Battle axes to grind and praise

How do the battle scenes in today’s movies stack up against history -- and each other?

Ranked worst to best, I’d call the shots thus: “Timeline,” “The Last Samurai,” “Master and Commander,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” and “Cold Mountain.”

“Timeline” is pretty much big-budget drivel, well deserving its dismal box office fate, its evocation of medieval times as thinly imagined as its rendition of medieval warfare. It has one clever visual touch, which is a night storm of fire arrows loosed against a castle. And it has one clever device: a trebuchet, or several of them, apparently built in real time and space. That is, a medieval artillery piece that, by an elaborate mechanism of slings and counterweights and beams, flips flaming rocks through the air.

But amid these two wonders, there’s naught but callow American Gen Y members dodging arrows and performing absurd feats.

“The Last Samurai” has been widely lauded for its battle sequences, but I’ll offer a rebuttal. The film’s director, Ed Zwick, who is working from the model of the great Akira Kurosawa, color-codes his various units by flags that are mounted on helmets. Possibly this is historically true; possibly some genius on Kurosawa’s staff thought it up. But even as it solves problems of distinguishing among units, there’s something plodding and dogmatic about Zwick’s attempt to capture the futility of a cavalry charge against emplaced mechanical guns. (Gatlings weren’t technically machine guns, as they used human energy to crank. A true machine gun harnesses the recoil energy of the cartridge to operate, but nobody reading this cares about that.)

Zwick sets it up: good guys here ... bad guys over there ... the valley goes this way, and ... one, two, three, go! ... as mechanically as the Gatling guns. It reminds me of those diagrams in more obtuse battle history books, which reduce the carnage to sequences of blocks moving this way and that across a topographical map. And in the actual fighting, the camera stays so resolutely on handsome Tom Cruise that we never feel the larger clash of arms around him.

“Master and Commander” opens with an extraordinary sequence, in which Lucky Jack Aubrey’s HMS Surprise is itself surprised by the French ship it thinks it’s tracking. The Frenchy fires out of a fog bank, its muzzle flashes flickering like summer lightning in the high clouds. There are a few terrible seconds of time-in-flight; then the terrible results of the cannonade arrive and there’s a fabulous, terrifying sense -- computer imagery, I’m sure -- of shrapnel in air.

If you shoot a gun, you’re aware that you can see or sense slow-moving bullets as they head toward the target: It’s a kind of blurry, imprecise disturbance in the air, very eerie, very scary. The technical crew on “Master” somehow captures that blur, and the air feels dangerously full of ugly stuff. I’ve never seen a movie capture that before, and it’s a sensational effect.

In the second and concluding battle of that film, the Surprise disguises itself as an American whaler to get close enough to the superior French craft and finish her off. Sorry -- never bought it for a second. The French weren’t idiots, and they would have recognized -- by length of mast, deployment of sail, shape of prow, depth of draw -- the reality of the vessel facing them, and they would have blown it out of the water. And more disappointing, when the two ships close, the fighting feels generic, as if plugged in from any of a dozen celluloid pirate dramas of the last century.

The results are equally mixed in “Return of the King.” It boasts two giant battles, one great, the other mediocre.

I suppose in some way the director, Peter Jackson, was hamstrung by the J.R.R. Tolkien books upon which his epic was based, but he’s stuck with a somewhat awkward reality. At the conclusion of the film, we have to get through, first, a fabulous defensive fight in which the good peoples of Middle-earth stand against the hordes. Then, quickly, a short half-hour later, they mount a slapdash offensive, the point of which is to distract the Mordor legions from paying attention to those two big-footed cuties with the giant eyes closing in on some kind of volcano where one of them, Frodo, will destroy the ring of power and save blah blah blah. This leads to the silliest battle cry in movie history, when Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) pulls his ceremonial sword and screams, all together now, “For Frodo!”

A shame this moment feels so anticlimactic. The earlier battle has very much a feeling of the fight at the end (or the beginning) of the world. This is medieval combat on an epic scale, appropriate to the classic 150-year-old study of such events, “Fifteen Battles That Changed the World” by Edward Creasy. Here, the computer-generated imagery is at its most fluent, its most vivid, its most convincing. I find, however, that it’s hard to believe in those flying lizards, those gigantic elephants, those faceless generals. So I make myself see some great forgotten bloodbath in the mud: the Somme perhaps, or maybe the European repulsion of the Islamic invasion at Poitiers. And that’s why it works so well for me.

Jackson, given the freedom and the suppleness that the CGI grants its purchasers, truly makes the most of it. The overwhelming visual metaphor is men versus hordes, which in turn plays on deep Western prejudices (Tolkien, after all, was an Englishman to his DNA). It’s difficult to see this great battle without thinking of “us”: us the West, with our science, our medicine, our literature, our culture, our government, versus “them,” the Others who are not of the West. You may call this racism, and I’m not sure at all that it isn’t. Nevertheless, it seems to me it’s a chord that Jackson plays expertly if inexplicitly, and it gives the big fight in “Return of the King” a mythic feel to it.

Finally, there’s the big boom in “Cold Mountain.” History records that on July 30, 1864, Pennsylvania miners tunneled under the Confederate defenses at Petersburg, Va., planted tons of black powder, lit a fuse, and waited for it to go boom. When it did, Union infantry rushed forward. Alas, the boys got hung up and disorganized in the big hole they had just blown into the earth’s surface. The surviving Confederates shook the dirt off their clothes, plugged their bleeding ears with cotton, and shot most of the Union forces dead from the safety of the balcony. Talk about your great military screw-ups.

This battle, like the Somme and the Arnhem airborne invasion, has been used for some time as a model of military futility, and Anthony Minghella uses it brilliantly at the beginning of “Cold Mountain.” Watch his montage carefully, as he deftly ties the geography together by following a rabbit, driven from its burrow by the Union miners, until it flees across the ground to the Confederate trenchworks. What a brilliant device that briskly paints the spatial relationships in the sequence without a single word of expository dialogue -- which so many filmmakers, even to this day, rely on.

The explosion, when it comes, is stupendous, seen from the Confederate point of view, through the eyes of the infantryman Inman (Jude Law, who makes a great scrawny Southern fighter). The earth itself buckles -- there’s an image of war -- and the men are swallowed up in dirt and panic. Minghella goes silent, to convey the terror of burial underground, as the survivors claw their way out of the rain of debris. Now we are in the elemental world of the actual, and life itself depends on the vigor of the newly buried, and whether they have the energy to expend in an ecstasy of clawing or whether they quit and perish.

Inman emerges groggy and exhausted. Then he hears music and, through the drifting smoke, watches as the steady Union advance emerges. We feel his panic. But then we’re deftly again in the pit, as the Union troops come hard against the far wall of the crater and find it too steep to mount.

The Confederates stand above them, shooting. A new hell: One or two slip down, and in the pit itself we are somehow in the guts of war, where victory is determined not by skill at arms but by the totality of will to kill. Inman, searching for a fallen friend, descends (into madness, also), fights like a demon, saves his friend, and escapes.

The whole brilliant sequence has taken about three minutes, start to finish, but consider what it has accomplished: It has depicted the futility of a lost war, it has precisely re-created the tactical events of a pivotal battle, it has characterized the hero of the movie and made you feel exactly his revulsion, which will be the core of his motivation in the remainder of the movie.

That also gets at another use of battle in film: It’s at its best when it’s not just pure spectacle, but when it advances story and reflects (or establishes) character. Too often moviemakers forget that battles aren’t about troops -- they’re about men.