As I said, I’m still in the middle of it, but…Cruise and Moore are surprisingly good, and given his penchant for overacting…Nicholson is surprisingly restrained (until the big moment of course). He doesn’t flip his lid in the early scene (“You gotta show me some respect”) but in a moment of nice foreboding, you can see the rivets start to pop.
It suffers from the Associative Eureka Trope (X-Files? Fox? Stocks? Locks? Bicycles?..no wait, back up…Locks? Socks? Socks!! That’s it! He didn’t pack any socks!) but it’s very good.
Let me clean up my hypothesis. This is the prosecutions case:
One doctor who says Santiago ‘Absolutely’ died of poisoning. (I wonder if later, if he needs to, he can fidget around that by saying Santiago did die of poisoning. Acidosis)
Motive: To silence Santiago.
The defendants confession.
Now IMHO the motive is weak. Cruise says as much in the montage.
The doctor. IMHO his ‘absolutely’ HURTS the case. Cruise was already prepared to call several experts who would refute the doctor’s claim.
So when Cruise recalls Stone (The doctor. Provided he has that right) and asks Stone, “Now you’ve heard ten men with more expertise than yourself in criminology, and poisons testify that there is NO WAY anyone can claim Santiago was absolutely poisoned. And that it is EXTREMELY unlikely Dawson and Downey would have access to the ‘literally dozens of toxins that leave no trace in a body or on a rag it was soaked in’…given that they are exotic and obscure. Dr. Stone, how can you sit there and put your entire career on the line and say in the face of these ten men, Santiago was ABSOLUTELY poisoned?”
The confession. The defendants confessed to manslaughter, not to murder one. And manslaughter wasn’t an option for the jury.
IMNSPO, the prosecution doesn’t have a chance. They have no poison, no witnesses to establish motive (“I heard him say he was going to get Santiago”) no witnesses to establish conspiracy. No bruises or marks on Santiago.
Closing argument: “It doesn’t matter if Dawson and Downey went in with a Code Red, or if it was a tickle fight gone wrong. The prosecution has not even remotely proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Dawson and Downey conspired to go to Santiago’s room and murder him. Ladies and gentlemen, which is the more likely scenario? That Dawson and Downey snuck out into the Cuban jungle and milked the venom sacs of female Wolfenstein Spiders for three days? Or that they were engaged in the practice of… which we’ve already established as a common occurrence…called a Code Red?”
And I reckon that’s a tip-off that, as Dale suggests, the state’s case isn’t as strong as it might seem at first blush.
One of my favorites, too. I’ll Rob Reiner’s output from '84 to '92 up against almost anybody’s, for a sustained creative peak.
My primary beef with it is that Caffee never calls Jessup out on his hideous, self-serving hypocrisy. The man was lecturing all and sundry about honor and loyalty, while conspiring to evade punishment for something he’d done, and put two other men in prison in his place. Caffee has one line about it (“And when it went bad, you cut these guys loose!”), and given the quick-hitting, dramatic nature of the final testimony scene, there probably wasn’t a good opportunity for it, but every time I watch the movie I want to leap into the film and give Jessup a nasty scolding.
Don’t forget too, that the defendants’ credibility was completely blown out of the water when it was discovered they lied, on record, about being ordered to give the Code Red. The instant Downey admitted he was not even in the barracks when Kendrick allegedly ordered Dawson and him to give the Code Red, even though they had both previously stated that he was there, Kaffey’s entire strategy went out the window. At that point, all he could do was get Kendrick and/or Jessup to somehow admit they had given the order.
Are they exotic and obscure, though? I don’t recall the film addressing this point. If something Dawson and Downey had easy access to - bore solvent, bug spray, boot polish - was a toxin that would casue acidosis but be otherwise undectable, it’d support Dr. Stone’s conclusion.
You know…that scene is a bit confusing. Am I to understand that Downey lied to protect Dawson? That they fudged things a bit because they didn’t want it coming out that Downey actually gave the Code Red? Via Kendrick and Jessup of course.
Well we know bug spray and boot polish aren’t going to up and evaporate from a rag…i’ll dare the wrath of the NSA and do an online search for undetectable poisons.
Downey and Dawson both lied. They both said in their statements that they were both present when Kendrick ordered them to give a Code Red. I presume they did that because it would have boosted their case to have two people claiming to have heard the Code Red order. And it seemed safe enough - it’s not like Kendrick could have claimed “Oh no, I only ordered Dawson to give the Code Red, not Downey.” But when it was proved Dawson couldn’t possibly have been present, it looked like they made up the whole thing.
Heh. I’m making note of differences between the play and movie and have found about five things so far that Sorkin did very nicely to clean up his play.
One is…that play is very funny. Kaffee (to an extent), Sam, the Judge and Whitaker all have very funny and dry lines. That’s FOUR comic relief guys contrasted with the marines who can stick coal between their ass cheeks and make diamonds. On top of the fact that a man was killed. The movie is still funny, but it evens the tone out by cutting a lot of the funny lines.
Another that I just realized…in the play, Kendrick tells all the squad leaders “Pass on my words to Private Downey. ANYTHING I say at this meeting to the squad leaders is to be considered a direct order to the squad members”
Kendrick then tells Alpha, Bravo and Charlie not to touch Santiago, but after dismissing them he tells Dawson (and therefore all of Delta) to give Santiago a Code Red.
By cutting that scene Sorkin clears up the possibility of my scenario arising. In the play Dawson and Downey are still caught in the lie, but cutting that scene keeps people from going “Waitaminute”
Quotes on imdb are added by users. So someone not related to the movie just added that description/interpretation. IIRC, he does pause a few seconds while staring pissed off at Kaffee before answering.
Because most people in the movie audience don’t know that, and would find it odd if they kept referring to Dawson as “Lance” ? Too much jargon can screw up a movie.
Dunn, Hammaker, and Howard are Corporals. Dawson is a Lance Corporal and in the play is repeatedly referred to as such. In fact, it’s one of the points of the play that Dawson is still a LANCE Corporal because he at one point refused illegal hazing orders. Kendrick coerces Dawson into the Code Red by repeatedly calling him Lance Corporal and telling him to get his house in order so that his men (and God) can respect him.
If anyone is still following all this, I did find an online cite saying that Bacon’s opening statement is completely out of bounds.
