A Life Through Film #022: The Rock
A caged Cage makes magic with Bay in the bay
Release Date: 6/7/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
Here’s a quirk of life you may relate to: if you grow up near a major tourist attraction, it’s shockingly easy to never go see that attraction as a local. In fact, you may even write off the idea of going as silly and inessential. After all, what’s good for the tourist isn’t necessarily good for the resident. You understand the realities of where you live, why engage with the shiny façade that visitors pay far too much money to see?
And so as a kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, there were a few SF landmarks that it took me a while to visit in person. I had never even heard of the Chinatown Gate until I had to walk by it every day for my first job, and I didn’t frequent Golden Gate Park until I was walking there weekly while living in the Sunset during COVID lockdowns. To this day, I’ve never been to the Palace of Fine Arts, despite its many appearances as San Francisco set dressing in classic films like Vertigo [3/5]. Ironically, if I ever go, it’ll be as a tourist to the city, since I no longer live there.
The most famous local landmark that I totally missed going to, though, had to be Alcatraz. The prison island looms on the Bay from wherever along the water you look, making its decades as a maximum security prison fascinating to consider. As a citizen, seeing Alcatraz so clearly from the shore and knowing some of the most dangerous men in the world were there, gnashing at the teeth to escape must have been chilling. As an inmate, the proximity to freedom could drive you insane. But the nearness was an illusion; the security measures of the prison combined with the dangerous bay waters surrounding it means that no confirmed escapes were ever logged in the nearly 30 years that Alcatraz Prison operated.
This mystique, funneled to me via History Channel programs that focused on the prison’s eerier aspects, made Alcatraz a tourist trap that I actually did want to visit as a kid. Alas, circumstances didn’t line up for a visit until I was an adult visiting the area after moving away, but the trip surprisingly held up to my childhood expectations. The island holds simultaneous beauty and terror, making Alcatraz a paradoxical space of peace and misery at the same time, especially as you learn more and more of its history.
I fully enjoyed my visit to the former prison island, but I also now hold some disappointment that I wasn’t able to see it as a youth. I imagine, though, that my drive to see the landmark could have been boosted even more if I had been exposed to some exhilarating, lizard-brain Alcatraz representation at a younger age.
The Rock is a Michael Bay action movie starring Nicholas Cage, Sean Connery, Ed Harris, and a whole cadre of character actors that you could spend an afternoon pointing at and saying “Oh, that guy from the thing!”1 The plot follows a rogue group of Marines led by Ed Harris, who hold the entire Bay Area hostage under threat of bioweapon annihilation from their stronghold on Alcatraz. The FBI has no choice but to rely on the skills of a quirky biochemist (Cage) and a grizzled escape artist (Connery) to save the day.
In the years since The Rock was released, it’s developed a reputation as its director’s best film. Granted, that’s not exactly an achievement on par with an Olympic Gold Medal. Michael Bay is somewhat of a mirror image of past and future subject of this column David Fincher. Both men got their creative start by directing music videos2 in the ‘80s and early ‘90s before transitioning to feature films. Each man has a distinct style and genre of choice; Fincher’s dark tones and venetian blinds contrast completely with Bay’s bright explosions and spinning hero shots. A David Fincher movie is dark, mysterious, philosophical even. A Michael Bay movie is about as subtle as a bright neon Coca-Cola advertisement, and some would say just as artistically meritorious.
But while Fincher’s movie career got off to a rocky start with Alien3, Bay was a popular hit maker from the jump thanks to his first movie, 1995’s Bad Boys. Though not a critical success at the time, the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence buddy action comedy pulled in over $65 million and spawned a billion dollar franchise that continues to this day. An early hit doesn’t always guarantee a lengthy career, but Michael Bay’s cinematic style was undeniably built for a generation of young men who loved paying money to see big explosions, hot women, and quippy one-liners in their glossy, exciting action movies.
It didn’t hurt that Bay was able to get funding for his action projects from megaproducers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the pair behind the original Top Gun [3/5] and Beverly Hills Cop. Bruckheimer had known Bay since the director’s music video days, and pegged his flashy style and confidence with a camera as the signs of a future star director. And with Bad Boys, the producer was proved right. Simpson and Bruckheimer knew how to get popcorn blockbusters made, so when they were handed a script by Disney (operating through their Hollywood Pictures branch) about a terrorist attack on Alcatraz, they knew just which director to go to.
