Last Updated on January 30, 2025
INTRO: Hollywood Pictures was a relatively short-lived production and distribution division of Disney, and it did not have a good reputation. Their logo showed an image of the sphinx, and the saying going around was, “If it’s the sphinx, it stinks!” There were some notable exceptions to that rule, though. One of those exceptions was the 1996 action film The Rock, which gave a sixty-five year old Sean Connery the chance to be a badass again, and boosted Nicolas Cage from award-winning character actor to movie star status. That’s why we feel The Rock is worth being Revisited.
SET-UP: Built on the foundation of a spec script written by David Weisberg and Douglas S. Cook, The Rock is essentially another variation on Die Hard. You could call this one “Die Hard on Alcatraz”. But director Michael Bay, the film’s lead cast members, and a series of mostly uncredited script doctors – including Quentin Tarantino, who had just won an Oscar for the Pulp Fiction screenplay, and Aaron Sorkin, who would go on to win an Oscar for writing The Social Network – were able to shape it into something special. The set-up is familiar, but the execution is uniquely entertaining.
Bay received a lot of attention for his commercial and music video work before making his feature directorial debut with the 1995 buddy cop movie Bad Boys. In fact, Bad Boys producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson first took note of his skills five years earlier, when he shot a video for their movie Days of Thunder. Bay was offered the chance to direct The Rock around the time he wrapped production on Bad Boys, but he turned it down. The way the story was told just didn’t work for him. Some months later, Bruckheimer and Simpson came on board to produce The Rock, and Bay got the offer again – reportedly after Tony Scott had passed on it in favor of directing The Fan. Now that his Bad Boys producers were involved, Bay decided to take the job… and to start figuring out how to get the script into shape.
The story Weisberg and Cook came up with begins with a platoon of disgruntled Marines raiding a military base and stealing fifteen rockets filled with VX poison gas, a highly lethal substance that causes a gruesome death for anyone who’s exposed to it. They then take control of Alcatraz Island, using the old prison as their base and locking more than eighty civilians in the cells. The rockets are aimed at the San Francisco Bay area; if their demands aren’t met in forty-eight hours, San Francisco is toast. With most countermeasures off the table for one reason or another, the Department of Defense and the FBI decide that the most viable option to deal with this situation is to infiltrate Alcatraz. A team will have to sneak onto the island through the tunnels beneath the prison – a team that will include the best FBI chemical weapons specialist and another person who doesn’t officially exist. Someone who has made his way through those tunnels before. The only prisoner to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz.
There were cool ideas in Weisberg and Cook’s script, but Bay wanted rewrites to make it smarter and more serious. He wanted his film to show how the government would really handle a situation like this. The first person hired to revise the script was TV veteran Mark Rosner, and Bay felt his work took the script too far into serious, technical territory. He compared the Rosner draft to an earlier Bruckheimer and Simpson production, Crimson Tide, and while that movie had been a box office success, he wanted his movie to have a broader appeal than Crimson Tide had. So Die Hard with a Vengeance writer Jonathan Hensleigh was brought in. It’s Hensleigh that Bay credits with writing the movie he made. Unfortunately, the Writers Guild saw it differently. On the finished film, the only credited writers are Weisberg, Cook, and Rosner. Bay said it was a travesty that Hensleigh didn’t receive credit and called the guild’s arbitration process a sham. According to him, the only reason Rosner was credited over Hensleigh was because Rosner was the first person to do a rewrite.
It’s tough to say who wrote what in the movie, but we do know that the script wasn’t complete by the time filming began. They had a June 1996 release date locked in place, they needed to get this thing rolling. Hensleigh and other writers would continue working on the script throughout production, with some characters undergoing substantial changes at the request of the actors that were cast in the roles. The biggest changes were made to the FBI’s chemical expert – a role that was once offered to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but ended up being played by Nicolas Cage in his action movie debut.
It would seem to make more sense if Schwarzenegger had been offered the role Connery played, the man who escaped from Alcatraz, but Arnie himself said it was the Cage role. In earlier drafts, the character would have been more fitting for him. He started out as Bill Goodspeed, an FBI agent who was stuck at a desk job but really wanted to be out there in the field. If the character was a frustrated man of action, Schwarzenegger could have played it well – but he didn’t want to do the movie because the script was a mess when he got his hands on it. He said it was eighty pages with a lot of handwriting and scribbles on it. So he turned down The Rock, a decision he said he ended up regretting. But it would not have been the same movie if he had played this Bill Goodspeed guy.
