Hacker Cinema
The Rock
1996 · Film · 137 min
Directed by Michael Bay
When vengeful General Francis X. Hummel seizes control of Alcatraz Island and threatens to launch missiles loaded with deadly chemical weapons into San Francisco, only a young FBI chemical weapons expert and notorious Federal prisoner have the skills to penetrate the impregnable island fortress and take him down.
11 positive14 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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28 comments on Hacker News
I wouldn’t say they are all poorly made, but they became poorly made as they became more Bayhem. Like how Tim Burton leaned too far into his style (and his love of Depp in everything) and lost the balance. The Rock, The Island, Bad Boys, and Armageddon are very fun, exciting, and visually interesting movies. Then he leaned into Bayhem and now his movies are barely comprehensible.
Every Frame a Painting is a great channel.
He really, really knows how to make giant fireballs explode in time with a rocking soundtrack though.
I had forgotten about The Rock, but recently rewatched it - and halfway through I had to check, and sure enough. Michael Bay.
Also, for a more recent cheesy movie (with Nicholas Cage), Drive Angry is surprisingly good. In a bad way.
It's a post from a propmaker community of replicating an iconic prop?
Movies are all about how they make the audience feel, and everyone remembers the creepiness of this particular prop in The Rock. It's awesome that someone replicated it because yeah - it's a very impressive prop because of exactly that reason - it was basically a character itself in them movie, and was an impressively constructed visual piece which was meant to exude menace.
You're doing a weird thing of saying "obviously this is about nerve gas"...no it is first and foremost about a movie, a story, and the emotional narrative it told.
Yeah just watched the Rock a few nights ago (on my new giant TV) and the movie holds up, but the VX gas does not make you blister up like they show in the movie, nor does it just naturally vaporize into a deadly gas. One of its strong points is actually that it is sticky and is hard to get off of you once it makes contact. It will still kill you though.
I love those two, thanks for the movie rec.
I have a working theory that real life 3 letter agency plots make it into Hollywood movies because intelligence agents and script writers hang out at the same bars. Likely a mix of intentionally planting tropes so that when someone claims the government is doing it they look like a conspiracy theorist who watched "The Rock" too many times, and retired folks having one too many whiskies and letting their secrets slip knowing that there's no way to prove it anyhow, and those make it into scripts just because they're good stories
I call BS. They invaded on a Michael Bay level of unbelievablity[1].
They invaded cause they wanted to invade.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/movie-plot-the-rock-inspired-mi6-sources-iraqi-weapons-claim-chilcot-report
The milestones (from the source code):
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at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for 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2002 according to https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/08/it-was-such-obvious-bullshit-the-rock-writer-shocked-film-may-have-inspired-false-wmd-intelligence
There's a great Nicholas cage quote from the movie 'The Rock' where he's handling VX nerve gas and looks Sean Connery in the face and says "The second you don't respect this, it kills you". Which pretty much holds true for handling enriched nuclear material. Kind or terrifying.
That is a quote by a character in the movie "The Rock", not a quote by The Rock.
Also it was said to a guy whose wife/fiance was the prom queen.
I have no problem to defend Drive against Fugitive, Fugitive aged really bad and it feels like cheap TV movie, Drive is obviously much newer, has great cinematography, great score, atmosphere, nice action and aged really good despite being 11 years already (but I am not really some big fan of Drive, just saying it's better than Fugitive). Btw. just because something is "stupid action flick" it doesn't mean it can't be good at it, you can have good stupid action flicks and you can have bad stupid action flicks. I don't usually watch stupid action flicks (I'm more (social) drama guy), but when I do I want to watch the good ones.
I'm recently rewatching movies starting from 90s and while The Rock was still enjoyable even in 2022 (8mm or Absolute power were meh, same as already back then), I remember Fugitive being pretty bad already many years ago. Movies like Die Hard, Speed, Con Air, Mission impossible, Enemy of the state, were all better than Harrison action movies, which always felt like cheap TV movies with low production value. Meanwhile we have 2 year newer Heat, which is still for sure in top 5 best action/crime movies ever and aged amazingly and could easily beat any day any new action/crime movie. The production value and director skills are on completely different level than Harrison action movies. I just checked the most famous Harrison action movies I remember from 90s - Fugitive, Clear and Present danger, The Devil's Own and Air Force one - all 4 have different director, 3 directors nobody remembers and 4th only thanks to Das Boot.
I think it's understandable.
It's very hard to believe whatever either side is reporting. And before you say that's what Russian bots want you to believe, I'll add I lost my trust after Iraq war reporting (like who in their right mind confuses plot of The Rock (film) and WMD in real life), and then after Trump's victory in 2016 (media I was following at the time were making it out to be a sure fire thing for Hillary which is opposite of what happened).
