Unwatchable. Well -- Unseeable.

Rating: 3/10 (25 July 2003)

Maybe you can get through this but I couldn't get past the first 45 minutes. Every scene was too dark. Almost all the scenes took place at night or were shot day-for-night. All of the indoor scenes were shadowy, even in the mess hall, so much so that faces were indistinguishable. Groups of people standing together became homogeneous black masses. When I realized that I was looking forward to the commercial breaks because I could actually SEE them, I gave up.
Here's what I got out of the first 45 minutes. Demi Moore is a successful Naval Intelligence officer, a lieutenant who is given a crack at the SEAL training program. She feels she ought to take it because she would be the first woman to complete the program. (She's been denied duty on submarines and in a couple of other positions because they couldn't accommodate women.) She has a conversation about this with her husband in bed, in almost complete darkness, so I can only guess from the conversation that it was her husband because her companion didn't sound like Daffy Duck. She points out that although they've been in the Navy the same amount of time and had similar appointments, he has had a more successful career because he's a man. He doesn't understand her desire to prove herself despite her womanhood. (My heart began to sink somewhere around here.)
Well, I kid you not, the training program is really a rough one. They seem to perform all their exercises at night and in the rain. And when the recruits are told they must jump over a series of barriers or something -- I couldn't tell exactly what the obstacles were because I couldn't see them -- she is informed that steps have been provided for her use. She gets up on her hind legs and screams that she doesn't want any special considerations just because she's a woman. The other recruits, by the way, have been acting like testosterone-maddened brutes towards her -- whistling when she enters the mess deck, ogling her rack, shouting out questions to her: "Don't you know it's rude to point"? I don't know why. Demi Moore isn't unattractive but her voice sounds like tires crunching over a gravel driveway.
Enough is enough. Whether or not the photography was bilged, the script seemed well on its way to doing so all on its own. You can imagine how little effort went into picking a title for this politically correct piece -- "GI Jane." The writers and the director (who has done admirable work elsewhere) seemed to have worked equally hard on the story. That is to say, not very much. I anticipated that she would not only successfully complete the program but in addition perform some heroic deed -- saving the life of a fellow recruit during an accident or something. There would be a band playing at the end, when the credentials were being handed out, and all the men who had treated her with such condescension would stand at attention when she passed. Her husband would take her in his arms and apologize for having been such an unfeeling moron. I mean, that's the kind of plot a committee of unimaginative writers would come up with and a bunch of MBAs with an eye on the box office would greenlight. It's like one of those connect-the-dots puzzles that are provided on the backs of the menus in some Chinese restaurants to keep the impatient kids occupied, only here, instead of winding up with a pencil drawing of a clown it comes out as a dollar sign.
Demi Moore is good at playing a tough cookie with that voice of hers that sounds as if it had been cured by Gauloise. And Vigo Mortenson has the stereotyped role of the harsh Master Chief who is only sadistic in the service of a noble cause. At least I think it was Vigo Mortenson. It may have been Sam Shephard. It was too dark to tell.