Stargate

Stargate (1994)
Dir. by Roland Emmerich

Starring Kurt Russell, James Spader and Jaye Davidson

[content warning: Orientalism, transphobia, white savior narratives, depression, suicide, child death]

Plot:

Egyptologist and conspiracy-theorist Daniel Jackson is hired by the government to translate a series of hieroglyphs on a stone unearthed in Giza in the 20s.  When he succeeds, he learns that they are the code to activate a portal to the other side of the universe.  Traveling with a team of soldiers to investigate the destination planet, Jackson becomes entangled in a revolution by the humans living on that planet against their alien overlords, who have taken the guises of the Egyptian deities.

Nostalgia:

I’m almost positive that I saw this movie in the theaters.  I don’t actually remember having done so, but it’s exactly the sort of movie I would have gone to see. If it wasn’t in the theaters, I certainly saw it on Pay-Per-View the next year.  We taped it off of TV, and the Extended Cut DVD is one of the first I can remember buying when I was in college and got my first DVD player.  I had several friends who were obsessed with the TV show at the time, but I never really watched it while it was airing.  Saw the first couple of seasons on DVD about a decade ago now, and that’s about it.

Review:

How the hell did this movie start a franchise that’s lasted for 25 years?  There’s been three TV shows, two direct-to-DVD movies, and a web series, all stemming from this action B-movie from the guys who brought you Geostorm and The Day After Tomorrow.  What did this movie had that so many other mid-90s movies didn’t?

I think what it had going for it, more than anything else, was its setting and design.  This movie came out in 1994, at a time when CG was beginning to take over the film world.  Sci-fi movies were big, and there hadn’t been a big, traditional fantasy movie since NeverEnding Story II in 1990, four years earlier.  While this isn’t, strictly speaking, a fantasy movie, the ancient Egyptian trappings give it much more of a time-traveling fantasy feel than most of the other sci-fi movies of the time.  It was something different and unexpected. 

It also helps that the movie has two strong leads.  An almost unrecognizably young James Spader, of The Blacklist fame, plays Daniel Jackson as a nerdy scientist who’s incredibly competent in his field, but is completely out of his depth in most other situations.  As a very nerdy kid myself, who’d later be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, I saw a lot of myself in Jackson, and immediately emphasized with him.  Despite his social awkwardness, Spader manages to imbue Jackson with some of the quirky humor that he would later bring to Alan Shore on Boston Legal. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, Jackson, in an attempt to communicate to the planet’s citizens that the disgusting-looking food they’ve given him tastes like chicken, flaps his arms up and down and makes clucking noises repeatedly.  Everyone – slave and Earth soldier alike – just stares at him.  It’s equal parts endearing and cringe-inducing, but goes a long way to making Jackson an actual person instead of a character defined by his job or role in the film.

The same can be said for Kurt Russell as Col. O’Neil.  The role could have just been played as a hard-ass military commander, and that’s what he seems to be for the first couple of scenes.  However, he’s introduced in a depressive state, with his son having recently died in an accidental shooting.  As the movies goes on, Russell brings in not only the sadness that one might expect with such a background, but also the anger.  His Russell is bitter and self-destructive, but not in a way that he’s willing to take down the rest of his men with him.  While I enjoyed Richard Dean Anderson in the role in what I saw of the TV series, I think that his portrayal is barely the same character as what we see in the movie, rounding off all of the sharp edges of his personality and making him a more lighthearted individual.  It works for the show, but I don’t think it would have for the movie.

Now, the setting does bring up legitimate concerns about Orientalism. The movie essentially revolves around the (already existing at the time) conspiracy theory that all of the great works of ancient Egypt were completed with alien assistance.  Because, of course, a culture from that part of the world wouldn’t have been able to do it on their own.  No, the pyramids were just landing docks for alien spacecraft, and all of Egyptian culture is based on lies and manipulation.  And it takes the arrival of the strong, Western military power to free the backwards, tribal slaves from their oppressors *eyeroll* (though, in the movie’s defense, they were deliberately kept in that state by the aliens.  The script wisely incorporates two millennia of linguistic drift and doesn’t have them speaking an existing dialect, and you could posit that there would have been a corresponding 2000-year tech increase if not for alien intervention).

So yeah, the cultural politics of Stargate aren’t great.  Also complicating matters is the casting of Jaye Davidson as the villain Ra. He had just come off of his debut performance as a transgender woman in the movie The Crying Game, a performance for which he’d received a Best Supporting Actor nomination.  His role here is obviously playing up that association, deliberately going for a very young, androgynous look for the utterly evil alien.  That this movie came out the same year as Ace Ventura, a movie also inspired by The Crying Game for its negative portrayal of a transgender woman, makes me convinced that the filmmakers were going for the same thing.  It seems to have actually been enough to get Jaye Davidson to quit acting altogether after this movie.

  

Fortunately for the franchise, from what I remember the TV show’s more complicated mythology manages to help alleviate this problem somewhat, though there are definitely individual episodes that are still cringe-worthy in an early TNG way (I’m looking at you, “Emancipation”).  I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already seen it, especially if you’re sensitive to Orientalism or white savior narratives. I still enjoyed the movie, however, despite its more obvious flaws, though that enjoyment has drifted more into the “guilty pleasure” status over the years. 

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-One thing I definitely can’t fault the movie for is its score. I really like David Arnold’s music, especially the main title theme, which they’d use for the TV series as well.

-My roommate in college was from Colorado Springs, which is where the real complex that the Stargate team is fictionally located in resides.  He always got great amusement from the fact that in real-life there’s a zoo sitting on top of the mountain the Stargate’s inside of.

Demolition Man

Demolition Man (1993)
Dir. by Marco Brambilla

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock and Nigel Hawthorne

[content warning: political satire, actual murder]

Plot:

When LAPD Sergeant John “the Demolition Man” Spartan is framed for the murder of civilians while taking down crime kingpin Simon Phoenix, both he and Phoenix become some of the first inmates in the new cryogenic prison being tested.  Thirty years later, Phoenix escapes during a parole hearing, and begins to terrorize a future Los Angeles that is no longer used to violence of any kind.  The police, now only experienced in apprehending suspects who break curfew and tell dirty jokes, thaw Spartan out of cryo and reinstate him in an attempt to recapture the dangerous fugitive.

