"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart.
The enemy knows the terrain and has the advantage of surprise, but is surprised itself at the way the Americans improvise and rise to the occasion. Wallace cuts between the American troops, their wives back home on an Army base, and a tunnel bunker where Ahn ( Don Duang), the Viet Cong commander, plans strategy on a map. Director Randall Wallace (who wrote " Braveheart" and " Pearl Harbor") does make the situation clear from moment to moment, as Moore and his North Vietnamese counterpart try to outsmart each other with theory and instinct. They are not as lucid and easy to follow as the events in "Black Hawk Down," but then the terrain is different, the canvas is larger, and there are no eyes in the sky to track troop movements.
But it is not a victory it's more the curtain-raiser of a war in which American troops were better trained and better equipped, but outnumbered, out maneuvered and finally outlasted.įor much of its length, the movie consists of battle scenes.
Ia Drang cannot be called a defeat, since Moore's men fought bravely and well, suffering heavy casualties but killing even more Viet Cong. "We Were Soldiers," like " Black Hawk Down," is a film in which the Americans do not automatically prevail in the style of traditional Hollywood war movies. Moore realizes it's an ambush, and indeed in the film's opening scenes he reads about just such a tactic used by the Vietnamese against the French a few years earlier. Some 400 of his men ride into battle in the Ia Drang Valley, known as the "Valley of Death," and are surrounded by some 2,000 North Vietnamese troops.
"We will ride into battle and this will be our horse," Moore says, standing in front of a helicopter. Moore leads the First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's regiment. The reference to Custer is not coincidence.