TheBrowningIdentity's Top Ten Worst Directors List

Suppose you are going to do this, you probably have thought about "possibility" of people dying, yet you decide to do this anyway. And you go into this with full conviction. You are willing to kill people who stand in your way. You are willing to risk lives of your men. Now that things didn't go as planned, you had most of your men die and you are cornered even more, instead of going all the way to bitter end you go 180 and turn against everything you stood for and against your own men, for whom you decided to start this mess in the first place.


And the reason being- people were gonna die. How could such possibility not occur to him? His entire plan and his apparent conviction weren't real. If only they had known to point the consequences of his actions to the General, not only he would have stopped, he would have started shooting his own men sooner.


The General was portrayed as somebody who knows what he was doing, but it would have been better to portray him in the same vein as Peanut Butter & Jelly from "Flypaper" (2011).

Suppose you are going to do this, you probably have thought about "possibility" of people dying, yet you decide to do this anyway. And you go into this with full conviction. You are willing to kill people who stand in your way. You are willing to risk lives of your men. Now that things didn't go as planned, you had most of your men die and you are cornered even more, instead of going all the way to bitter end you go 180 and turn against everything you stood for and against your own men, for whom you decided to start this mess in the first place.


And the reason being- people were gonna die. How could such possibility not occur to him? His entire plan and his apparent conviction weren't real. If only they had known to point the consequences of his actions to the General, not only he would have stopped, he would have started shooting his own men sooner.


The General was portrayed as somebody who knows what he was doing, but it would have been better to portray him in the same vein as Peanut Butter & Jelly from "Flypaper" (2011).

Ed Harris's character and the men loyal to him weren't willing to kill anyone unless it was absolutely necessary. The opening sequence where his squad steals the nerve gas is carried out with tranquiliser darts so as to minimise fatalities - the only death happens to one of his own men by accident. The whole reason he was carrying out his plot was to get reparations for the families of soldiers he'd lost over the course of several black ops missions that had been covered up and forgotten by politicians, so he at least had a sympathetic motive that meant he actually wanted to cause as little death as possible. The main problem with his plan is that, in addition to the squad that helped steal the nerve gas, he enlists a squad that is less interested in his cause and more interested in the ransom.

Take the scene where the Navy SEALs show up in the bathroom and are surrounded by Harris's men. Harris and Michael Biehn have an exchange where they try to talk each other down because neither one wants to have to kill the other one's unit (which does count as a character "pointing out the consequences"), yet the fight starts anyway less because of a direct order from Harris to his subordinates and more because of one soldier's itchy trigger finger. During the firefight, he desperately wants both sides to stop shooting, but since they're defending themselves and also have the high ground, there is no hope for a cease-fire. Even after the fight is over, he closes a dead SEAL's eyes and then stares into a bodycam to explicitly blame the operation's leaders for choosing to send even more soldiers to their deaths rather than simply pay his ransom.

It's pretty clear that Harris never intended to launch any of the missiles, and even as he is backed into a corner he refuses to lose sight of that goal. As Connery's character puts it, he can tell that Harris isn't a murderer. Near the end of the film, the leaders of the extra squad I mentioned earlier are the ones pushing him to launch a missile in order to show that they mean business, but when he does launch one he decides to neutralise it in the water instead. He then reveals that the point of the missiles was to bluff the government into paying the ransom, and since they were clearly not going to do that, the new plan was to cut their losses and leave the island. This is what causes the extra squad members to turn on him and shoot him. Even when Cage's character showed up, he told him where the final missile was so that it wouldn't get launched by the others. Harris never went 180 - for him, going 180 would have meant going through with launching the missile. He proved his conviction again and again without becoming completely evil.

Ed Harris's character and the men loyal to him weren't willing to kill anyone unless it was absolutely necessary. The opening sequence where his squad steals the nerve gas is carried out with tranquiliser darts so as to minimise fatalities - the only death happens to one of his own men by accident. The whole reason he was carrying out his plot was to get reparations for the families of soldiers he'd lost over the course of several black ops missions that had been covered up and forgotten by politicians, so he at least had a sympathetic motive that meant he actually wanted to cause as little death as possible. The main problem with his plan is that, in addition to the squad that helped steal the nerve gas, he enlists a squad that is less interested in his cause and more interested in the ransom.

Take the scene where the Navy SEALs show up in the bathroom and are surrounded by Harris's men. Harris and Michael Biehn have an exchange where they try to talk each other down because neither one wants to have to kill the other one's unit (which does count as a character "pointing out the consequences"), yet the fight starts anyway less because of a direct order from Harris to his subordinates and more because of one soldier's itchy trigger finger. During the firefight, he desperately wants both sides to stop shooting, but since they're defending themselves and also have the high ground, there is no hope for a cease-fire. Even after the fight is over, he closes a dead SEAL's eyes and then stares into a bodycam to explicitly blame the operation's leaders for choosing to send even more soldiers to their deaths rather than simply pay his ransom.

It's pretty clear that Harris never intended to launch any of the missiles, and even as he is backed into a corner he refuses to lose sight of that goal. As Connery's character puts it, he can tell that Harris isn't a murderer. Near the end of the film, the leaders of the extra squad I mentioned earlier are the ones pushing him to launch a missile in order to show that they mean business, but when he does launch one he decides to neutralise it in the water instead. He then reveals that the point of the missiles was to bluff the government into paying the ransom, and since they were clearly not going to do that, the new plan was to cut their losses and leave the island. This is what causes the extra squad members to turn on him and shoot him. Even when Cage's character showed up, he told him where the final missile was so that it wouldn't get launched by the others. Harris never went 180 - for him, going 180 would have meant going through with launching the missile. He proved his conviction again and again without becoming completely evil.