Nostalgia:

My first memories of this movie are actually of the aggressive marketing push for the movie conducted by Taco Bell, due to its prominent feature in the film.  I was only 11 at the time, and there was no way my parents were actually going to let me watch the movie itself.  I think I first saw it sometime in high school, and by the time I headed off to college it was one of my favorite action movies.  I don’t watch it quite as much anymore, but I still give it a spin in the DVD player every year or so.

Review:

This is a very bizarre film.  It’s one-half violent 90s sci-fi action movie, and one-half social satire dystopian comedy.  While the two halves don’t really fit all that well together on paper, I enjoy both of them equally, and the movie itself quite a bit.

While the movie isn’t a deliberate comedy (at least, no one in the movie is playing it like a comedy), the borderline-surreal environment that the reawakened Spartan finds himself in is more than sufficient for the film to have plenty of laughs to go with its action.  Most of these come from Spartan’s interplay with his new partner on the force, Sandra Bullock’s extremely enthusiastic Lenina Huxley.  A 20^th-century pop culture fanatic, she gloms on to Spartan like her own private Stan Lee, eager to show off her (frequently wrong) knowledge of 90s slang and action hero tropes. There’s also a lot of fish-out-of-water humor involving Spartan’s reactions to “modern” technology, most notably an extended reoccurring gag with a machine that dispenses fines for swearing, and the lack of toilet paper in the restrooms – two gags that naturally dovetail together in one of the movie’s more memorable scenes.

While Bullock and Stallone are both good in their roles, special attention has to be paid to Wesley Snipes as the villain.  When we first meet him, he’s a ruthless, self-assured drug kingpin, who takes pleasure in taunting Spartan before he gets captured.  Due to the machinations of the outwardly affable Dr. Cocteau, he emerges from cryo freeze as an over-the-top, almost cartoonish terrorist.  While Stallone mostly goes around with this bemused, “I can’t believe this shit” expression, Snipes’s Simon Phoenix is openly disdainful and sarcastic about the future, making his interactions with just about every part of this ridiculous dystopia a joy to watch.  It’s not quite to the level of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood, but he does begin to approach that level of scenery-chewing, which is just perfect for a movie with this satirical tone.

Phoenix's wardrobe is sponsored by Goodyear

Speaking of the dystopia, the movie takes multiple potshots at PC culture and over-regulation.  Pretty much everything that makes life enjoyable seems to have been regulated out of existence, leading to a famous, epic libertarian Denis Leary rant late in the film.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the movie went into production shortly after Bill Clinton took office.  However, even if the movie’s politics aren’t really modern any more, it has several points that still resonate today, especially when it comes to the government trying to decide what people can do with their bodies (both sex and pregnancy without a permit having been made illegal).  And the Taco Bell scene is still amazing.

I’m not sure what it says about the movie that what it’s probably most known for now is an extended product placement.  According to Huxley, all of the major franchises competed themselves into oblivion, leaving Taco Bell as the only restaurant in existence.  As a reward for saving his life, Dr. Cocteau invites Spartan to an upscale, fancy Taco Bell, with a valet and live music.  It’s such a memorable scene that Taco Bell actually recreated the restaurant from the movie as a pop-up at this year’s San Diego Comic Con to celebrate the movie’s 25^th anniversary.

I haven’t talked much about the action itself in the movie, and that’s because the action movie side of the film is mostly standard early-90s fair.  It’s well shot, for the most part, and decently choreographed, but there’s nothing truly inventive about any of it.  This movie doesn’t live on its violence, as much as it does the reactions of everyone else to the fights, from Huxley’s gleeful enthusiasm to a random cop who has to use a Youtube tutorial to figure out how to arrest Phoenix.

Even if I don’t really agree with all of the movie’s satirical targets, I find that there’s more than enough for me to still enjoy it, even in 2018.  It’s definitely a relic of its time, but that’s actually part of the point: Spartan is an 80s/90s era action hero in a modern world that’s moved beyond him.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-Seriously, I’ve seen multiple breakdowns and infographics trying to explain how the three seashells thing is supposed to work.  And I get it in theory.  My question is, what does the next person to come into the restroom do? Use the same seashells?

-Jack Black has a blink-and-you-miss-him role as one of the Scraps in the sewers, something I never caught in all of my times watching it until I had it pointed out to me.

-This movie accurately called Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career, a decade before he became Governor of California.  In fact, the movie has him becoming president due to a new Constitutional amendment being passed – an amendment which was actually proposed right after Schwarzenegger was elected.

-In a slightly creepier coincidence, the inmate immediately before Simon Phoenix on the parole hearing docket is listed as a “Peterson, Scott.” Many years after the movie’s release, a man named Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife, in a media circus trial that made the news nightly.

If Looks Could Kill

If Looks Could Kill (1991)
Dir. by William Dear

Starring Richard Grieco, Roger Rees and Gabrielle Anwar

[content warning: sexism, transphobia]

Plot:

Teenage slacker Michael Corbin is given a surprise on graduation day when his diploma is withheld due to an incomplete grade in French. In order to get the credit he needs to graduate, he has to accompany his French teacher on a summer trip to France. Unfortunately, he is mistaken at the airport for an American secret agent traveling under the same name, and is co-opted by MI6 into assisting with a dangerous mission. At first he goes along with it, enamored of the fast cars and spy gadgets, until he learns that being a spy might actually have real-life stakes.

Nostalgia:

I have literally zero memory of when I first saw this. I’m pretty sure it had to be a VHS rental, though we’d eventually own a copy ourselves. I grew up watching the James Bond movies, so a James Bond parody starring a teenager definitely appealed to teenage me. I actually wasn’t able to track down a DVD copy of the movie, so I eventually resorted to pulling out that old pan-and-scan VHS tape from a box in the basement and watched it on my parents’ VCR.

Review:

This film is basically White Cishet Power Trip Fantasy: The Movie. It starts with a premise that’s essentially someone’s fanfiction come to life: a teenager is mistaken for a secret agent and given access to all of the cool spy gadgets from the Bond films. And for about two thirds of the running time, Corbin behaves exactly how you’d expect a horny, straight Hollywood teenager to act in such a situation. He goofs around, acts like he knows what he’s doing, fails to take anything seriously, and survives mainly on sheer luck.