Cage had been told that he was too quirky to star in an action movie. Even at that point, he had already been told again and again in his career that his acting choices were crazy, wrong, off beat, too off the wall. But he wanted to work with Bruckheimer and Simpson, and when he was given the chance he was also able to prove that he could still make his quirky choices while starring in an action blockbuster. Bruckheimer welcomed his ideas. Bay encouraged them. So he basically rebuilt the Goodspeed character from the ground up, starting with a name change. Cage doesn’t play Bill Goodspeed, his name is Stanley Godspeed. And Stanley is perfectly happy remaining in the office. He doesn’t want to be a field agent. Cage met with a real chemical expert who had a sad look in his eye while describing how deadly a certain poison could be. That person’s demeanor inspired the addition of Stanley being wary of bringing children into such a dangerous world – a feeling he expresses right before his girlfriend, played by Vanessa Marcil, tells him she’s pregnant. A line where Stanley references the Elton John song “Rocket Man” right before killing a villain with a rocket made Cage decide to make the character a music fan. He prefers vinyl over CDs, he’s a Beatlemaniac, he mentions “Superfreak” and grunge. Cage also refused to swear as the character, replacing vulgarity with terms like “A-hole”, “Gee whiz”, “Gosh”, and “Zeus’s butthole”. He saves his swears for special moments near the end. A lot of what makes Stanley Goodspeed so much fun to watch are things that Cage specifically brought to the movie.
The man who escaped from Alcatraz is John Patrick Mason, a character who was similarly reworked when Sean Connery showed interest. It has been suggested that Connery was looking for an action project in response to the excitement surrounding the return of James Bond in 1995’s GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan’s debut as the character. Whether that was part of his decision-making or not, Connery did confide in Bay during filming that it felt good to get to kick some ass again. Connery had a writing duo brought in to work on the script even before he had officially signed on. Those writers were Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, who had previously done unscripted work on his rogue James Bond movie Never Say Never Again a decade before. Connery wanted them to punch up Mason’s dialogue, add some humor, and make the character more British. They also deepened Mason’s back story, putting some Bondian touches in there, like saying he was in British Intelligence. One thing the producers told them not to touch was the action sequences, and they weren’t interested in writing those anyway.
Mason’s reason for being imprisoned also came from Connery. We find out that Mason has been locked up for more than thirty years because he stole J. Edgar Hoover’s top secret microfilm files. Files that contain information not only on prominent Americans and Europeans, but also information on the alien landing at Roswell and the truth about the JFK assassination. He never turned over the microfilm, so he was never released even though he was never put on trial. And since he has so much information, the FBI decided to cover up his existence. He was sent to Alcatraz in 1962, but moved elsewhere after briefly escaping in ’63. He escaped again in the ‘70s, was caught again. He did have enough time to impregnate a woman he met in a bar after a Led Zeppelin concert, though. And the fact that he has a twenty-year-old daughter living in San Francisco gives him an emotional connection to the Alcatraz terrorist situation. Having a scene where catches up with his daughter, played by Claire Forlani, right before he returns to the island was a very smart choice.
Once the La Frenais and Clement revision was done, Connery officially signed on to not only star in The Rock, but also receive an executive producer credit on it.
The group of Marines who take over Alcatraz are led by Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel, a highly decorated war hero, a veteran of multiple wars. He has even carried out missions the government has never admitted to. Over the years, eighty-three Marines have died under his command, but since they were on secret missions their families were lied to and denied compensation. The men weren’t given military burials. Hummel is doing this to right that wrong; he’s demanding a hundred million dollars, and eighty-three million of that is meant to go to the families of the Marines who were killed in action. It’s a noble objective, but he’s breaking laws and threatening innocent lives to get there. Ed Harris was cast to play Hummel, and he could sympathize with his character. The sympathetic aspect of Hummel was played up in the movie, and while Bay says it wasn’t fully explored, it does come through. It becomes clear to the viewer that Hummel doesn’t really want anyone to get hurt – but he has taken things so far that people do get hurt. They get killed. And there are members of his team who are just fine with causing the amount of death and destruction Hummel has threatened to cause but never intended to go through with.
REVIEW: There’s a reason for the saying about too many cooks. Often when a script has been assembled by multiple writers and there are suggestions coming in from every direction, you end up with a muddled mess. But The Rock is a great example of a strong collaborative effort. Somehow this mixture of ideas worked out and resulted in a really cool action movie with some admirable character work in the middle of the mayhem. What reached the screen may not have been what Weisberg and Cook originally envisioned, but it is a blast.
Bay has built a career on dazzling audiences with frenetic action sequences, and his skills in that department are already on full display in this movie. When action breaks out in The Rock – and it does frequently – it’s fast-moving, hard-hitting, and exciting.
There was a version of this movie that had less action; it was shown to a test screening without the Ferrari versus Humvee car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Bay felt it was important to have a car chase in the film at that point because there is a long stretch of movie that focuses on first Goodspeed and then Mason being recruited into the Alcatraz mission. It especially takes a while to convince Mason that he should be a part of this. When the movie was shown without the chase, Bay was proven right – things got dull without it. It needed some action in there, and he inserted this vehicular madness at just the right time.
