The Rock is basically prototypical Bruckheimer, where nothing quite makes sense, everything happens a bit too fast and too colorfully to be believable, and no one talks when they could shout instead. It's a world of color and action and jerky over-fast camera editing, flavored with testosterone and cheese, and set to a blaring military soundtrack. And it exists only in big budget action movies.  Some people love his style, some people deplore it as the death of intelligent cinema, but few are indifferent.

My initial review of The Rock is very brief, since it was just a few paragraph-long mention in the middle of a blog entry on August 5, 2003. I've added this intro and the categorized rating system below to the original blog entry, both to flesh it out and to include enough of an opinion for this to qualify as a review.

It's very difficult to say whether or not this movie is any good. A lot of stuff happens and some of it even makes sense. It's all so over the top and outrageous that it's hard to take any of it seriously, but it's got enough nice touches and acceptable acting that you can't write it off entirely.  At the same time, the ridiculously bombastic style of much of the film ruins several scenes that could be quite entertaining, if they'd been executed with a bit more restraint. But since "restraint" is pretty clearly near the top of the no-no list for Bruckheimer, repeat it to yourself and dream on.

My overall score for The Rock is lower than just about every categorized score, and I'm not entirely sure why. I guess it's just that the sum of the parts is less than the individual elements, and it's mostly due to a sort of cumulative overkill. Lots of the action is pretty good, but some of it is just so silly that it's impossible to watch seriously. The scenes that most remain in my mind are a few shots of fighter jets rolling out of a hanger about about walking speed. That would be a no-brainer for 99% of movies, but somehow in The Rock it becomes a series of fast cuts of low camera angles, silhouetted running figures, wet and gleaming pavement, sun-blinded camera angles, etc, all set to an absurdly over the top piece of "drum drum drum" military style music and terse voice over narration.  It's about the least dramatic scene in the movie, but rather than just showing it and getting back to the actual ongoing plot and action, the jets are lingered over for their very boy-toy porn nature.

The scene took me entirely out of the movie and seemed utterly ridiculous. Other people probably enjoy it and think it's rad. How you feel about that sort of thing is probably going to reflect how you feel about this movie, and all of Bruckheimer's over-edited movies in general.

As for my original short review, it starts now:

After the movie we walked around the Barnes and Noble next to the theater, and ended up in their DVD section.  They have amazingly-overpriced DVDs galore, and are trying to get $30 for almost everything new. Considering that Price Club offers virtually every new movie for around $19, and all the other department stores like Target and WalMart and others have selected new movies for $15 or $20, I don't think Barnes/Noble sell a lot of DVDs.

However they did have a pretty-good selection of used ones for marked down prices, and we got three movies for around $20 each.  Conan the Barbarian, The Rock, and Eat Drink Man Woman.  Malaya has been jonesing for The Rock for weeks, for some reason.  I'd never seen it, and lacking anything better to do upon our return from the movie, she threw it in and I got interested and sat down next to her, mostly to snuggle, and for two hours we were relatively entertained by it.

I had never seen it, but could remember the whole critical frenzy at the time, since it was one of the first of the hyper-stylized overly-edited Bruckheimer movies, and it divided critics back in 1996.  Of course just about every movie has 5 cuts a second now, but at the time it was like the most hyperactive eye candy ever, and people complained about being made carsick by it, and getting eye strain and headaches from the way it was edited.

The whole "new depths in short attention span action crap" thing overshadowed any potential good/bad movie debate at the time, and that was half the reason I wanted to see it now, at last, just to see how frantic it really was.  I found it reasonable watchable, and only noticed the ridiculous editing during an early car chase, when there is not one single long shot of anything; every single view is looking steeply up or down, no camera view holds for more than half a second, most of them are moving wildly in one direction or another or tilting or flying back from explosions, etc.

I personally found it annoying and off-putting, where the craft became so much more visible than the substance that all I could do was be amused at how they were chopping the scene up. It was like they had a ton of footage, but none of it looked very good, so they had to blender edit it to try and create false excitement.  You know, like how they overedit fight scenes when the actors really can't fight at all (see any Steven Segal movie) and all you see are the backs of people being hit by punches you never clearly see thrown.

I don't think that was the case, it was probably a reasonably-coherent action scene with plenty of budget and fire and amazing, flying trolley cars, but they way they chose to chop up the editing you could hardly tell.

I also remembered hearing critics complain about the vastly-overused faux military music, and I noticed that and got tired of it also.  They had one piece written for the movie, and they must have played it 50x, and in about ten different ways.  Slow and melancholy when the mood demanded it, fast and hard when there was a fight, in a different pitch for a sadder scene, etc.

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