I remain a skeptic and will wait for 5+ years to see what actually happened.
>What money can't buy is the knowledge that you can do this:
Again: who cares? Audience-wise both movies were watched less than some The Rock vehicles. It would only matter if The Rock was insecure and wanted to prove his is a "real actor", which never seemed to be his thing.
A movie doesn’t have to be cerebral to be good. The Rock is a good movie for the type of movie it is. There are bad movies in the same basic genre as The Rock or Con Air, many of which also starred Nicolas Cage.
yeah, 1 in a 100 movies I don't know - not sure I put Sorkin at 1 in a 100 as a writer. Also one person's 1 in a 100 is another person's pretentious piece of whatever.
I think for a lot of people Star Wars is a 1 in a 100 - if so, to quote Harrison Ford: "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it!"
on edit: I had missed that he was looking for a 1 in a 100 movie originally so I went back and reread, he says "Perhaps worst of all is the realization that the movies you like are very rare, and as you dive deep into film, you’re on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience." so it is not that he is looking for an objective 1 in 100 movie, but rather the 1 in a 100 he likes, thus Con Air and The Rock could stand for someone as those 1 in a 100 - for example I like both those movies but I hate everything else Michael Bay has ever done (don't know who directed Con Air - hmm Simon West quick google, yeah looks like I hate all those too)
> Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.
I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such.
Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences?
I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking.
Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?
>If you have a bad writer, no amount of good other stuff can salvage your movie.
no, if you have good actors they can make your bad writing in some ways standable.
There is the whole "so bad it's good movie" which is generally because the actors manage to make the badness bearable.
Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.
I've seen that movie. I bet it's got The Rock in it.
Nicolas Cage starred in a lot of good movies. He also made a lot of bad films. The Rock happens to be one of the good ones.
Ohh I loved that one. I haven't watched his bond films and I didn't liked the few clips. Him as an older actors was fabulous everytime I saw him.
Dragonheart - I loved his voice in that. I think I realized for the first time, what a voice can do. The angry, bitter dragon turning to the wise advisor.
And someone else mentioned 'The Rock'
He was iconic as James Bond, but he had many great roles. My personal favorite: The Rock. He's just so good in this movie.
I wouldn't underestimate the thief character he played in "Entrapment" (though the movie in itself was IMHO so-and-so), which is clearly derived/has connections with the one in "The rock".
And there are some memorable quotes:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137494/quotes/?tab=qt&ref_=tt_trv_qu
I like the "It's impossible. But doable." and the "I'm never late. If I'm late it's because I'm dead."
The Rock! I consider it his best film but opinions are of course opinions.
I'm trying to decide if Red October or The Rock makes a better Halloween movie.
Like in that movie from the 90s, "The Rock"
*sadly, not actually staring Dwayne Johnson
At what level of crisis does one country with a large enough arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles target the largest population centres of the world as the last resort to reach sustainable levels of humanity?
Is this being war-gamed at the highest level of any of the big three world powers that have this kind of arsenal?
Countries that are net exporters of primary materials and foods would be more valuable than those which are net importers.
Try to minimize effects on arable land and base ecosystems - limit the damage to the boundaries of worthless cement and asphalt.
How many times in a row with the likeliest variables does the modeling have to result in "them or potentially everyone" before the decision is made to press the big red button?
Who decides the variables? What population numbers are we talking? What about retribution?
What about more subtle alternatives? Taking out an entire country's power grid under the guise of a terrorist act, let the ensuing chaos be it's own form of population control, then comes the big bang under cover of chaos it is more difficult to attribute.
This sounds like a dystopian story which would get turned into a bad movie with a happy ending starring The Rock or Tom Cruise being reunited with their daughter who was at college in one of the targeted cities but as luck would have it was visiting less fortunate rural orphans when it all went down, and she still had her makeup clutch.
I really don't know if I should have posted this or not. I've spent the last hour reading the other comments and the overwhelming feeling i get is that there's very little hope. Someone even quoted Peter Watts, so i can't be going too far thinking that this a real future option can I? I don't even know if i think its a remotely realistic scenario, but i do know that war is humanity's most effective population control with historic precedent.
Just tried with this great phrase from the late Roger Ebert (slightly modified to fit in one sentence; the original is four different sentences):
> The movie has been signed by Michael Bay: this is the same man who directed "The Rock" in 1996; now he has made "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen", and, well, Faust made a better deal.
It correctly identifies the sentence as negative, while all words taken individually are either neutral or positive... I'm impressed.
It is definately Hans Zimmer, but with the short part they used in the movie it might as well have been the theme to The Rock.