For example, Corbin engages in an action movie car chase without ever once realizing that he’s being pursued. He’s trying to lower the windshield so he can hit on the woman in a convertible driving next to him, and starts flipping switches randomly. These switches deploy the Bond car defenses, eventually blowing up the car that’s been chasing him – something he only notices once the explosion occurs. Even after that, he seems to be more upset that he blew out his tires and let the girl get away than at any property destruction or death he may have just caused. 

Now, this is a problem that I could most certainly ignore while watching the movie as a teenager. But looking back at it as an adult, I was pretty constantly annoyed by Corbin’s attitude about pretty much everything for over an hour of the movie. It’s only when the movie actually finally gets to the villain’s chateau, and he faces up to the seriousness of his situation, that I found myself enjoying the character at all. The movie stops trying to be a frat house comedy with spy trappings at this point, and actually turns into a decent Bond movie pastiche, complete with one-liners, great set piece fights, and gadget-induced escapes. Unfortunately, the movie is only 88 minutes long, so you have to wade through almost two thirds of the film before getting to any of the good stuff.

In addition to my problems with the Corbin character and the way he’s written, there’s also a whole lot of fairly crass sex humor. For example, there’s an extended joke about Corbin being seduced by the evil femme fatale agent (named Areola Canasta!), who’s attempting to kill him with a scorpion in bed. He doesn’t want to have sex without a condom, and spends what feels like five minutes trying to open a heavily-fortified tube of “Combat Condoms” in the bathroom. Meanwhile, the agent is stung by her own scorpion, and is writhing around on the bed moaning – sounds that Corbin mistakes for an orgasm. There’s also a fairly glaring transphobic joke involving a pair of X-ray glasses that I definitely don’t remember from the last time I watched this. 

Fortunately, the movie gets redeemed somewhat by its villains. Roger Rees, whom I mostly remember from playing the Sheriff in Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood parody, is much more serious here as Augustus Steranko, the Bond villain whose plan basically amounts to…creating the Euro. But he lends a much needed gravitas to the movie, as an antidote to Corbin’s attitude. And Linda Hunt is just delightful as the henchwoman who wears a gold whip around her neck like a choker, and really really likes killing people for Steranko. I also found myself enjoying Robin Barlett’s performance as the French teacher, whose main defining characteristics at the start of the movie are hating Corbin and having unfortunate taste in headwear. She gets mistaken for a Cold War mercenary by both MI6 and the CIA (really, neither organization comes off as competent in the least), and embraces the persona by the end of the film, packing an Uzi and wearing ripped clothing as a headband, Rambo-style.

So yeah, this was nowhere near as good as I remember it being. If only the rest of the movie had been like the final 20 minutes, I might have enjoyed the rewatch a lot more. It probably deserves to be as obscure and hard to find as it is now.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C

Stray Thoughts:

-The British agent who gets killed in the movie’s version of the Bond cold open is Roger Daltrey, lead singer for The Who. I guess he really needed the extra paycheck that year.

-Corbin is supposed to be from Detroit. I’m pretty sure that every student on that class trip to France was white (or at least, I don’t remember seeing any students of color). I’ve lived in the Detroit area for almost 30 years, and unless his school was in Grosse Pointe that casting is flat-out wrong.

-This movie’s so obscure now that I couldn’t even find any good screenshots to include.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
Dir. by Steve Barron

Starring Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas and Josh Pais

[content warning: Yellow Peril, sexism]

Plot:

While investigating a series of mysterious crimes, TV news reporter April O’Neil is saved from a mugging by the Ninja Turtles, a group of four anthropomorphic reptiles trained in ninjitsu by their rat master, Splinter. When Splinter is kidnapped by the forces of the Foot clan of ninjas, who are behind the crime wave, the Turtles take refuge with O’Neil. The five of them, plus masked vigilante Casey Jones, must locate the Foot’s secret hideout, rescue Splinter, and put an end to the criminal empire.

Nostalgia:

I was a huge fan of the animated Ninja Turtles series (and the arcade game – the less said about the original NES game, the better), so of course I saw this in theaters as soon as my parents would take me. It ended up being the last movie I saw in America before we moved to the U.K., about two weeks later. I had one of those storybooks with the cassette tape that came with it, and I would listen to it on repeat while going to bed for like the first six months we were in England.

Review:

If you didn’t grow up in the United States in the late 1980s, you might not realize what a huge deal the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were. The characters had been created as a parody of Frank Miller’s dark and gritty take on Daredevil in the mid-80s, but hadn’t really taken off until a syndicated Saturday morning cartoon debuted in 1987. It toned down a lot of the comic’s rough edges to be more kid-friendly, and was one of the biggest hits of its time, running for 10 seasons and almost 200 episodes. It also, of course, sold many an action figure, lunchbox, breakfast cereal and video game.

It was a foregone conclusion that they’d attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the franchise with a movie release. However, they made the odd (in retrospect) decisions to A) do a movie about anthropomorphic animals in live-action, in the pre-CG era, and B ) to make it an adaptation of the original comic books, ignoring most of what had made the cartoon so popular in the first place. In fact, the first of these proved to be so problematic that virtually no movie studio wanted to touch it with a ten-foot-pole, even with the guaranteed fanbase from the cartoon. Eventually, the Henson Company stepped in, with Jim Henson seeing it as a personal challenge to create something that would look good on-screen. He not only succeeded, but ended up creating the foundation upon which all future animatronic characters would be based. 

So we have a low-budget movie that ignored most of what made its content popular, with untested and experimental special effects, being released by an independent studio (New Line) that was known mostly for art house movies and cheap B-horror. Why, then, was it such a massive hit, and is still a beloved nostalgia film for so many people?

For me, I think it’s the very fact that it wasn’t the cartoon version of the Turtles. I don’t think the Turtles as portrayed on the show would have worked in live-action. The show is really silly, and very much operates on cartoon logic They kept some of the more distinctive elements of the show (Mikey’s immaturity, the colored headbands, “Cowabunga”) but otherwise tried to ground as much of the movie in reality as six-foot-tall turtles named after Renaissance artists would allow. No aliens, no mutating goons, no mad scientists, no Turtle battle wagons. Just a modern-day Fagin who takes in angry young men (I don’t think we see any female Foot members, though I may be wrong) and turns them into a personal army. Twenty-five years later and Shredder would have had a Youtube channel and a Twitter account.

