Director Report Card: Ridley Scott (1997)

10. G. I. Jane

By 1997, Ridley Scott's legacy as a director was probably secure. When you have “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and “Thelma & Louise” on your resume, you're always going to garner a certain degree of respect. Yet I do suspect the director was hoping for a hit, after having two big flops in a row. His tenth movie, “G.I. Jane,” would seem to blatantly recall “Thelma & Louise,” which was his last successful movie at the time. Or maybe I'm getting it backwards. “G.I. Jane” was written by David Twohey, based on a story by Danielle Alexandra. (Her only feature film credit.) At the time, Demi Moore was a big star and produced the movie. Maybe she sought out Scott, based on his record with strong female characters? Regardless of how it came about, “G.I. Jane” would cause a minor stir in 1997.

Texas Senator Lillian DeHaven publicly criticizes the military for not being gender inclusive. This leads to a back room deal, where the Navy will agree to allow women to join under a test period. The first selected recruit is Jordan O'Neil, a topography analyst. O'Neil is accepted into the Navy SEAL program... But that doesn't mean she's accepted by the men around her. She faces constant harassment based on her gender, in addition to all the rigors and strain of extremely tough SEAL training. Most obviously, Command Master Chief Urgayle berates and abuses her in cruel ways. O'Neal – quickly dubbed “G.I. Jane” by the media, the minute they become aware of the program – becomes determined to prove her doubters wrong and survive the program. 

As I said, you can't ignore the feeling that “G.I. Jane” was a blatant attempt to recapture “Thelma & Louise's” success. Both movies deal with a lot of the same topics. O'Neal encounters the same culture of casual sexism that Thelma and Louise dealt with. She's criticized for being both too tough and not tough enough. She's patronized when she demands truly equal treatment. She's accused of being both a lesbian and a slut. She has to put up with rude comments about tampons and all the expected sexual harassment. Inevitably, she has to be threatened with sexual assault too. “G.I. Jane” even has its main character say the line “suck my dick,” an obvious callback to Scott's previous feminist film.

Yet “Thelma & Louise” was presenting these ideas in service of a larger theme: Namely, women everywhere have to put up with this shit on a daily basis. “G.I. Jane” is making a far more specific point about women in the military. Namely, that if women are to succeed in the military, they have to be twice as tough as the men and put up with a lot of specialized abuse... Is it just me or does that seem like an underwhelming moral? “G.I. Jane” never truly attacks the inherent sexism at work in hyper-macho areas like the military. It never questions if the brutality of military training is good or bad and what role gender might play in that environment. It seems to think “Yep, women can be just as tough – maybe tougher! – than dudes” is itself a powerful statement, instead of a basic fact of life anyone should be able to recognize. (Some people don't recognize this fact but... Why would people like that be watching this movie?)

The most interesting idea presented in the film is by far its most cynical. That, regardless of what happens to her once she's there, a woman Navy SEAL is going to be used as a political tool by both sides of the argument. Senator DeHaven specifically picks O'Neal for this mission because she's still traditionally feminine. She's not overly muscular or masculine-looking like the first two candidates. O'Neal's chances at success are less important to DeHaven than the message she'll help sell. The other half of the political system, meanwhile, deliberately plan to sabotage O'Neal to prove that women don't belong in the military. Neither end of the spectrum actually gives a shit about her as a person. They only care about how she can help their particular agendas.

We know Stanley Kubrick was an influence on Ridley Scott. If “G.I. Jane” reminds you of “Full Metal Jacket,” that probably isn't a mistake. Both movies chronicle the hellish process of military training. The SEAL trainees suffer sleep deprivation, freezing temperatures, and repeated grievous injuries. They are forced to do ridiculous shit like roll enormous fuel canisters up a hill or carry fully-loaded rafts over their head. One scene has the men eating food out of a garbage can. Oh yeah, they are also literally tortured. O'Neal is water-boarded in one scene and, later on, tied to a chair and physically beaten. Regular basic training is already designed to dehumanize a recruit. I guess since SEAL training is suppose to produce super-tough soldiers, they have to suffer specific brutalization to be especially hardened. Seems to me that focusing on the specialized shit SEALs do would be a better use of everyone's time. (Real life Navy SEALs, by the way, claim the movie horribly misrepresents SEAL training.) 