It was during the filming of the chase that Bay nearly got in trouble from Disney for falling behind schedule. He was taking too long with it. He was called in for a meeting where he was sure he was going to get a stern talking to… but luckily, Connery offered to accompany him to this meeting. Connery stood up for him and said he was doing a good job, so leave him alone. And you don’t argue with a legend like Connery.
Despite the Connery intervention, Bay did have issues with the studio throughout production. He couldn’t always accomplish what he wanted to because he didn’t have the time or budget to do it all. This conflict really came to a head when they told Bay he couldn’t have the submersibles the team of Navy SEALs use to infiltrate Alcatraz with Goodspeed and Mason. Nearly half of the movie’s 136 minute running time is spent building up this infiltration sequence, and Bay felt it had to be impressive. They couldn’t cheap out on it. The studio didn’t agree. So for about two hours in the middle of production, Bay quit The Rock. The studio threatened to slap him with a sixty million dollar lawsuit if he didn’t go back to work, but when he did go back he got what he wanted. The SEALs use their submersibles in the movie.
The Navy SEALs are led by Michael Biehn as Commander Anderson, and Bay said he cast Biehn in this role with the intention of fooling the audience. They had seen Biehn in The Terminator, Aliens, he was even a Navy SEAL in the movie Navy SEALs. Viewers would expect him to be around a while and do some heroic stuff. But after a tense standoff between the SEALs and Hummel’s men, a really great scene of Harris and Biehn interacting while everyone is pointing guns at each other, Biehn and the rest of the SEALs get wiped out very quickly.
That leaves Mason and the inexperienced Goodspeed as our only heroes on the island, forced to take on over a dozen Marines by themselves while attempting to neutralize the rockets. It’s a rough time for them, but it means the audience gets to enjoy watching Cage and Connery bounce off each other in highly entertaining scenes while their characters take on the challenge and overcome the odds. Connery wanted to work with Cage and of course Cage had grown up watching Connery be awesome. When they got on set together, they proved to have good chemistry – and all of those writers worked together to give them some really amusing lines to say to each other.
In addition to Ed Harris, Bay cast some terrific character actors as the Marines our heroes have to deal with. There’s David Morse, John C. McGinley, Bokeem Woodbine, and Raymond Cruz, among others, with Gregory Sporleder and Candyman himself Tony Todd playing the two who are really the worst of the bunch. Don’t worry, the Marines who have fully gone to the dark side are taken out in some very satisfying death scenes.
There are more notable character actors in the bureaucratic scenes, like John Spencer, Philip Baker Hall, Xander Berkeley, Todd Louiso, and William Forsythe. It’s always nice to see any of them show up in a movie, and here we get to see them all over the course of this wild journey.
At its core, The Rock may just be another variation on Die Hard… but some of those Die Hard knock-offs turned out really well. This is one of them. The Rock is one of the best action movies to be released in the ‘90s. It has a great cast playing great characters that they helped create, and those characters are dropped into some spectacular action scenes.
LEGACY/NOW: The budgetary and scheduling disagreements between Bay and the studio weren’t the only problems behind the scenes. The Rock was also destined to be the final film from the producing team of Bruckheimer and Simpson. Although they had been working together since the early ‘80s, in December of 1995 they agreed to part ways once this movie was finished. The reason for the dissolution of their partnership was Simpson’s cocaine addiction… an addiction that took his life in January of 1996. The Rock is dedicated to his memory.
Bruckheimer and Simpson had incredible success making movies together. Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Bad Boys. Their last collaboration was another huge success. Made on a budget of seventy-five million dollars, it earned three hundred and thirty-five million at the global box office. It also got a decent enough critical reception to be the only Michael Bay movie to date to have a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In 2016, it was revealed that The Rock had a very unexpected impact on the world. The Chilcot report, a public inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq War, unearthed the fact that MI6 believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in Iraq due to reports from a dishonest source. This source described the weapons of mass destruction they had supposedly seen – and this description was of the fictional VX poison gas as seen in The Rock. In the movie, this substance is kept in glass containers. In reality, it would not have been. So some agents at MI6 immediately knew this source was lying and getting their information from The Rock. But that didn’t stop the march to war.
Perhaps the greatest honor The Rock has ever received came when it was given a special edition release as part of the Criterion Collection. It was added into a collection which is largely made up of arthouse movies. Criterion chooses films they believe are “important classic and contemporary films” that represent “cinema at its finest”.
Yeah, that sounds like the perfect way to describe The Rock. “Cinema at its finest”.
Follow the JOBLO MOVIE NETWORK
Follow us on YOUTUBE
Follow ARROW IN THE HEAD
Follow AITH on YOUTUBE