We Were Soldiers

Paramount Pictures | Release Date: March 1, 2002

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

65	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 37 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

100

Mick LaSalle

One of the best war movies of the past 20 years. Read full review

Roger Ebert

"Black Hawk Down" was criticized because the characters seemed hard to tell apart. We Were Soldiers doesn't have that problem; in the Hollywood tradition it identifies a few key players, casts them with stars, and follows their stories. Read full review

James Berardinelli

The in-your-face style of We Were Soldiers results in a suspenseful, intense, and exhausting cinematic experience. Read full review

William Arnold

A powerful experience, filled with dazzlingly executed action sequences that generally avoid the rock music and drugged-out conventions of "Apocalypse Now," and even exude a certain core of humanity. Read full review

Ted Mahar

The film's soldiers are more the mom-and-apple-pie, God-fearing lads of World War II movies than the cynical grunts of "Platoon" (1986) and "Full Metal Jacket" (1987). Read full review

Stephen Hunter

You don't really watch the film; you survive it. Read full review

Desson Thomson

Gibson may get top billing, but it's Sam Elliott who steals all the scenes. As Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley, a man who fires with his own .45 revolver rather than the standard M-16 rifles, he's full of hilariously colorful comments. Read full review

Dana Stevens

Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight. Read full review

New Times (L.A.)Robert Wilonsky

It succeeds where its recent predecessor miserably fails because it demands that you suffer the dreadfulness of war from both sides. That might not make it a milestone, but it's a hell of an improvement. Read full review

David Grove

This is a good film; strong, honest, strikingly photographed (by Dean Semler) and appropriately devastating. Read full review

Lisa Schwarzbaum

The writer-director bestows honor -- generously, apolitically -- not only on the dead and still living American veterans who fought in Ia Drang, but also on their families, on their Vietnamese adversaries, and on the families of their adversaries too. Read full review

Mike Clark

This also is the rare combat movie that deals substantially with mourning widows on the home front. Read full review

Jami Bernard

We Were Soldiers works. The action is well-staged and realistic. And Gibson is a commanding presence in a role that has more shadings and stature than his usual action heroes.

Jay Carr

It isn't afraid to genuflect to heroes and heroism and has everything it needs to connect with the resurgence of patriotism after Sept. 11.

Michael Wilmington

Probably the best thing you can say about We Were Soldiers is that it does justice to an awful conflict. Read full review

David Ansen

A powerful and moving experience -- once it overcomes its clunky, badly written and clichéd first act.

Kenneth Turan

Manages to evoke a complex series of reactions. It both frustrates with its unrelenting sentimentality and impresses with the overwhelming physicality of its combat sequences. These in turn are so powerful they take on a life of their own, sending a message that is probably quite opposite to the one the filmmakers intended. Read full review

Stephanie Zacharek

Isn't a great movie; I'd say it's barely a good one. But it's a war movie that at least acknowledges the distinction between macho and masculinity, always putting the dignity of the latter over the bluster of the former. Read full review

Todd McCarthy

Gibson has the closest thing to a John Wayne part that anyone's played since the Duke himself rode into the sunset, and he plays it damn well. Read full review

David Edelstein

It's square, stiff, and in places cheesy; it's also authentically harrowing -- and blood-showered, blood-drowned. Read full review

Michael Atkinson

Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant. Read full review

Peter Travers

The battle, expertly shot by Dean Semler, captures the chaos of guerrilla warfare paralleled in "Black Hawk Down" and gives the film a scarring documentary realism. Read full review

Liam Lacey

If the action is graphic and immediate, other aspects of the movie are inexcusably bad. Read full review

Carrie Rickey

One admires Wallace's intentions while despairing at his execution. Yet as clumsily directed as his film is, it inspires compassion for Moore, his men and their foes. And in that, there is merit. Read full review

Lawrence Toppman

Some scenes achieve dramatic greatness and emotions that reach to the heart's core. Almost as many have the tinny ring of a badly counterfeited coin. Read full review

Rene Rodriguez

We Were Soldiers feels strangely irrelevant -- a well-acted, well-crafted and inconsequential visit to woefully familiar territory. Read full review

Joe Morgenstern

While the movie is dreadfully clumsy or sentimental around the edges, there's no denying the strength of Mr. Gibson's performance or the power of the savage combat, a 90-minute sequence that's even more graphic than the horrific firefight in Somalia in "Black Hawk Down."

Scott Tobias

Leaves all the real risks to the young warriors at Ia Drang and collects easy dividends on their bravery. In the end, it honors them by paying tribute to itself. Read full review

Peter Rainer

Fitfully effective as a battle movie, and Mel Gibson does his rugged best to take center stage without seeming to. But the movie is self-righteous in a way that's frequently unseemly. Read full review

David Denby

Yet as art this revisionist movie, grimly effective as some of it is, doesn't hold a candle to the remarkable cycle of pictures in the late seventies and the eighties which captured the discordant character of a tragic war. [11 Mar 2002, p. 92]