When Kubrick depicted military training as a horribly violent and humiliating experience for soldiers in “Full Metal Jacket,” it was in service of an obvious anti-war statement. It was a critical depiction. No shit. “G.I. Jane,” on the other hand, still basically operates as military propaganda. In the film's last act, the SEAL trainees are called into a war zone in Libya because no one else is near-by. They get to prove that the training was successful, that it prepared them to become powerful soldiers in the American war machine, O'Neal included. That's a weird fucking message to send, after the movie spends 100 minutes showing us how utterly terrible SEAL training is. Was the intended moral of this movie really “The SEAL program treats its recruits like absolute dog-shit but it makes them good soldiers, so it's all okay?” Does that make “G.I. Jane” more or less effective as propaganda? I genuinely can't tell. 

The baffling nature of the film's treatment of the training process is most obvious in the character of Master Chief Urgayle. Throughout the majority of the movie, he is an antagonist. He seems to repeatedly single O'Neil out for mistreatment. He refuses to listen to her questions. He is nothing but berating and terrible to her. This peaks during some sort of psychological training exercise, where men are fake-captured on a fake-mission and really tortured by their real commanding officers. This is when Urgayle seemingly attempts to rape O'Neil. She defeats him before he gets that far but it still marks him as an obviously monstrous human being who has no right to exert authority over anyone, least of all women... And then he's treated like a heroic mentor at the end, who helped O'Neil achieve her dream of becoming a real Navy SEAL. What the fuck? Did the last twenty minutes of this movie watch the previous 100 minutes of this movie? Apparently the script not only thinks brutal violence during training is okay if it makes good soldiers, it thinks attempted rape is too.

But let's move on from the movie's extremely confused, if not totally fucked-up, ethical center. I'm not the first person to observe that “G.I. Jane” feels like a Ridley Scott movie trying to be a Tony Scott movie. The film's story, of trainees being suddenly drafted to participate in a real war zone, even mirrors the plot structure of “Top Gun.” Ridley even copies some of his brother's visual cues, like the use of slow-motion during dramatic moments or hand-held style rough zooms. Though don't worry, there's still a shot of light passing through spinning fan blades into a darkened room. Ridley makes sure to include that during O'Neil underwear-clad training montage. 

The Tony-Scott-ification of Ridley Scott during “G.I. Jane” is most apparent – and most annoying – during that last act. During that last act battle sequence, the camera starts to jitter an inordinate amount of the time. When soldiers are firing their suped-up machine guns, the camera starts to dance back and forth in an extremely distracting way. The occasional rough zoom, in previous scenes, wasn't too bad as a visual exclamation point. Here, the trick is abused over and over again, creating a headache-inducing swirl of motion and violence. I guess this was an attempt to simulate the confusion of combat but Scott and his cinematographer, Hugh Johnson, mostly just succeeds in making an unfocused looking climax to the movie.

As I said, “G.I. Jane” was made around the peak of Demi Moore's box office power, which starting to decline after "Striptease." Moore, her voice gravellier than ever here, certainly turned herself into an imposing physical specimen. It's hard to believe the damsel of “Ghost” and Lieutenant O'Neil, with her shaved head and bulging biceps, are the same actress. As an performer, Moore is convincing too. You absolutely buy that she is this incredibly tough woman who will not back down from any challenge and will not surrender. The movie never quite sells the emotional stakes of the story but I'm blaming that on the half-baked screenplay, not on Moore.  She's perfectly funny and charming during the film's rare low-key moments.

Because it's a military movie, most of the supporting actors in “G.I. Jane” have the same shaved heads and bulky physical builds. This makes it difficult to tell anyone apart. Indeed, few of the other actors in the movie prove to be especially memorable or nuanced. However, you can at least count on Viggo Mortensen – at least during the “Prophecy” portion of his career – to create a memorable villain. Mortensen plays Master Chief Urgayle as a sadist who delights in tormenting his trainees. The sheer joy he shows when water-boarding O'Neil or punching her in the face is obvious. Once again, this makes the movie's eventual decision to treat him as a proper mentor extremely bizarre but that's not Viggo's fault. When playing a sweaty, over-the-top scumbag, Mortensen is entirely compelling.

I seem to recall “G.I. Jane” generating a decent amount of discussion in 1997, about feminism and what role women can play in the military. (I also recall a lot of people complaining about being sick of Moore, which is probably why the bottom-feeders at the Razzies gave her a Worst Actress “award” for this movie.) This might just be because my dad – a Navy veteran who liked to lie about being a SEAL, in order to puff up his ridiculously fragile ego – watched the movie frequently at one point. In truth, “G.I. Jane” was only a moderate box office success, winning its box office weekend but ultimately failing to out-gross its budget in the States. As a film, it's a confused mixture of well-intention, if misguided, feminism and totally misplaced jingoism. [Grade: C]