Funny thing about that screenplay. Though originally written as a spec script by writing pair David Weisberg and Douglas Cook, once Simpson and Bruckheimer got their mitts on it, the producers shopped it around to an army of other writers for rewrites and punch ups. Evidently Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin were among the many uncredited scribes who had a hand in the story and plot of The Rock. I wouldn’t say they left much of a creative impact on the final movie, but I think the producers were just throwing bodies at the problem. If you were a screenwriter at the time, it seemed more than likely that you spilled at least a little ink onto the shooting script for The Rock.
Once Bay was attached to the project, he brought on writer Jonathan Hensleigh, who made a brief appearance in this column already as one of the credited screenwriters on Jumanji. According to the director, no writer had more of an impact on what actually ended up in the final version of The Rock than Hensleigh, with the two men collaborating for months to ensure a unified vision of the film. However, the Writers Guild of America decided that final credit of the script would go to Weisberg and Cook as a pair, as well as Mark Rosner, one of the writers brought in for pre-production rewrites.
I can’t speak for today, but WGA accreditation was a controversial subject in the mid ‘90s specifically (it’ll sneakily become a recurring theme through this summer of 1996). A 1998 New York Times piece that explored more contentious moments of improperly credited screenplays explained that the Guild prioritized the initial writer or writers behind a script, even if the final film barely resembled that first draft. In a business where story rewrites are absurdly common, this led to swaths of writers whose hard work on a film went fully uncredited. It was a silly, out of date system that frustrated many. Even former WGA president Frank Pierson had to own up to the chaos of the crediting system in 1998 with hilarious frankness:
The large majority of credits are still straightforward and uncontested. When they go wrong, they go horribly wrong.
Bay was pissed at the WGA for refusing to credit Hensleigh. The director went to bat for his writer in the press, calling the Guild’s decision a “sham” and a “travesty” in an open letter published around the release of the movie. Bay was just one of a few Hollywood creatives to call out the cryptic, opaque practices of the WGA at the time; if you can believe it, we’ll be looking at another case of this just next week. Alas, his efforts didn’t change the crediting in The Rock. Hensleigh’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the credits, despite the movie allegedly looking nothing like the original spec script because of his hard work.
Obviously I’m all for proper accreditation (that’s why I include a Works Cited page at the bottom of the column each week), but I do find it a bit funny that this is the movie that caused such a public hubbub. This is far from the worst written movie I’ve reviewed for this column (Black Sheep is still the winner of that distinguished honor), but I could count its interesting story or character ideas on one hand. This isn’t the kiss of death you might think it should be though. After all, this is a Michael Bay action movie starring legitimately talented actors. Despite all of the hullabaloo around the script, they all make it work.
The most impressive narrative element of The Rock is without a doubt its villain. Brigadier General Hummel (Harris) is the first character we see on screen, and everything about him screams “hero.” He’s decorated veteran who cares about the men he served with and lost, the kind of man who brings flowers to his wife’s grave and promises to do right by her memory. With stoic confidence and love in his heart, he takes over a secret military base and steals the bioweapons they have stashed behind their most secure vault door. And that’s all before we ever get to Alcatraz.
When you find out his motivation for holding hundreds of thousands of people hostage is to ensure proper compensation to the families of fellow black ops soldiers, Hummel only grows more fascinating. Is he really planning on pulling the trigger if his demands aren’t met? Does he expect to get out of this situation? How much of his plan has he coordinated with the squad of men more loyal to him than they are to the United States? Harris, an actor I am always thrilled to see, layers his performance with both macho bravado and quiet moments of doubt, making an already compelling character on paper the most memorable aspect of The Rock.
Our actual protagonists, played by Cage and Connery, are less interesting than their adversary by nature of not being able to surpass him on the motivation front. But actors of this caliber know how to twist even the flattest character into something that jumps off of the screen. This was Cage’s first movie to come out after his Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas. As important as it was to prove that that award was no fluke, The Rock also provided Cage with the opportunity to star in his first ever action movie.