Since when have five anthro animals been living in my apartment?
I need to clean more.

The fights in the movie are also very appropriate for the ages of both the protagonists and their Foot clan opponents, all of whom would be in their teens or early twenties. The movie begins with the Turtles’ first real mission, so they’re all still quite new at the hero thing and haven’t ever really been in a live fight with people who intend to hurt them before. And the Foot “ninjas” can’t have had more than a year or two of training themselves, given their age and the recency of the crime wave. It helps to make the awkward fighting of the Turtles (whose actors had limited movement and sight because of the costumes) more sensible, and also explains away a lot of the sillier bits of the fights (the dunking in a fish tank, the nunchuck contest, etc): they’re ALL immature and trying to show off. 

Now, one thing I don’t really buy as an adult is the relationship between April and Casey Jones. He’s kind of an asshole to her for most of the movie, breaking her firing to her in maybe the worst way possible, and running off a whole string of potential condescending and sexist nicknames for her, asking her to choose one. Sure, he saves her life, and helps her and the Turtles out when they’re hiding at her farm. But I can’t see how they go from screaming at each other and slamming doors (one of the Turtles even compares it to Moonlighting) to kissing by the end of the film.

There’s also a current of Yellow Peril inherent to a lot of the scenes involving Shredder and his second-in-command, Tatsu. They’re the only actual Japanese people in the movie (Splinter, despite being a Japanese rat, is voiced by, of all people, Kevin Clash), and neither have any redeeming features at all. Tatsu nearly beats one of his own students to death (and does kill him in the script) for letting the Turtles escape, and Shredder is literally covered in knives. April O’Neil even makes a fairly racist joke when first encountering the Foot ninjas, asking whether they were sent by Sony to collect on late TV payments. However, it’s not a huge focal point of the movie (both Shredder and Tatsu probably have a grand total of fifteen minutes of screen time between the two), and it definitely wasn’t a deal-breaker for me. But it’s certainly something I noticed a lot more now than I did back then. 

TMNT is definitely a flawed film. It doesn’t actually have that much to do with the franchise that people were expecting; the animatronics, though groundbreaking, definitely didn’t help the staging of the action at all; and there’s some dubious romance and racial aspects that distract from the whole. However, it’s probably the best movie possible given the budget and the state of Hollywood special effects at the time. It’s quite telling that Michael Bay-produced reboot, for all of the might of 2010s CG and blockbuster budget, couldn’t actually improve on the Turtles from 1990. I don’t know if the movie would hold any appeal at all for someone who didn’t grow up with it, but for those who did it’s a nice nostalgia bomb to revisit from time to time.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: B

Stray Thoughts:

-The Foot clan member who shows the new recruit Danny around their very-late-80s hangout, with video games, skateboard ramps, and bootleg cigarettes, is none other than Sam Rockwell! I had absolutely no idea he was in this, but managed to recognize him immediately this time around.

-The joke about Casey Jones using a signed Jose Canseco baseball bat as a weapon plays a lot differently now than did back then, given his association with the steroids scandal.

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Dir. by Kevin Reynolds

Starring Kevin Costner, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman

[content warning: Crusades, religious persecution, witchcraft]

Plot:

Robin of Locksley, a Crusader imprisoned in Jerusalem, escapes with the help of the Moorish prisoner Azeem. Returning to England, he finds that the Sheriff of Nottingham has branded his father a devil-worshipper and seized his lands. Banding together with a group of forest outlaws, he and Azeem set out on a campaign to thwart the Sheriff’s attempt to stage a coup and overthrow King Richard.

Nostalgia:

When I was eight years old, my father was transferred from America to the U.K. for business. It was in the middle of the school year, so instead of immediately enrolling me in the British school system my parents held me out of school until the next school year began. We spent six months exploring Britain instead, including stops at Nottingham and the actual Sherwood Forest. That also happened to be the year that I read The Hobbit for the first time, and the two combined to firmly cement my love of fantasy literature for life. The next year, while we were still living north of London, this movie came out in theaters. It was the right movie at the right time. It might not be the best cinematic version of Robin Hood, but it’s definitely the one that I’ve seen the most times.

Review:

The cinematic history of Robin Hood is a long and peculiar tale. It seems that every 10-15 years there’s a new version of the story that comes along, with pretensions of being the “definitive” Robin Hood. Personally, I think that ship sailed back in the 1930s with the Errol Flynn version, as that movie helped define the look and feel of all subsequent Robin Hood retellings. However, each generation definitely puts its own spin on things, from the 1970s furry version to the 2010 Ridley Scott movie that kills off King Richard in the first ten minutes.

The 1991 Kevin Costner version was very distinctly a movie made for the tail-end of the 1980s action movie boom. It’s got explosions, horse chases, and the villain from Die Hard. Robin Hood even gets flung over the walls of a castle with a catapult! Kevin Costner seems to attempt an English accent for about twenty minutes, before just giving it up and playing it as an American. The movie was a ginormous financial success, becoming the second-highest grossing film that year at the world-wide box office, but a lot of critics had disdain for it. It got nominated for two Razzies, and it’s been fashionable to hate on the movie ever since, like a forest-bound Waterworld (which coincidentally had both the same lead actor and director as this).

I'm pretty sure 1100s-era black powder isn't going to do THAT

I personally think that the hate for this movie is extremely misplaced. I’m of the opinion that it’s the best cinematic Robin Hood movie made in the last forty-five years, and probably the best fantasy movie of the early 90s. And yes, I just called Prince of Thieves a fantasy. This version of the Sheriff has a fortune-telling, Satan-worshipping witch as an advisor, whose role is even more significant in the extended cut of the movie that I watched for this review. Her presence, and the fact that the England of Prince of Thieves resembles Westeros more than it does the actual 12th century England, puts the movie squarely in the fantasy camp for me.

