Commando, Part 1
[00:00:00–00:01:44]
Synopsis
We fade up from black to the 20th Century Fox logo and fanfare. Then the film crossfades through black into a suburban street, likely in California based on the roof style. A white garbage truck drives toward the camera. Men in blue jumpsuits are hanging off the side, in the way sanitation workers might. The truck rounds a bend, and we see palm trees—yes, California seems likely. Cut to a bedroom. A man is sleeping next to a woman. The sound of the approaching truck wakes them. It’s not the usual garbage day, but he hurries out of bed to bring the cans to the curb. Running down the driveway, he calls out to the workers. The truck is backing up slowly to his driveway. The man slows his jog for the last few steps and smiles, glad to have not missed trash day after all.
Analysis
The movie throws us right into a story in progress. We don’t know who the man and woman in bed are or where they live (though we can make some guesses about location based on the scenery.) As of 01:44 it’s not clear whether the garbage truck portends anything ominous; it might be unusual for it to come on a different day than normal, but the man, whoever he is, certainly doesn’t perceive any danger here. Given the film’s emphasis on the truck, though, the viewer might begin to suspect something is up.
As we see it for the first time, the truck is shot from a low angle in a shot that lasts from 0:29 to 0:43—fourteen long seconds, an eternity in a high-octane action movie like Commando. Subsequent shots of the truck, showing it continue to drive through an unknown suburbia, take us all the way to 1:04. These shots give a closer look at the truck and the people onboard, most notably the blue-jumpsuited men riding on the back. One is wearing a bandana over his face, but that might not seem out of place for someone working in close proximity to trash. Owing to the shot selections here (and, to be fair, the fact that we’re watching an action movie), the film’s viewer is likely more suspicious than a neighborhood passerby might be at this point.
Inside the house, we’re introduced to the man and woman in a pretty tight shot on their faces, just as the garbage truck wakes them—the lack of visual context around them is a good match for the disorientation of having just woken up. When the man clambers out of bed to hustle the trash to the curb, he leaves the shot and the woman remains. We move to a medium-wide shot as the man cinches his robe, moves through the kitchen, empties the cat litter into the trash, tucks some newspapers under his arm, and exits the house.
At 1:36 we cut back to the garbage truck, and those workers are seeming more menacing now. Shot from a low angle, the truck is backing up toward the camera, looming over the viewer as it fills the frame. The workers hanging on the sides are not moving or responding to the man’s calls of “Wait a minute!” We get a close-up shot of one of the workers, his face covered in a bandana, with no discernable expression in his eyes. One detail leaps out here: he seems to be wearing a shiny watch, something you might assume a real sanitation worker would leave at home during his shift. The man with the trash doesn’t notice or care, though—there’s a sense of relief on his face at having caught the truck when this segment ends at 01:44.
