is surprisingly touching as a frightened young father encountering the horrors of war. Felicity's Keri Russell, who plays Klein's wife Barbara, displays incredible depth in her few scenes. She elicits more from the viewer in her 30 minutes of screen time than Harbor's Kate Beckinsale did in three hours.

Academy Award nominee Greg Kinnear, who plays helicopter pilot Major "Snake" Crandall, surpasses even his award winning turn in As Good as it Gets. His performance is so moving and heartfelt, that it seems impossible to think he began his career as a host on Talk Soup.

Despite the long list of terrific performances, it is Barry Pepper, who made his debut as the bible-quoting sniper Private Jackson in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, who is the scene-stealer by far. He plays reporter Joe Galloway, who goes into the battlefield with hopes of showing the people at home just what is going on, yet is forced into harsh reality the moment he sets foot off the chopper.

Pepper gives quite possibly the best war-movie performance we have seen in years. Given the recent ubiquity of the genre, this is a great compliment, and entirely deserved. After all, it is through his character that the audience fully sees the death of idealistic patriotic enthusiasm, followed by the hollow emptiness of tragedy that is born in its place. Through him we see that this is the price a soldier pays for his participation in battle; this is the transformation he must undergo. Showing this loss of innocence is no easy feat for any actor, much less for one who's only been in the business for a few years.

In fact, the only actor who doesn't shine is Madeleine Stowe (The Last of the Mohicans), who is adequate, yet greatly outdone by the rest of the cast. Wallace would have been better off giving the role to somebody with a bit more on-screen charisma. As it is, Stowe's character comes off as rather bland and impossible to relate to.

Shortcomings aside, We Were Soldiers is a remarkable insight into the harsh reality of war. Even more so, it is a remarkable example of the success good acting and impressive direction can make out of mediocre scripting. Don't miss this movie, both your money and time will be well spent. A-

Time Machine fails to function

By Brian Tanaka

Scene Staff Writer

Simon Wells' The Time Machine is lavish enough to start the pre-summer blockbuster season, yet struggles to find anything genuine to say. It is commendable in trying to recreate the Victorian essence of the book to film, yet much of what it has to say has already been said and done in film.

Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) is a bumbling physicist in New York. When taking time away from his equations, he spends them with the lovely Emma (Sienna Guillory). On a fateful night when Alexander asks her to marry him, she is tragically killed, sending Alexander into a spiraling depression. He spends the next four years devising a plan to revive his old life by creating a time machine to fix the past. A few scratches of equations on a chalkboard with an implied knowledge of relativity and he's off, traveling through the wrinkle in time.

After a few stumbles into the near future, a cataclysmic event occurs that knocks Alexander unconscious in the time machine, hurtling him almost 800,000 years into the future. He awakens in a nearby village, aided back to health by Mara (Samantha Mumba), and finds a pleasant and simplistic way of life. What he doesn't expect is that Mara is not a human, but an Eloi, an evolved and similar species of human. The Eloi live on the surface of the planet, but must avoid the violent Morlocks who live underground.

Alexander must then decide whether to forget the future and flee, or help the Eloi fend off the Morlocks.

A Victorian story at heart, The Time Machine in the end relies too much on Hollywood conventions to alter that story. Most of this Victorian essence, instead, gets drained from the script and screen by turning it into a generic action/adventure popcorn flick. I opt for the traditional Hollywood convention of "love conquers all" rather than the objective social commentaries of capitalism and communism found in the book. The relationship between Alexander and Emma and Emma's demise becomes the perpetuating factor in Alexander's need for time travel. The end result is a generic story of vengeance.

That vengeance manifests itself towards the end in the form of a creature. Instead of making Alexander's worthy adversary the theme of man's struggle with the element of time, Wells decides to paste on an Uber-Morlock in the form of a pale Jeremy Irons. Though this idea was originally conceived by H.G. Wells (who, incidentally, removed it from his final draft), the Uber-Morlock only serves as a materialization of evil to fight against the heroically good Alexander.

The film's alterations do take one enjoyable deviation from the book by adding several scenes between his jump from 1899 to 802,701, the best of which supplies an explanation to the division of the two species in the great future. The brief segment when Alexander arrives in 2037. to find a prosperous New York in shambles adds the right amount of eerie confusion with objective vision to create a stirring chill of what might be.

Alexander's voyage through tens of thousands of years is another "wow"-inducing image. Years fly by before Alexander's eyes in lightning-fast speed, like he has the remote control to the world and has decided to set it to fast-forward. This fascinating sequence of life and death and construction and destruction of civilization hails great marks in the field of visual special effects.

The main failing comes when Alexander finally reaches 802,701, which is a moot point considering the book flashes directly to this time. For whatever commending efforts H.G. Wells had with the advent of time travel into literature, his story has floundered to the cliché in modern film. With the saturation of Planet of the Apes (which is basically a retelling of this story using a space shuttle) and time travel films like Back to the Future firmly grasped in the minds of popular culture, this film looks like a meager attempt at manipulation. There is no need for a story of this simplicity because the basic ideas of H.G. Wells on time travel and devolution are already stapled in the viewers' minds.

The Time Machine masks a lack of substance with flashy visuals and mediocre action sequences. Though visually stimulating with sparse engaging moments, it ultimately fails to set up a decent homage to its ancestor. C-