The actor later said that many around him doubted his ability to pull this genre switch off. Cage turned those haters into motivators and ensured his employment in another decade of action movies to follow. As we’d come to expect from this dude, he makes some characteristically strange choices. His character of a nerdy FBI biochemist is supposed to be the “normal” person in the cast, but Cage decided to show that by never cursing. Besides that though, his character is a profoundly strange dude. The actor injects some of his signature hamminess into the role, leading to hilarious narrative disconnect when we, for example, get a moment of the actor screaming the word “BUTTHOLE” louder than anyone has ever screamed it before.
The casting of Sean Connery as a wizened badass was absolutely a play for audience nostalgia (check out the trailer I linked above if you don’t believe me), but I don’t think that the actor saw his role in The Rock as slumming it like other former Bond actors I’ve covered in this series. It helps that most of the movie relies on his character, an aged escape artist who secretly broke out of Alcatraz in the ‘70s, projecting a cool aura that inspires everyone around him to try and be more badass. That’s just something Connery does naturally. Though you can tell Connery’s joints were pretty stiff as he shuffled around in the film’s action scenes, the legendary Scotsman could still be trusted to bring some dapper charisma to the role, though it doesn’t quite measure up to his Bond work.
Still, Connery was at least a little over making these kinds of movies at this point. A report from the time made the older actor sound annoyed at having to shoot in cramped sets with so many practical effects happening around him that all his dialogue would have to be added in post anyway. Regardless, Cage and Bay loved working with him, especially when some sad news hit the set. A month into shooting, producer Don Simpson passed away at home from a massive cocaine and pill overdose. Though continued production of The Rock was never in doubt, it still took Bay a day to recover from the news. Connery was less affected. He had only met Simpson once when the producer had visited the set less than a week before his death in what sounds like a rough appearance. Connery later said on Simpson’s death:
Having only met him briefly, I was not completely surprised.
Of course, this is an action movie. Any memorable characters are an unexpected bonus as we galivant from one explosive set piece to the next. No one ever wants to admit it, but Bay can stage some quality extravagant action. His style is distinct and can scale from fist fights to the apocalypse. They’re simultaneously filled to bursting with visual overload but also totally bare of complicated or layered imagery. When it comes to understanding what the director is going for, the barrier to entry for a movie like The Rock is a functioning pair of eyeballs. And even then, you could probably get by without your glasses on.
At the time, maybe it looked like the future of the genre. Bay’s movies look like someone rubbed Vaseline on the film stock during the editing process. His oeuvre ends up a visual far cry from far grittier, nastier action movies of the ‘80s like The Terminator [4/5]. In The Rock, Bay’s flair for strong visuals occasionally leads to a frustrating feeling of style over substance, but goddamn it if some of that style isn’t cool.
A squadron of fighter jets fly in slow motion low over Nicholas Cage as he holds a pair of flares outstretched in both hands. A San Francisco street car careens down a hill and hits every car on the way down, causing an unbelievable explosion with each impact. A rapid zoom on Sean Connery bursting through a decrepit metal door, welcoming a team of Marines to The Rock. He’s not a subtle visionary, but at his peak Michael Bay can really tap into the part of my brain that worships the Rule of Cool. With The Rock, he hits that peak mode a few times.
Much of the movie was filmed on location, lending a strange eeriness to the otherwise fun action. I like the visuals of the abandoned island prison as a backdrop to this story in particular though. In universe, our villain seeks justice for the ghosts of his past. Meanwhile, the metatextual effect of a past star like Connery strutting through the ruins of earlier decades is striking to think about, even if it’s just in an effort to get him to the next gun fight.
Unfortunately, even by this early point in his career Bay had codified some of his more annoying directorial quirks. Many close ups in the action scenes are shaky to the point of nausea. They’re a far cry from his more elaborate, dare I say beautiful shots, and the movie briefly becomes unwatchable when they show up. Speaking of classic Bayisms, the constant shots of helicopters and other military vehicles feel almost fetishistic. As someone who isn’t that interested in that heavy hardware, the effect is similar to when Tarantino has beautiful women show off their bare feet in his films.
Most irritating though? There are only two female characters of note in this movie, both defined by either their ability to bear children or to already be the child of a more important male character. It’s the kind of representation that gives action movies a bad reputation as chauvinistic drivel. Even by the standard of the genre at the time this is weirdly regressive; Broken Arrow only had one woman in it, but at least she was an integral part of the action. Here, it’s a total sausage fest.
