The Rock – 1996
Budget: $75 Million
Box Office Gross: $335.1 Million
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 66
Number of Explosions: 6
“It’s on a need to know basis. And you don’t need to know.”
Every character in The Rock is keeping a secret from others. And every character in The Rock is having information withheld from them. The plot, each character arc, and the theme of the movie cover the power and authority that come with holding information that others lack.
Ed Harris’ General Hummel threatens to release chemical weapons in San Francisco, killing millions. The audience knows that he doesn’t intend to hard anyone. But the threat of danger is his secret, and the secret is what gives him power.
Hummel’s motivation? Frustration that the USMC won’t pay reparations to families of Marine special operatives who died performing secret missions. Harris’ knowledge of the secrets of these operatives is what makes him take extreme actions.
Every character has a secret agenda. Nic Cage’s Stanley Goodspeed constantly lies, to his girlfriend, to his counterpart John Mason (played by Sean Connery), and later to the FBI about Connery’s fate. These lies give him the free will to act as he chooses. When he is at risk of being found out, like when he tells the obvious lie that he has combat and anti-terrorism training, he is in danger of retribution. But as long as he maintains his secrets he is powerful, as powerful as if the lie were true.
Again we come to the difficult intersection of the director and the long list of specialists who work on a movie. The Rock is expertly written by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg and they are the ones who put these motivations into the minds of their characters as well as the words that help the audience understand them. But Bay is the one who chooses how and when to reveal these motivations, through staging and dialog and imagery. Again, never the one for subtlety, he shows a character’s pants literally catching on fire at one point. But he also shows Harris’ struggle with maintaining his threat while carefully avoiding hurting anyone.
Bay interned briefly for Steven Spielberg on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark*, (and famously thought the movie was going to be terrible) and seems to have picked up a lot from Spielberg’s storytelling methods. While Bay is not sentimental in the same way Spielberg is, their technical approach to showing the characteristics of a scene are quite similar.
*By the way, check out Steven Soderbergh’s beautiful version of Raiders which has been stripped of all sound and color and re-scored to the electronic music used in Soderbergh’s television show The Knick. It is surprisingly engaging and not at all hard to follow even without any dialog. A great study in composition and visual storytelling.
What we interpret as scenes and pictures with our minds are actually a series of pictures. When you look at the something your eye is rapidly and constantly scanning the surroundings and taking snapshots and your brain pieces the snapshots together to create what you interpret as an image. Some filmmakers choose to leverage this natural capability of the human brain by creating complex painting-like compositions that describe an entire scene in a single picture. Think of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road where each frame is a tremendously complex and beautiful work of art.
Michael Bay (and to an extent, Spielberg) take more of an abstract approach, replicating your eye/brain process by actually showing you each individual chunk that makes up a larger scene. In a Michael Bay action scene, or even in a conversation, the camera is constantly showing you new things. A close up of a character. A piece of scenery. An object. The space between characters. A different angle. Another angle. Light pouring in from a window. You get a sense of space and time and motion that doesn’t exist in any single frame but does exist as a composition of shots. This is purist filmmaking.
This is a decidedly less “beautiful” approach than employing a cinematographer to capture intensely focused and massive establishing photographs and each picture fails to take your breath away. But it is a wonderfully effective way at telling a story that respects time as well as space in a medium like film. Bay is an excellent communicator and whether he knows it theoretically or not he has a precise understanding of how humans like their information paced and distributed to best understand a moment.
This expert dispersal of knowledge is almost a meta-narrative when combined with The Rock‘s themes of knowledge and authority. The skill would rarely be described as an art but the amount of technical and intellectual expertise required to master it is truly artistic in nature. Note that the heroes of The Rock are masters of knowledge – Goodspeed because of his expertise relevant to the diffusion of the film’s chemical McGuffins, and Mason whose entire life has been about spycraft and access to hidden information.
People who succeed are those who have special knowledge that no one else has. When others learn their secrets, they can be threatened. A surprisingly topical lesson considering 2016’s issues of privacy, disclosure, and access to information.
“Losers try their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
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