W is for Weariness

This is the next movie on the never ending Netflix queue. I was so excited because I thought for sure that Husband would like to watch a war flick with me! Finally, I found a movie that we could watch together.

Boy, was I wrong. He refused to watch it with me! Hmph. Men.

I’m intrigued by these code talkers. Every code that the Allies came up with during WWII was broken by the enemy. Someone finally stumbled upon the idea of a code based on the Navajo language. They were able to embed these soldiers with all the commands and get encoded messages around from camp to camp without being broken.

In all the years that the code talkers were used, the code was never broken. That’s pretty incredible when you think about it.

So when I heard of this movie, I was so excited! I really thought it was about how the program was started and Nicolas Cage was just the star power behind it.

Turns out that it’s a full blown war movie. The action is set in the Pacific (part of the war I tend to forget about when I think about WWII, actually) and so feels a bit more like Vietnam than WWII. There’s lots of blood and gore, which I usually don’t mind.

But this one? There wasn’t really a story – other than a messed up soldier (Nicolas Cage) who was trying to get back into heat of action after being injured in a battle where his entire command was killed – plus some kids from the reservation in Arizona. The one plot point? Cage’s character was supposed to protect the code at all cost – not necessarily his Navajo code talker. Should push come to shove, he was supposed to protect the code and not let it fall into the hands of the enemy. Hence, he’d have to kill the kid if it came to that.

Yup, that’s the plot.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been expecting so much. But seriously? I love good war flicks but this just left so much to be desired.

This is part of my 101 in 1001 project. I didn’t think I’d get a hard letter crossed off the list so early!