A large portion (perhaps even the majority) of my love for this movie can be laid at the feet of two actors. The first is Alan Rickman as the Sheriff. This may be the most over-the-top villain performance ever committed to celluloid, and I unabashedly love every second that he’s in the frame. Rickman is clearly having the time of his life playing the villain, and this movie, coming so soon after Die Hard, is probably what earned him his reputation as one of the best villain performers of his generation. He steals the movie in the same way that Jack Nicholson’s Joker did to the first Batman movie, which is probably why the next major Robin Hood movie after this one downplayed the Sheriff role so much that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that the character was in the movie.

No scenery left unchewed

The other actor is Morgan Freeman, playing the new addition to the Merry Men, the Moor Azeem. This wasn’t the first Robin Hood adaptation to feature a Muslim character in the ensemble. The British TV show Robin of Sherwood featured a Saracen named Nasir a good five years earlier. But Freeman’s performance left so much of an impression that it’s hard to imagine a new Robin Hood production that doesn’t include the character, especially for American audiences that may not have been as familiar with the origins of the Robin Hood legend. While Jamie Foxx may be playing Little John in the new adaptation coming out later this year, his appearance is clearly modelled after Freeman’s in Prince of Thieves. 

I think it is especially significant that not only does Freeman play a black Muslim, two minority groups that until this point had been woefully underrepresented in Robin Hood films (and in the case of PoC, in fantasy films in general), but that he is also perhaps the most positively-portrayed member of the Merry Men. This is even more interesting in contrast to the movie’s take on Friar Tuck, and the interactions between the two men that make up a significant side plot in the movie. Tuck’s always been portrayed as a bit of a bon vivant: a great lover of food and drink, sort of a “boisterous bruiser” type. Prince of Thieves' Tuck, as portrayed by Michael McShane, goes a little bit farther than that, however. He is first introduced singing a ribald drinking song while he gorges himself on wine. When he meets Robin Hood, he latches on to Robin’s leg and begins to chew upon it, forcing the remaining men of Robin’s band to pry the inebriated cleric off him. He is rude, unshaven, and slovenly at all times, and is pretty much an altogether poor example of a clergyman.

Yet, his position as a member of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church gives him an air of moral superiority which colors his judgment. He cannot see the positive traits of Azeem, his humility and spirituality. He can only see that he is a Muslim, whom the Pope has declared to be the sworn enemies of Christianity. Tuck blindly assumes that a heathen that does not follow God in the same fashion as a Christian could not possess knowledge that a Christian does not, despite the fact that the Muslim civilization of the twelfth century was the most technologically advanced of the time. He cannot see past this us-versus-them mentality, saying that “You know nothing of our God”, even though, as Azeem points out, Muslims and Christians both worship the Jewish God. This is why Tuck initially refuses to allow Azeem to attempt to save the life of Little John’s wife. Azeem’s success in performing the surgery brings about a marked change in Tuck’s attitude towards the Moor. He is now humbled before his Muslim counterpart, stating “I may be Godly, but I know now that I am not worldly.” As a final gesture of contrition and reconciliation for his prior behavior, he offers to share his precious beer with Azeem. Of course, Azeem must decline, as he holds to the Muslim prescription against alcohol. However, the two men become friends from this point on, and even team up together for the infiltration of Nottingham at the end of the movie. 

Okay, is it obvious yet that I wrote about this movie for my Master’s thesis? Sure, the movie does some things wrong. Maybe a lot of things wrong (just ask anyone who’s at all familiar with the geography of Great Britain to explain how Hadrian’s Wall is within walking distance of Nottingham). But it also does a whole lot right, and really shouldn’t be written off as so many people seem to have done in the last couple of decades.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-In case anyone’s wondering, my thesis was about how Hollywood had portrayed Arabs and Muslims historically, and how that portrayal was affected by 9/11.

-Seriously, it’s not just any old wall that they’re walking along. They used Sycamore Gap, only probably the single most famous section of the Wall, and maybe the most-photographed single tree in the U.K.

-The music for this movie, by the late Michael Kamen, is truly amazing. It’s one of the best movie scores of the 90s in my opinion. And the Bryan Adams song, cheesy though it may be, is also my mother’s favorite song. So I can’t really complain about that either.

Nate and Hayes

Nate and Hayes (1983)
Dir. by Ferdinand Fairfax

Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Michael O’Keefe and Max Phipps

[content warning: slavery, human sacrifice, racial stereotyping]

Plot:

Nate Williamson, a Christian missionary, is traveling with his fiancée Sophie to his new post in the South Pacific. When the mission is attacked by slavers and Sophie kidnapped, Nate teams up with the ship captain who ferried them to the island, a disreputable pirate named Bully Hayes, in order to rescue her.

Nostalgia:

I have absolutely zero recollection of the first time that I saw this movie. I’m assuming it was something my parents rented, as it’s a little too obscure for the basic cable I was watching at the time (we didn’t have HBO or anything until I was in high school). However, I do know that we bought our VHS copy of it from the local video store, Video Junction, when they went out of business in 1998. A good number of the lesser-known films from this project came from that particular sale. It was unavailable on DVD for ages, so I probably hadn’t seen it in almost 20 years before this viewing.

Review:

As discussed a couple time so far on this project, the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of those watershed events in the history of cinema. Like Star Wars before it and Die Hard later in the decade, it seemed like every production company in Hollywood suddenly had its own swashbuckling adventure movie in production. For Nate and Hayes, they tried a different time period than a lot of the other Raiders clones. It’s a pirate movie, but pirates of the South Seas in the 1870s rather than the more familiar Caribbean pirates.

Speaking of which, while this movie fails at being an Indiana Jones ripoff, it actually manages to play like a Pirates of the Caribbean ripoff instead, albeit one that came out twenty years before the movie it’s copying. It’s got almost the exact same plot structure: a naïve young man has to team up with an older, more worldly pirate to rescue his loved one from the pirate’s sworn rival. The young man is initially hostile to pirates, but after several adventures with his impromptu mentor, including a visit to a rowdy pirate port, ends up becoming one himself. At the end, the pirate is captured by the authorities, but is rescued from his execution by the young man, now very much a swashbuckler himself. 

