Commando, Part 40
[01:07:36–01:09:20]
Synopsis
Matrix picks up the rocket launcher in one hand and throws his rifle over his shoulder in the other; he’s fully geared up. Elsewhere on the island, Arius and Bennett are in an opulent sitting room in the dictator’s compound. Arius sips his drink and looks at his watch. Back along the coast, Matrix is climbing up off the beach. He sees a collection of buildings in the distance and scopes out the area with his binoculars. Inside the compound, Jenny is continuing to work on her escape, prying apart the planks on the barricaded exit using the doorknob as a lever.
Matrix gets closer to the buildings, takes cover behind a shrub, and looks through his binoculars again. Now he can see moving vehicles, sentry towers, and large numbers of guards milling around. He gets up and continues moving in that direction.
At the Val Verde Airport, people are getting off the plane Matrix was supposed to be on. The two men who arrived at the airport in a previous scene are carefully watching who disembarks. On the island, Matrix is now wading through a stream with his gear as he gets ever closer to Arius. Back at the airport, the last of the passengers have climbed down the stairs onto the tarmac. Two medical workers follow them out of the plane, carrying a sheet-covered body on a stretcher. Meanwhile, Matrix dashes from tree to tree for cover, peering out to reconnoiter the area. He’s practically inside the compound now.
Analysis
We open with the culmination of the gearing-up scene. When the scene began, the fast-paced score actually slowed down a bit. It then sped back up during the series of quick cuts, and now, as we pan up from the ground and hold on a shot of the fully geared-up Matrix posing with his rocket launcher and machine gun, it crescendoes in a triumphant fanfare. The camera is looking up at Matrix, and behind him there is a dense mist or fog, through which we can see rays of light shining down upon him. In other words, this is carefully engineered to be the ultimate heroic, iconic shot of Matrix.
Up to this point, most of the film has been made up of full, discrete scenes that are allowed to play out before we move to the next location. But now, the film begins to heavily use cross-cutting, switching to show slices of action with different characters in different locations—Arius checking his watch, Matrix climbing a bluff, Jenny prying her way out of captivity, Matrix looking through his binoculars, the passengers disembarking from the plane in Val Verde, etc. Matrix is the hinge point here; repeatedly we cut to him, then to a scene somewhere else, then back to him. The effect raises tension as multiple storylines are beginning to converge. Primarily, Matrix is arriving at the dictator’s compound. But at the same time, Jenny is making her escape, and the plane’s landing in Val Verde means that Arius will soon realize there’s a problem with his plan. There’s virtually no dialogue in this cross-cut sequence, and the propulsive score is loud in the mix, tying the disparate scenes together and further ratcheting up the tension.
Each time we return to Matrix, he’s getting physically closer to his objective; the geography is well established in this sequence. After climbing the cliffs on the beach, he spots the compound from afar, and we see his point of view in a wide landscape shot. The next time we see him, he’s dramatically closer—in his point of view we can now make out individual guards walking their rounds. When we cut to him again, he’s right up near the compound. Before, the point-of-view shots were static, long-distance vistas. Now it’s a shaky handheld shot as Matrix is dashing between trees for cover. This change is getting us ready for a big battle—the trajectory of Matrix’s movement can only end in one place.
