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Review: Behind Enemy Lines
The plot centers on an aircraft carrier patrolling near the end of the savage conflict in Bosnia. The ship is run by Americans but under the command of NATO, a setup for the murky global politics that underscore the plot. Lt. Chris Burnett (Wilson) is sick of the routines of non-combat flying and is considered a spoiled hotdog by his weary Admiral Riegart (Hackman). A wise-cracking smartass, he's sent on an aerial reconnaissance mission on Christmas Day. Ever looking to push the envelope (shades of Tom Cruise in Top Gun ), he veers off course and takes pictures of things he's not supposed to see -- civilians being slaughtered. His plane is shot down in a whiz-bang, special-affects laden sequence, his co-pilot and best buddy murdered as he looks on helplessly.
From the first shot, Director John Moore knows exactly what he's doing. The movie has an authentic, gung-ho quality too it, and it's eerily prescient -- the spy satellite and thermal imaging stuff is right out of today's evening newscasts. The Bosnian war and background scenes are authentic and disturbing. The movie moves like a rocket, pushed along by jump cuts, aerial shots and changes in film speed and angles. It doesn't get cluttered up with the usual distractions (remember Pearl Harbor's belabored love interests and other digressions?). And it actually ends right where it should, a minor cinematic miracle these days! Wilson convincingly evolves from an irresponsible snot-nose into a resourceful warrior, pursued by cool, murderous Bosnian soldiers who want to get the film of a massacre he shot from his onboard digital camera. Riegert is snarled in bureaucracy, his efforts to save the pilot complicated by a weak-kneed U.S. government and NATO wussies worried about global politics and diplomatic concerns.
As the onboard Marines restlessly lobby to fire up their Apaches and go in and get him, Wilson dodges and battles the Bosnian army all over the European forests (the movie was shot in Eastern Europe). The ending is pure John Wayne. This is a first-rate war thriller under any circumstances, but given the particular ones raging in Afghanistan, it's going to be a blockbuster.
I think the Tom Cruise movie you are thinking of is "Top Gun", not "Top Dog." No big deal, but might throw some people off.
I only saw the trailers but it doesn't seem very realistic. Americans never leave their dead or missing on the battlefield. Not after Vietnam. When I was in the army we were taught that we should risk our own lives to bring back the bodies of our dead. To the US Army Rangers it's a part of life. Somalia is an example. Same thing with missing. You search for them until you are sure they are dead and then you bring back the remains.
But it's a good story for Hollywood about a rogue officer trying to do what is right and going against the beauracracy. Americans hate beauracracy and it reflects in our art.
Did he just NOT insult a movie for once? IMPOSTER! Actually whatever you've done with the real Jon Katz please leave him there!
I generally liked it, but I had a few quibbles.
1. Too much use of camera shake. This made it hard to watch in some points, while not really helping tell the story in any way. It also gave me a creepy feeling at one point.... The obviously hand-held camera is following our hero, and I'm wondering: Who is following our guy around with a camera? The shake makes it seem like there should be a person there.
2. Too heavy-handed use of music soundtrack. I don't like being lead by the nose with music telling me what I should feel at every moment in the movie. Silence can be golden. Just watch 2001: A Space Odyssey again, you'll see.
3. The whole theme of hero's doubts about "why are we here" seems quaintly anachronistic after the events of Sept 11. So do the parts where UN officials are bossing around the US Navy. Can anyone imagine that happening today? The world has changed in a short time, and this film is already taking on the feeling of a historical piece.
You say this like it's a good thing, a tendency I've noticed in many reviews lately. For some reason a movie is regarded as too long if it even comes close to the two hour mark. DVD fans will know another side of the issue; director commentaries always talk about the parts they had to slash, and the number of unused scenes only seem to grow.
I understand perfectly well that in many cases a movie can be made too long, making it boring or just too long-winded. But why is a short movie seen as a good thing in itself? If a movie is really good, I'd love to stay in the theatre for three hours, or more. If it isn't good, I'll just leave. I can't tell you how many movies I've seen lately where I wished it would just last longer, and show us more of the story.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I liked the movie overall until the end, which seemed too much like an Indiana Jones finish. I served with the US Army under the NATO led IFOR (Implimentation Force) back in 95. From what I saw I was really impressed with the markings on the vehicles, uniforms etc. It looked so much like the former Yugoslavia to me that I stayed to watch the credits. I wanted to see where it was actually filmed. One scene they are in a factory, (I was shaking my head in disbelief) which appeared to be just like a tank factory we were stationed at in Slavonski Brod,Croatia. I am sure there is someone out there who will nit pick the innaccuracies, but at first glance the attention to detail as far as the country and military forces was excellent in my opinion.