Now, that’s not to say that it’s a good pirate movie, either. Sure, the movie definitely has its moments. Tommy Lee Jones is actually pretty fun as Bully Hayes, but he and his rival (played by Max Phipps) seem to be the only ones not just going through the motions in a movie that has surprisingly little actual swashbuckling in it. The best sequences are the bookends at the beginning and end of the movie. The former is the sequence that’s most clearly taken from Raiders, as Bully and his crew trek into the middle the jungle before attempting to sell guns to the island’s natives. The deal goes south, and Bully and company end up having to run for their lives, including a scene on a collapsing rope bridge that actually beat Temple of Doom to it by a year. The ending, of course, is the aforementioned escape from hanging, with Nate disguised as the reverend administering last rites, and his wife Sophie as a pistol-packing nun.

The rest of the movie largely consists of a lot of banter and misunderstanding between Nate and Hayes that the writers obviously intended to be funny, but which mostly falls pretty flat. There’s a subplot involving the German attempt to build a base for its new ironclad vessels that is a lot smaller than I remember, and ends a lot more perfunctorily. The South Pacific location also opens the movie up to a major source of criticism that the first Indiana Jones movie mostly sidesteps: the portrayal of its non-white characters. Even the most clearly “good” character, the missionary Nate, still has a very patronizing attitude towards the indigenous people he encounters, who are portrayed as children in need of instruction (one even refers to the elderly heads of the mission as “Big Man God and Momma Jesus Christ”). 

The villainous tribes fair even worse. The female leader of the group that Hayes attempts to sell guns to is treacherous and greedy, and gleefully shoots one of her own people to test out the rifles. And the king of the island that the Germans are attempting to buy (by offering severed and shrunken heads) rebuffs their attempts until they offer him Sophie for use as a human sacrifice. At one point, Nate is allowed a righteous speech against slavery, but Hayes stops him with an equivalent of “now’s not the time”, and the subject is never broached again, despite the multiple people other than Sophie that were abducted and sold by the villain Pease. It doesn’t help knowing that the real Bully Hayes whom Jones’s character was based on actually was the human trafficking blackbirder that the movie character denies being. 

This movie has a small cult following, and it’s one that I remember enjoying back in the 90s. While I definitely found it to have its moments, I couldn’t help but notice all of the significant flaws this time around. It definitely doesn’t help the narrative of pirate movies being box office poison pre-Pirates, as the movie totally bombed when it was released. The setting is pretty unique for a pirate movie, however, and if they could punch up some of the action and negative stereotypes it could make for an interesting remake at some point.

Nostalgia: B
Rewatch: C

Stray Thoughts:

-Nate and Hayes was released as Savage Islands everywhere but the US, in case any non-American readers are confused by the title.

-The movie was actually filmed on location, and was one of the first New Zealand-produced movies to get released in the United States, well before the breakout of NZ cinema in the 90s with The Piano and Heavenly Creatures.

-Seriously, Tommy Lee Jones with a beard and full head of hair just seems wrong to me. I’m so used to his later career roles as the grizzled veteran that seeing him young is just a little incongruous to me. It’s like Patrick Stewart with a wig on, or Wilford Brimley without his mustache. 

Bloodsport

Bloodsport (1986)
Dir. by Newt Arnold

Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Donald Gibb and Bolo Yeung

[content warning: racist portrayals, sexual assault]

Plot:

Captain Frank Dux goes AWOL from the U.S. Army to represent his ailing martial arts instructor at the Kumite, an invitation-only underground fighting tournament held in Hong Kong.

Nostalgia:

I remember hearing about this movie several times before I eventually saw it. I know I didn’t actually watch it until after I started taking Tae Kwon Do, so probably some time in early high school would be my guess. Yet again, it’s one of our many VHS tapes that didn’t make the transition to DVD, though I have seen it a handful of times in the last decade or so.

Review:

For a brief moment there, it looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme was going to be the next big action star. He was an actual full-contact karate and kickboxing competitor, so he had the martial arts chops to pull off the moves on screen, and for some reason wooden, European-accented actors were all the rage for action movies during the 80s (see: Arnold, Christopher Lambert, Dolph Lundgren, etc). This low-budget Cannon movie would be his big breakout role, and he’d go on to a whole string of low- to mid-budget action movies in the 1990s, until he just suddenly disappeared after Universal Soldier: The Return in 1999.

I’ll admit to actually having a bit of a soft spot for his movies, especially cheesy yet enjoyable crap from the mid-90s like Timecop and Sudden Impact. This, however, might be his best performance from an action standpoint. He was still close enough to his fighting days to be in amazing physical condition, and it shows in the moves that he’s able to pull off on-camera (when he does the splits with his feet suspended on chairs in one scene, that’s not a camera trick. Another character even remarks “That hurts me just looking at it”). While he would learn to relax and be better in the dialogue scenes as his career went on, here they’re all kind of hard to watch. However, most of the scenes outside of the Kumite are pretty much filler, and it doesn’t really distract from what you’re here to see.

Honestly, I'm going to have to agree with Jackson on this one

Speaking of filler and the plot, this movie is basically just an extremely clichéd fighting tournament movie, the sort that any martial arts movie fan has seen a hundred times. It’s tempting to compare the movie to Enter the Dragon, but the Bruce Lee movie actually has a more complex plot than Bloodsport. There’s no undercover mission, or evil supervillain, or revenge angle to the plot (well, not initially, anyway). It’s just “man enters tournament, man’s bosses try to stop the tournament.”

No, the closest comparisons I have to this movie are actually two properties that came after, and in fact were inspired by, Bloodsport: Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. It’s got the secret, invitation-only tournament, the international cast of fighters with widely differing styles, and the villain who really likes killing people mid-fight. Those styles, in my opinion, are what elevate this movie above all of the other low-budget tournament movies I’ve seen. It’s not just all kung fu, or karate, or judo, but a mix of styles from all over the world, which keeps the fights fresh and interesting to watch. However, this does open the movie up to some criticism for the portrayals of the fighters, most especially the token African and Middle Eastern competitors. Hossein, the Arab fighter, is played by a clearly non-Arab actor, and is introduced making unwanted advances on the love interest for the movie. And the African fighter, who is never named, is shown jumping around in trees in the training montage and hops around like a monkey in the ring. For all I know it’s an actual style (it’s not capoeira – that I can recognize), but it looks pretty racist to me on first glance.

