Colin Farrell gets cornered by Bruce Willis in 'Hart's War.'

Whether they're film historians or casual moviegoers, when most people discuss the Vietnam War's impact on Hollywood movies, they think first of Apocalypse Now and Platoon. Yet Vietnam's real cinematic legacy can be seen in more recent war movies that are set during other wars, such as Courage Under Fire, Saving Private Ryan, and Black Hawk Down. These films, and the combat veterans who serve as their main characters, reflect a skepticism toward the U.S. government and even the military itself as an institution. War movies from the pre-Vietnam period always emphasized the rightness of what the soldiers were fighting for and the importance of following orders. The new breed of Hollywood war movies doesn't see soldiers as noble because they're battling evil or because they're accomplishing military objectives. Instead, they underscore the soldiers' willingness to go to any lengths, including sacrificing their own lives, to save their comrades. The promotional tagline for Black Hawk Down sums it up nicely: "Leave no man behind."

We Were Soldiers is the latest exemplar of Hollywood's new outlook on war. It's based on the memoir written by Lt. Gen. Harold Moore (ret.), who was a lieutenant colonel in November 1965 when he led the First Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry in Ia Drang Valley, the first major U.S. engagement of the Vietnam War. The film begins with Moore (Mel Gibson) moving his family to Ft. Benning, Ga., and even before he receives orders to ship out, he's skeptical about the whole idea of American intervention. A student of military history, he notes that the U.S. is repeating the mistakes made by the French during their colonial rule over Vietnam. Yet that doesn't stop him from commanding his troops and trying to hold them together under heavy fire.

The movie was written and directed by Randall Wallace, the scriptwriter on Braveheart and Pearl Harbor, whose sole directorial effort prior to this was a leaden 1998 adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask. His filmmaking has improved markedly, although the first half-hour or so of the film seems to take forever. The opening sequence depicting a massacre of French soldiers in 1954 is well-staged, but after that it's a lengthy parade of speeches and scenes of Moore's family life, presented with all the solemnity and pomp of a funeral march.

There's also a lengthy segment about the soldiers' wives that's placed arbitrarily in the middle of the movie and should have been cut severely if not entirely. The subplot about an American lieutenant and his wife doesn't work, mostly because the two are played by Chris Klein and Keri Russell -- tragedy isn't a strength with either of these actors.

However, most of the film is taken up with the action in Ia Drang, and that's where the film's at its best. The movie makes its point much more forcefully by showing us what happens to the soldiers than by simply telling us how heroic they are. The first men on the ground begin firing off rounds at nothing at all. Then an enemy scout leads a platoon into an ambush, and it's all downhill from there.

By concentrating on the battle, this film follows a strategy similar to Black Hawk Down's, but its inclusion of character development departs from Ridley Scott's ruthlessly efficient but anonymous storytelling method. The men on both sides have dimensions to them -- we're properly introduced to a black soldier (Edwin Morrow) who suffers discrimination back home, a Japanese-American soldier (Brian Tee) with a family back home, and a civilian journalist (Barry Pepper) who gets pressed into service. The movie also spends time following the Vietnamese commanding officer (Don Duong) and a nameless Vietnamese soldier who carries a picture of his wife in his helmet. These personalizing touches aren't much, but they're enough to make us identify with the men. When bad stuff happens to them, we know what they have to lose. The movie is more conventional, more Hollywood, and less true to life than Black Hawk Down, and it's actually better for those reasons.

Wallace's approach has its limits, though. The soldiers in Black Hawk Down are figures on a map, but the ones here are plaster saints. The characters in Saving Private Ryan weren't terribly complex or subtle, but the movie was truthful enough to depict them as rowdy, jaded, cynical, mercurial, irascible, despairing, and even unheroic on occasion. The men in this film don't exhibit anything close to those qualities. Spielberg's film was much stronger for showing that the soldiers were willing to die for their fellow men even though those men might not have been worth dying for. The indiscriminate reverence shown by We Were Soldiers keeps it from reaching greatness, but it remains more than good enough to stay with you for a while.

You can reach Kristian Lin at kristian.lin@fwweekly.com.