Commando, Part 36
[01:00:40–01:02:24]
Synopsis
Matrix continues banging on the plane’s dashboard. “Fly or die!” he shouts at it. The propellers finally spin up, and he says, “Works every time.” While Cindy prepares for takeoff, he leans out the plane’s door again and continues firing at the goons in the jeep as they drive along the dock toward the plane. At last, his bullets hit the goon duo, sending the jeep careening off the side of the dock. The bad guys fly out of the jeep, which then splashes into the water.
The plane’s picking up speed now, and Matrix sits down in the copilot’s seat. They’re starting to run out of their watery runway—boats and land are dead ahead. “All right,” Cindy says. “Here we go.” “Watch out for the boat!” Matrix exclaims. “Oh, we’re not gonna make it,” Cindy cries. Matrix says, “Yes we are,” and he pushes a lever on Cindy’s side of the cockpit. It sounds like the propellers start spinning much faster, and the plane lifts off, barely clearing the boats parked below.
Breathing heavily with a mix of relief and disbelief, Cindy says, “We did it. We did it. Wow.” “Well done,” Matrix says. “Thank you,” she replies. The plane flies off toward the horizon—it looks like dawn will be coming soon.
Back on the ground at Surplus City is General Kirby, walking away from the building while cop cars still surround it. A fellow military man asks him, “Matrix?” Kirby doesn’t answer, instead saying, “Call the federal building, have them monitor every police, aviation, and marine channel in the area.” “What are you expecting?” asks the other soldier. “World War III,” Kirby responds.
Meanwhile, in the air, Matrix has a headset on and is talking over the radio. “Repeat, this is Whiskey X-Ray Four Four Eight for General Kirby. Urgent you respond.” A response comes over the airwaves: “Attention unidentified aircraft, this is the Coast Guard cutter Marauder.” The speaker is inside a ship’s command center, staring at a radar screen. “You are flying over the San Miguel gunnery range. This is a highly restricted area. You must change course, or you will be forced to land. Acknowledge!” Matrix: “Urgent, repeat, urgent. You must contact General Franklin Kirby.” The Coast Guard man: “You must first change course or you risk being shot down. Acknowledge.”
Matrix looks at his watch: 2:23:44 and ticking. Cindy notes, “They shoot the shit out of this area all the time. All the flights out of LAX avoid it like the plague.” Matrix asks her, “Can you go below radar?” “Not marine radar,” she responds.
Analysis
First of all, I love the classic “hit a mechanical thing until it starts working” moment here. Matrix is pretty frantic when he’s hitting it, but as soon as it starts up, he’s supremely confident in the technique’s efficacy. Maybe that’s just how it works.
There’s a little moment in this scene that I never fully picked up on until watching it repeatedly now. While Matrix is having his firefight with the bad guys in the jeep, Cindy reaches out the cockpit window to do something. For some reason I think I always read this as something to do with the still-open window, like cranking it shut with some mechanism (although in retrospect that doesn’t make much sense if she’s reaching out through the window, I suppose). In any event, I now see that she’s actually just unmooring the seaplane, removing the rope from a holding point just under the window—which makes much more sense, and explains why the plane begins moving right after she does it.
The conclusion of the shootout is well executed—now we see that some of the bullets aimed at Matrix are at least hitting the plane, as some kind of special effects are used to produce bullet damage in the metal skin of the fuselage. Matrix’s shots are finally hitting home, too, as both goons get tagged within a few frames of each other. The jeep-off-the-dock stunt looks good, even if a slow-motion review reveals that the guy in the beige jacket gets shot in one frame and in the next is acrobatically leaping clear of the out-of-control jeep.
The shots from inside the cockpit as the plane is taking off are convincing enough, even if they’re pretty clearly using some kind of projection. One giveaway is that the plane and its occupants are not being jostled around the cockpit at all, even as the view through the windscreen shows that the plane is bouncing along the water as it struggles to get airborne. The camera seems fixed with respect to the plane, as though it were mounted to the floor. Some handheld camera shake, along with some artificial jostling by the actors, may have helped—although perhaps not having that motion synced to the projected footage would’ve looked even weirder, and it’s possible that the projection technique really does work best when the camera is stationary, since there wouldn’t be any parallax effect possible on the outside scene. Bottom line: the effects here get the job done. The sound design, which links all the shots with the propeller drone, along with the editing, which mixes some close-ups on the actors, exterior shots of the plane, and even a point-of-view shot of the approaching boats, help to paper over any roughness in the projection stuff.
This is the first time we’ve been with General Kirby since around the 20-minute mark, when we saw him surveying the aftermath of the carnage at Matrix’s cabin. He seems to be following Matrix’s journey; after the raiding of the surplus store, General Kirby can see what’s coming next. Interestingly, in a deleted scene there’s another glimpse of Kirby—he appears at the shopping mall after Matrix departs, explaining to a detective who Matrix is and why he’s so dangerous. Here, at Surplus City, he conveys the point of that cut scene in a single punchy phrase—“World War III”—so I can see why the mall portion was left out. (We even cut to a close-up of Kirby just for that phrase, underscoring the message.)
The Coast Guardsman talking to Matrix on the radio is quickly recognizable as none other than a young Bill Paxton. He had been in a few movies at this point but was still relatively new on the scene when he took on the role of Intercept Officer #1 in Commando. In the same year he was in Weird Science, and the next year he would appear in Aliens. Paxton doesn’t have a ton to do here, but he sells it.
Finally, I just want to point out that one of the boats that Matrix and Cindy pass by is named Sea Truck. I’m sure it’s just a boat that happened to be there, not something placed there by the production designers, but it really amused me.