The relationship between Dux and the reporter, Janice Kent, is also a prime example of time having definitely moved on in the thirty years since the movie was made. Dux meets her at the same time as Hossein does, and “rescues” her by effectively wagering her in a (rigged) contest of skill with Hossein. Yes, Hossein gets his ass kicked by Dux in the tournament the next day, and Kent proves to be more than capable of getting herself into the no-press-allowed Kumite audience by herself. However, I don’t think that a sexual relationship with someone who’d actually been betting someone over who’d be allowed to take you up to his hotel room 24 hours earlier would fly in a modern movie.

The movie’s very, very 80s, with jokes about 8-bit arcade games and many montages (seriously, there’s like two 3+ minute montages separated from each other by barely a minute). But if you can get past that and the pretty bad dialogue and acting, there’s actually a lot of good martial arts action in this one. It’s fairly easy to see how JCVD’s action movie career got started after this.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-Another reason a lot of people think of Enter the Dragon: <i>Bloodsport</i>'s villain, Chon Li, is played by the same actor who played Han’s large, memorable henchman from the Bruce Lee movie.

-Yes, the younger of the two Army agents trying to apprehend Dux is an extremely young Forest Whitaker, only a year removed from his breakout role in Good Morning Vietnam.

-This movie bills itself as a true story, based on the exploits of the real Frank Dux. Dux is indeed a real ex-Army officer and martial artist, but he’s also a well-known teller of tall tales and none of his claims about the Kumite can be verified at all. Therefore, it’s wise to assume that the events of Bloodsport are pretty much entirely bullshit.

-I'm aware that Donald Trump once said that this is his favorite movie. Yes, it's about an American beating up foreigners. But it's also specifically about an American immigrant, something that I think he failed to notice. And anyway, why would I concern myself about his taste in movies?

The Last Dragon

Kung fu and disco.  Two tastes that sorta taste
alright together?

The Last Dragon (1985)

Dir. by Michael Schultz

Starring Taimak, Vanity and Julius J. Carry III

[content warning: cultural appropriation and stereotyping, stalking]

Plot:

An African-American martial artist, “Bruce Leroy” Green, must rescue a popular video DJ from a corrupt video game entrepreneur and his henchman, a rival martial artist/gang leader called the Shogun of Harlem.

Nostalgia:

Like The Beastmaster, this must have been one of those movies that was in constant rotation on basic cable in the early 1990s.  I saw it enough times to still be able to remember several sequences, though I don’t think I’ve seen it since at least when I was in college at Carleton in the early 2000s.

Review:

This might be the weirdest movie I’ve rewatched for this project, which is saying something considering I’ve watched movies with video-game-playing starfighters, inflating henchmen, shrinking test pilots, armies transforming into pigs and pre-teens fighting Dracula.  It’s a Blaxploitation kung fu musical, a genre mix that I never thought I’d be typing.  It’s kinda pretty bad, but the bad parts aren’t actually what you’d expect given that genre and plot description.

For one, the martial arts action is surprisingly one of the strengths of the movie.  The lead actor, Taimak, is an actual martial artist, holding black belts in multiple styles, and the fights were choreographed by famous karate competitor and instructor Ron Van Clief.  Taimak isn’t much of an actor, and pretty much every scene where he had significant dialogue was cringe-worthy, but I definitely bought him as a fighter impressive enough to have been nicknamed “Bruce Leroy” by the community. 

One thing I never really bought was the movie’s villain, a businessman who apparently made enough money from running video game arcades to set himself up as a wannabe mobster.  We see him with henchmen, expensive penthouse apartments, and enough money to shoot elaborate music videos to jumpstart his girlfriend’s singing career, but never really get the sense that he’s really any sort of actual villainous threat.  As such, his plot to kidnap Vanity’s character and force her to play the music videos doesn’t really cause much tension.  I just couldn’t take him seriously.  The secondary villain, Sho’nuff the Shogun of Harlem, is actually more credible of a threat.  He’s clearly the leader of a street gang, and throws his weight around both metaphorically and literally from the moment he’s introduced.  Unfortunately, the movie saddles him and his gang with absolutely ridiculous costumes for most of the movie: knockoff samurai robes and an afro tied into an imitation of a topknot. 

Speaking of that, this movie resides in an interesting place on the border of cultural appropriation.  When Sho’nuff is first introduced, crashing a rowdy showing of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, Leroy Green is watching the movie while wearing a Mandarin-collared jacket and a straw hat, and is eating popcorn with chopsticks.  He idolizes Bruce Lee to the point of wearing the yellow track suit from Game of Death when teaching his class, bows to his consternated parents before dinner, and frequently spouts off vaguely Confucius-sounding words of wisdom. 

However, I didn’t have the sort of negative reaction that I did to movies like Remo Williams.  For one, there are multiple actual Asian characters in the film, played by Asian actors.  While Leroy’s kung fu master initially appears to be the stereotypical “wise elderly martial artist,” he also pulls a movie-long practical joke on his pupil before flying off to visit his mother in Miami.  Leory also gets called out for his appropriation during the course of the movie.  While attempting to complete his master’s futile request by breaking in to a fortune cookie factory, Leroy’s attempts to talk his way past the employees are very quickly rebuffed by the Asian-American New Yorkers who are offended at him wearing what they see as a racist caricature of Asian clothing. He eventually resorts to bluffing his way past them by adopting a stereotypical “black” accent and clothing and pretending to be a pizza delivery man.

They've kinda got a point

In fact, you could say that a major theme of the film is appropriation, assimilation and pretending to be something that you’re not.  Instead of the stereotypical soul food restaurant, Leroy’s father is proud to run the only African-American-owned pizza place in the neighborhood.  Eddie Arkadian and his girlfriend are both from rural upstate New York, pretending to be a mobster and pop star respectively.  Sho’nuff is just a street thug who’s adopted samurai pretensions.  Finally, it’s only when Leroy stops searching for an Asian master to train him, and accepts that he can be his own master without having to learn further from another culture, that he is able to finally defeat Sho’nuff.

This is far from a great film.  The dialogue is pretty terrible, the villain is weak, and the romance is cringe-worthy.  However, it’s also way too silly to really take seriously, and as a result I found myself actually enjoying a fair bit of it, especially the action parts.  Not sure I’ll rewatch it again any time soon, but I’d watch it again before I rewatched Remo Williams.

