Windtalkers is a Second World War melodrama about a broken soul. But it strains to be a heroic saga about racial healing under fire. Director John Woo's desire to make this movie a true epic occasionally clicks with his eloquent images of Navajos serving as U.S. Marines and triggers an unshakable potency. Too bad the balance is way off.

The casting of Nicolas Cage as a Marine corporal named Enders pushes it toward operatic melancholy from the outset. Only semi-recovered from the Japanese massacre of his squad on the Solomon Islands when he's assigned to protect a Navajo code talker, Yahzee (Adam Beach), during the Battle of Saipan, Enders is maniacally gung-ho in combat, sad-eyed and spooked outside of it. And looking haunted has become as easy for Cage as it is for Al Pacino to look exhausted.

Director Woo's inability to suggest an emotion without externalizing it adds to the picture's unwonted heaviness. When Enders flashes back to carnage while he stares at a whirring fan, it's not surprising Yahzee notices. What's shocking is that nobody else does.

The screenplay, by John Rice and Joe Batteer, promises to open up the nearly closed subject of the Navajos who developed and executed, flawlessly, a radio code that stymied the Japanese throughout the Pacific Theater. (The U.S. military kept the code classified until 1968.)

But the writers pull together the usual mix of Hollywood war-film soldiers, from a redneck racist (Noah Emmerich) to an open-minded all-American (Christian Slater). And they focus on an aspect of the story that is both historically hazy and controversial. As co-producer Alison Rosenzweig puts it in the official print companion, Windtalkers: The Making of the Film About the Navajo Code-Talkers of World War II, "Some code talkers were assigned Marine bodyguards for protection, but the code itself was to be considered more important than the code talker. The bodyguards' overt mission was to protect them, but their covert mission was to make sure they didn't fall into the hands of the Japanese."

In other words, kill the code talker if necessary to protect the code. Rosenzweig doesn't cite a source, and surviving code talkers differ on whether they had bodyguards at all. One of them, Chester Nez, has said, "I didn't have anyone following me, nor did I see guys who did."

Even if the movie is accurate, its emphasis on this point skews the drama toward Cage's portrayal of Enders, a psychologically wounded soldier striving to follow orders and still be a good man. The fresher story embedded in the material, yet slighted in the script, is how Navajos like Beach's Yahzee enlisted in the secret code program despite white American racism. Isn't that subject rich enough in emotion and irony without using Enders and his fellow white Marines to pile on secrets and lies, betrayal and sacrifice, melting-pot situation comedy-drama and psychodrama?

In Windtalkers, the Marines go through moral crucibles while the Navajos are simply stand-up guys to the nth degree. We don't even see how the complexities of their culture informed their creation of the code.

Yahzee is an uncomplicated family man. When he initially has trouble shooting the enemy, it only adds to his stature as a feeling human being. And when Yahzee learns that Enders is capable of turning on a Navajo for the good of the code, he channels his anger toward the Japanese. He and his best pal (Roger Willie) are pros and natural patriots in the performance of their code-talking duties. They're also spiritual healers in the downtime, enacting native rituals to protect the spirits of those who fell in the battlefield. In short, they're super-heroic, more like politically correct action figures than historical characters.

Woo is best known as a visual director. Yet his imagery is as plodding as it is imaginative - and, if you've seen previous Hong Kong movies like The Killer or Hollywood movies like Face-Off and Mission: Impossible 2, familiar. (We get the usual Woo motifs of birds in flight and men drawing on each other at exactly the same time.) He does bring enough conviction to the script's revamped cliches to renew them moment to moment. When Slater whips out his harmonica to match the recorder-like instrument of his Navajo sidekick (Willie), the two make beautiful music together.

But around the 90-minute mark, hope fades that Woo will get the elements of revisionism and derring-do to harmonize. Indeed, because the battle scenes ignite his choreographic talent and force Woo to be quick on his feet, you may find yourself looking forward to them despite their overbearing graphic mayhem. Woo's antiwar intentions and his talent are at odds. In Windtalkers, war is a beautiful hell.

Windtalkers

Starring Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Christian Slater and Roger Willie

Directed by John Woo

Released by MGM

Rated R (graphic war violence)

Running time 134 minutes

SUN SCORE * * 1/2