I still like The Rock as a movie to turn your brain off to though. Unfortunately, its clever villain fails to elevate its narrative beyond a cool concept, but the action itself is thrilling enough to warrant a watch if you’re in the mood for a really fun era of Nicholas Cage movies.
It’s not exactly a surprise that The Rock debuted atop the weekend box office when it did. It was summertime, the perfect period for dumb action movies (and God knows we’ll be seeing a few of those over the next few weeks of the column), and this one stars a recent Oscar winner and shares a director with Bad Boys. This is one of those movies which, if executed well, could be a hit in basically any year. So while it’s not exactly a great reflection of the time period’s culture, it at least shows that movie goers of 1996 were big into fun that summer.
The Rock garnered mediocre reviews at the time, which by modern Bay standards means it was a critical darling. For some critics, like Roger Ebert and Owen Gliebermann, the film’s lack of subtlety and high energy pacing was to its benefit, even if it made the movie feel more like a roller coaster than your standard thriller. Meanwhile, Hal Hinson of the Washington Post found these same qualities to be exhausting and annoying. At the end of his review, he reflects on The Rock as part of Don Simpson’s legacy:
Ultimately, the movie deteriorates into a long commercial for the home-game version of itself. And, with regard to Simpson and the Simpson/Bruckheimer legacy, this total surrender to merchandising is particularly sad.
Action fans today look back fondly on The Rock, especially when compared to Bay’s later output in the 2000s. I disagree with it being his best film, but I totally understand how someone could come to that conclusion. In a write up of the film for The AV Club, Tom Breihan explained The Rock in the context of its director’s filmography nicely when talking about the moment a cable car careens down a crowded road:
It’s a quintessential Bay scene: giddy and fun and satisfying in some lizard-brain way, but unable to withstand even the slightest smidge of skepticism.
Of course, it’s June at the movie theater, so big dumb action movies are going to do big business even if the reviews are mixed. The movie crushed the competition during its opening weekend, pulling in $25 million dollars, nearly double the take for a stale Mission: Impossible in second place. Though only number one for a single week, The Rock continued to rake in millions for the rest of the summer. When it left theaters around Halloween, it had grossed $134 million in the US and $336 million in total thanks to its impressive international run. By year’s end, The Rock found itself as the 7th best performing feature of 1996.
Still, one wonders if it could have done better. Compared to the bonkers success of Twister and Mission: Impossible, the previous two blockbusters of the year, The Rock’s big gains at the box office feel expected but not outrageous. Those movies featured more characters that weren’t just famous white dudes, and, in the case of Twister, even had a woman leading the film. Meanwhile, The Rock’s aggressive masculinity and military obsession is firmly for the boys. Obviously the movie made great money without having to appeal to the women visiting the theater during the summer of ‘96, but I believe there was money left on the table. The eventual biggest movie of 1996 was another summer blockbuster that looked more into the emotional arcs of its characters, even as its primarily male cast dealt with explosive set piece after explosive set piece. We’ll get to that in a few weeks though.
As we continue to advance through the virtual timeline, Bay’s style of sleek, over the top action will only become more and more prevalent. The gnarlier, muddier action of a Predator or even Die Hard [4/5, not a Christmas movie] will begin to subsist primarily in increasingly niche films until, arguably, the success of John Wick decades down the line. Between then and now, though, we’re gonna see a lot of big, stupid action movies. A good handful will be better than The Rock, but that shouldn’t scare you off from checking this movie out. If it catches you in the right mood, you may even find yourself eager for a quick trip to Alcatraz to see where it all went down. I recommend the self-guided audio tour if you do.
Rating: 3/5
Next Week: It’s time to check in with Jim Carrey again. After contractual obligations to play the hits in his last movie, though, the man was ready for a change. Join me next week as the biggest comedian of 1996 tries to break down his public persona to odd effect in The Cable Guy.
See you then!
-Will
My favorite? Hands down, frequent James Cameron collaborator Michael Biehn
My favorite? Hands down, one hit wonder “I Touch Myself” by Divinyls
(Okay I’ll stop this bit now)