From what I've seen of the previews it seems to be a "go team America, bring our boys home" kinda movie, but the methods they use to get there are pretty lame. The special-effects shots look great, but if it's all show and no meat then I'm not interested.
I read another reviewer talk about the main character's adventures by saying "standing on a ridge, making a target of himself, running in the open, etc, etc"? Stuff like that may look good on the big screen but in real life it'll get you an ass-full of lead.
A few random blurbs:
http://www.filmomh.com/r74.htm
http://www.upcomingmovies.com/nomansland.html
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilm/product/film_info/0,3 69 9,2406267,00.html
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/movie-1111144/
troodon.net
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The action scenes were definately cool, but I think that plot is still the quintessential part of a movie. There were a number of plot weaknesses.
Who was that random sniper guy who keeps appearearing? What a generic villain. How did he survive 5 or six shots from a pistol?
How did the hero survive a whole battalion shooting at him?? *sigh*
What was up with that random serbian guy he befriended? That kid played NO part at all, so why was he even in there?
They should have worked the genocide angle a little more to make the audience even more angry at the heartless enemy. Not just a generic mass grave...
It just goes to show that even the coolest special effects can't make up for a weak plot. Producers should at least try to make the plot a little more coherent.
That's my 2 cents. Feel free to flame if you loved the movie.
"The movie has an authentic, gung-ho quality too it"
Katz, do you even know what the hell gung-ho really means? Gung-ho means "striving for harmony" which is what pretty much the core leadership model for the USMC Raider Battalions (which started as an experiment on chinese comunist guerrilla operations).
Katz was probably referring to the bastardized version of "gung ho" made popular by the propaganda movies of the period.
As for the movie itself, it rocked. Loud as hell and well worth it. The politics of the movie were disturbing, which added to the overall theme.
One thing that did not make any sense was when Gene Hackman called the aircraft carrier a "boat." In the navy a surface vessel is a "ship," while a "boat" is a submarine (not that it matters, since to a submariner, anything on the surface is classified as a target, hostile or not). Notice that our submarines are built at a place called the Electric Boat Company (General Dynamics, http://www.gdeb.com/) while our surface vessels are built in shipyards (like for example Grumman's Newport News shipyard, http://www.nns.com/).
Still, it rocked. It definitely rocked. I think Behind Enemy Lines took the title from Top Gun for the aerial sequences.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
"If you're looking for anything beyond flashy entertainment, Behind Enemy Lines feels out of whack from the start."
-- Stephanie Zacharek, SALON.COM
"The exhausting obsession with gizmos and gotchas only accentuates a baffling disinterest in the story's emotional crux."
-- Jessica Winter, VILLAGE VOICE
"The Bosnian War becomes a video game, Gene Hackman turns into a pseudo-John Wayne, and Owen Wilson and Vladimir Mashkov impersonate The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote."
-- Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"Pro forma stuff, so much so that you start to wonder why no fetching femme resistance fighter materializes to help the Americans on the ground."
-- Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"An implausible military technology adventure that takes about 10 minutes to get started, then climaxes for an hour-and-a-half."
-- Paul Tatara, CNN
as the top five reviews I have to wonder. Couple that with the fact that Film Threat (with whom I agree about 90% of the time) gave it one star, and the sleaziness factor from knowing they moved the release date up to cash in on the September 11th bombing and I think I will be taking this review with more than a grain of salt :)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
That pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject.
I too was kind of shocked by some of the movies unrealistic scenes. Ok, flying off course a major mistake in and off itself is the premise for the movie and it is believable. I knew that was not realistic but it was belivable so the movie was still good.
Owen wilson did a good job in this role actually.
The scene with the SAM launched missiles and them evading and then ejecting were really awesome. I mean I have seen a ton of those scenes before but that missile chase scene was very engrossing and some of the footage for those scenes was plain awesome.
Once they hit the ground the movie starts getting a little silly. They know they are in hostile territory and he leaves his man laying injured in the middle of a wide open field.... NOT! At least if he would have dragged him to some woods and hid him and THEN the enemy army found him it would have seemed better, but that was a dumb movie mistake. The scene where they shot the pilot made me jump even though I knew it was coming.. it was well done.. just not realisitc.
Next You have owen wilson dodging an impossible number of bulletsand explosive tank rounds....... It was a good chase scene one of them would have been okay.
Then you have owen wilson sitting on some sort of broken stone structure. The main pursuer with the nice sniper rifle misses his target that has been sitting still for at least 5 minutes. In the real world if he was sitting in the open for so long that sniper would not have missed, end of the movie.