Nostalgia: B

Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-I called it a musical, though it’s not a musical in the traditional sense.  There’s only one instance where a character actually breaks into song during the narrative.  However, the music industry plays a heavy role in the plot (the love interest is a video disc jockey, and the villain’s girlfriend is an aspiring singer in the Cyndi Lauper mold), and full-length music videos get played more than once throughout the movie.  Even the one actual musical song is a live performance given on-stage.  There are also multiple montages throughout the movie, each set to a different 80s Motown artist.  Of course, the movie was produced by Motown Records head Berry Gordy, so the fact that the movie’s essentially an MTV set with breaks for fight scenes makes a bit of sense.

-Every time the movie threatened to get a little serious, it would undercut itself with something supremely silly.  There’s a scene literally taken wholesale from Blazing Saddles, in which the villain auditions a series of thugs and murderers to be his new henchmen.  It ends with one of them headbutting a table in half while barking like a dog.

-One thing I found much sketchier this time around was Leroy’s little brother, who’s maybe fifteen tops, and has an obsession with Vanity’s DJ.  He repeatedly talks about getting her to fall in love with him, and refers to her as “his woman” despite the fact that they’ve never met.  He comes off as way more stalkerish now than I think they’d intended at the time.

-There’s a brief cameo by an almost unrecognizably-young William H. Macy.

The Hunt for Red October

Sean Connery's head is coming for you!

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Dir. by John McTiernan

Starring Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, James Earl Jones and Scott Glenn

Plot:

During the 1980s, the captain of the Soviet Union’s newest high-tech submarine goes AWOL with the vessel while on a training mission.  While most of the American military thinks that he’s gone rogue and is attempting a strike on the U.S., CIA analyst Jack Ryan believes that he is trying to defect instead.  But how can he prove this before the sub gets close enough to launch its missiles?

Nostalgia:

Even though this is a PG movie, I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it until I was in middle school at least.  I certainly have no memories of having seen it before about the age of 13, a good five years after it had come out.  But I know I'd seen it several times before I finally got around to reading the book.

Review:

My senior year in high school, and continuing on into my first year of college, I went on a big Tom Clancy kick.  I read four or five of his novels in a row, before getting bored and wandering back to epic fantasy again.  Of those, the only one I have strong memories of is The Hunt for Red October, his first novel.  I found both the book, and the later movie that was based on it, to be highly effective and enjoyable espionage thrillers.  They’re also quite atypical for Hollywood action fare.

The book might be an airport paperback, but it’s surprisingly lacking in the violent tropes of most spy thrillers, a trait that carries over into the quite excellent film.  Instead of shootouts, chases and escapes, the action is of a much more cerebral variety.  Our hero, Jack Ryan, isn’t yet the clichéd action hero that he’d become in later books and films in the franchise.  Here, he’s a desk-bound analyst, his military career cut off before it could begin by a helicopter accident that left him with a bad back and a fear of flying.  He spends most of the movie having to outthink both Captain Ramius and the Soviet navy pursuing him, and he doesn’t even come into contact with Ramius and the Red October until the final twenty minutes.  As such, Alec Baldwin is perfect casting – believable as someone who might have had military training a decade ago, but not as stereotypical an action hero as Harrison Ford or Chris Pine, both of whom would later go on to portray the character.

On the other side of the equation, we have Sean Connery, in one of his last great performances as Captain Marko Ramius.  A lot was made at the time about his complete lack of any attempt to do a Russian accent, and how his thick Scottish took a lot of reviewers out of the movie.  I, for one, have no problem with it at all, and I actually think that it logically fits the character.  Most of the other Russians in the film are played by either British actors, or European/Australian actors using British accents.  They also establish that Ramius isn’t Russian, instead being Lithuanian.  Russian isn’t his native language, and he’s probably speaking it with an accent.  Therefore, having a Scottish accent in the midst of the British ones actually fits for his character’s background, as well as further enhancing his maverick status in the Russian military.

Since this is a military movie set during the Cold War, the complete and total lack of female characters makes some logistical sense (there’s a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo from Gates McFadden as Ryan’s wife, and a couple of bit parts with a single line of dialogue, but that’s about it).  The movie fares better on the diversity front.  It’s still overwhelmingly white, but the two African-American cast members are both in positions of great responsibility and competence.  James Earl Jones plays Ryan’s boss, Admiral Greer, who trusts him and his opinions completely, in marked contrast to the rest of the military.  And Courtney B. Vance plays the sonar operator who’s the only person able to figure out how to track the Red October, and is generally portrayed as the smartest guy in the room every time he appears.

Unlike the other three spy movies I’ve covered (Remo Williams, Undercover Blues and Cloak & Dagger), The Hunt for Red October was a smash success, coming in at number six at the year’s box office in 1990.  It also got three Oscar nominations, winning one for Best Sound Editing.  However, I get the sense that this movie has been mostly forgotten as the franchise has moved in a much more conventional action movie direction.  Harrison Ford would replace Baldwin for the next two installments, and his Ryan is much more of a two-fisted protagonist, single-handedly foiling a terrorist attack and engaging in a fistfight with the villain at the end.  Further portrayals, up to and including the Amazon TV show with John Krasinski, have followed the Ford mold rather than the Baldwin one.  And that’s really a shame, as I think Baldwin’s take is the superior one, and that this movie is perhaps the best English-language submarine movie* ever made. 

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

*The best submarine movie period is clearly the German film Das Boot

-I absolutely love Basil Poledouris’s score for this movie.  It uses a full chorus throughout, something that’s relatively uncommon both then and now.

-The way the movie handles the use of language might be one of my favorite “translation conventions” in all of cinema.  The movie begins with all of the Red October crew speaking Russian with subtitles.  When the political officer is meeting with Ramius to discuss their orders, he begins to read a Bible quotation from Ramius’s wife’s diary.  The camera pushes in on his mouth as he reads, until he gets to the word “Armageddon” – a word that is the same in both Russian and English.  It then pulls out, and the officer finishes the quote in English.  They all continue to speak English for the rest of the film, until the Americans finally come aboard the Red October - at which point everyone is back to speaking Russian again, except for Ramius, who is revealed to actually be fluent in English.