In Monument Valley’s emptiness, in the extreme condensation of the efficient battle scenes between the U.S. Army and the Japanese Army. ”Windtalkers” is based on the continuous contrast between the condensation and the subtraction of something always present in John Woo’s filmmaking, always so strong in the movements and in the actions of which one notices the breath (most of all) off screen. Starting from the beautiful beginning of the religious/visionary image of water which eventually turns red and contains lifeless bodies, John Woo penetrates inside the American war genre with such classic devotion, with his mysticism so close and respectful of the characters he brings on screen. On one side Monument Valley’s fearful heights may certainly remember John Ford’s cinema’s vast spaces. Most of all though, they appear as the Hong Kong director’s return to “his own set”, Mission Impossible 2’s set. From there he open’s his use of mutating his settings, he opens up to an epic atmosphere which emphasizes on the primordial dimension of the four elements (water, earth, air and fire) where an almost pantheistic fusion, typical in Michael Cimino’s filmmaking, occurs. The characters, such as Sgt. Joe Enders (performed with unexpected ambiguity and desperate cynicism by Nicholas Cage) or like the brief yet consistent appearance of nurse Rita Swelton (with a Frances O’Connor always suspended towards another world, just like in “A.I. – Artificial intelligence”), appear almost as reincarnations of lifeless figures, as visions more than real entities, the characters are confused people in a land where the war’s bloodshed, the scars on the bodies with a terrible sense of being totally lost like in the sequence where Enders gets drunk and hears the voices of the dead and revives the dramatic pages of the past where his sense of guilt, for not give the order to withdraw his troops from combat, grows. Woo focuses on the movie with essentiality typical of the most recent “war movies” (the Japanese’s suprise attack against the U.S. army with the crude realism from Speilberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” D-Day sequence but also the same fierceness seen in “Attack”), but Woo conserves his choreographic delicacy from his Hong Kong films (the sequence where Enders runs and the Navajo soldiers’ arrival at the base). During the Saipan battle scenes Woo opens spaces to the intimate lives of the soldiers as we see Navajo soldier Ben Yahzee holding a child, a scene that remembers us Face Off’s opening scene, or like the complicity between Sgt. Henderson (performed by Christian Slater) and the other Navajo soldier, Charlie Whitehorse who compose a duo with their wind instruments. “Windtalkers” is a great work of art and not propaganda (as some critics insinuated) “The green berets” style, it’s action filmmaking limited to its potential but also to its own “sentimental elegy”, the characters abandon them selves to frenetic singing and playing music, extending their temporary “ecstasy” like the dances of John Ford’s cinema. Windtalkers is a melting pot of contamination from Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gates” or “The sunchaser” and from Ford’s “Wagon master”. This makes “Windtalkers” a great movie, where the thoughts of men of honor lay before they act, it is a movie which will probably be considered as good as it is in the future.Original title: “Windtalkers”
Direction: John Woo
Screenplay: John Rice, Joe Batteer
Cinematography: Jeffrey A. Kimball
Editing: Jeff Gullo, Steven Kemper, Tom Rolf
Music: James Horner
Scenograhy: Holger Gross
Costumes: Nick Scarano
Actors: Nicolas Cage (Sgt. Joe Enders), Adam Beach (soldier Ben Yahzee), Peter Stormare (Sgt. Eric ‘Gunny’ Hjelmstad), Noah Emmerich (Charles ‘Chick’ Rogers), Mark Ruffalo
(Pappas), Brian Van Holt (Harrigan), Martin Henderson (Nellie), Roger Willie (soldier Charlie Whitehorse), Frances O’Connor (nurse Rita Swelton), Christian Slater (Sgt. Peter ‘Ox’ Hendeson)
Producers :Terence Chang, Tracie Graham, Alison R. Rosenzwieg, John Woo for Lion Rock/Metro Goldwyn-Mayer
Distribution (in Italy): 01 Distribuzione
Time: 134’
Country of origin/year of production: U.S.A./2002


traduzione a cura di Giuliano Capogrossi Colognesi