The pursuit continues and wilson manages to survive in what seemed to be the epicenter of a bunch of mines of some sort (I don;t know the military terminology for waht they were). ANyways it was not realistic after they showed what it did to the enemy soliders.
everything else in the movie is pretty good until the last scene. That last scene had me wishing it didnt happen.
They fly in with a few marine helicopters. There are a ton of enemy tanks and soliders all approaching owen wilson. Then these helicopters pop up, stay in the same place and somehow decimate the enemy for like four minutes. The footage was nice, but I just DONT see how the enemy solders can be such a bad shot that they could not hit these practicaly stationary helicopters for a full four minutes. Oh and whats with the enemy commander sitting there in plain view prancing about yelling in anger and never getting hit while everyone around him dies?
Oh and they happened to see the supa camo'd enemy sniper and shoot him a few moments before he fired?????
That last scene was bad
Overall the movie was great and the footage and way it was filmed were very nice. The camera angles were good (except those damn shaking camera scenes, won't those Private Ryan Esque scenes ever stop??? )
I am a little critical of a few scenes since I know a good deal about military procedure because I have a couple friends in special forces in the army.
Overall.. the movie was fun and they didnt truly spoil it until the end so I thought it was an alright movie.
Jeremy
The two major actors -- Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson -- are terrific, balancing and complimenting one another.
Wilson: Gene, your rendition of a strong self-confident military commander was so... so "Patton-esque". You were absolutely brilliant.
Hackman: Why, thank you! But, Owen my boy, your portrayal of a solder with keen survival instincts reveals the Rambo hidden in every man. Inspiring, to say the least.
Wilson: You are too kind, dear sir.
But the piece betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how foreign policy is shaped. First, the world we live in is not black and white. More often than not, we're dealing with international problems that have no clean, clear answer.
For example, it's easy to dismiss American Cold War fears of Castro's Cuba. But then, he did ask for and receive assistance from the Soviets in the form of missiles, didn't he?
The Vietnam War was by almost anyone's estimation, a wasteful, stupid blunder of immense proportions. But let us not forget that a large part of the reason the US got involved in the first place was that the Soviets were making advances of one sort or another on almost every continent. They had what the US perceived to be a client state in North Vietnam.
The Soviet Union espoused a form of government that viewed the destruction of capitalism and the bourgeous democracies as a primary goal.
US foreign policy was dictated by the overarching threat of communism. Sure, now it seems a joke - it collapsed from the inside, from its own weight. But just as sabre-rattling from the West scared the Soviets, the US was scared by Soviet threats as well.
Yes, there are other factors at work. Yes, the Soviet Union is now dead. Yes, mistakes are still being made in US foreign policy.
But the September 11th attacks didn't happen because Bin Laden was pissed off about the Vietnam War, or about the Bay of Pigs, or our meddling with Iran. Bin Laden was pissed off because we supported Saudi Arabia, a country whose rulers he sees as morally corrupt.
Our reasons for supporting the House of Saud over the years primarily stemmed from our desire to maintain stability in the Middle East. During the Cold War, the Soviets were trying as hard as possible to exert influence there, in hopes that by choking off the supply of oil to the West, Europe and the United States would become vulnerable.
We utilized balance of power politics, the same thing that Metternich used in Europe to avoid a major war for years. It's not policy driven by right and wrong. It's policy driven by expediency. It's not perfect. Hell, it's barely adequate much of the time.
But I'd much rather trust foreign policy to people who are thinking of overall balances and stability and peace, than people who would rather persue blindly optimistic policy based on idealism.
The track record of idealistic US foreign policy is pretty dismal. Woodrow Wilson got us involved in WWI too late, because he was loathe to go to war. Then his idealism failed at the Treaty of Versailles, because he went along with France's desire to humiliate and punish Germany.
Jimmy Carter was so infatuated with the idea of working with the Soviets for detente, that when they surprised him by invading Afghanistan, he launched a massive arms buildup (yes, Reagan didn't start it - Carter did) and sent the CIA in to support the mujahedin.
So while it's easy to throw rocks, and it's easy to look at history in retrospect, dealing with the day-to-day matters of international relations is a mite trickier.
The UN won't save you from terrorists. Germany won't work to protect American jobs by keeping the price of oil stable. Japan isn't going to keep India and Pakistan from nuking each other. It's a big, complicated, dangerous world out there.
Finally, the argument that Americans are being misled by the government about US foreign policy is a load of crap. American foreign policy aims are well known to anyone who takes the time to read about them.
Foreign policy is a complex topic, and you can't get a grip on it by watching E! Entertainment News. Less than half the eligible population of the US votes. News shows that stick to news get lower ratings than those that pander to the lowest common denominator.
Americans largely don't want to think about international affairs. That is a far more serious problem for the US in the long run than any specific policy blunders.
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