Something marvelous happens even though its terrible–that delivers the message, and that is the white squall storm that sinks the ship and kills several people you don’t want to see die. This is what sets this film apart from make-believe scenarios like Dead Poets, because those folks are never in DANGER. These folks put their idealism to the test of the real world, requiring REAL courage. The angst of never-having-fully-lived by America’s pampered in Poets smacks of trite self-indulgence, in this movie this Kennedy-era idealism runs smack into reality. President Teddy Roosevelt warned us as we grew pampered and at ease from industrial-age labor saving devices that we would stuill have to challenge ourseles physically, so he insured the natural state of the american west was conserved for us to explore. In this film, the sailing ship is a similar “retro-challenge” to build character, complete with a young idealistic character from the TV show “Party of Five” who looks like a young Kennedy in a sailing ship in several scenes. By teaching the boys to respect the sea and the ship, they will learn to respect each other.

The trouble with Camelot–is its self-indulgent idealism, not practical idealism, so the efforts of the boys to become men are spent on a flight of fancy in a dangerous sailing ship when we have much more sea-worthy vessels available and meaningful tasks to do, not just tasks required as Jeff Bridges’ skipper warns from the beginning are required to “keep the ship together”. The conflict in the film is the conflict of materialistic, pampered America to produce sturdy men who can face the storms of real life; the parents in the film sense this and are torn between safety and the need to take reasonable risks, and the boys themselves think there has to be “a better way”. The point of the film is NOT to “throw caution into the wind” counting on humanistic hubris but to take every precaution possible so you can set sail by the “wind”–a metaphor for life’s forces–and live to see another day.

But along the way, there are warnings that all is not well. Offshore near Cuba, a communist gunboat shoots across the ship’s bow and boards the boat. Bridges stands up to the commie and sends him on his way, though his compass is smashed and he must use his humanistic skills to pilot the ship…while over the horizon the ships of the ill-fated “Bay of Pigs” amphibious invasion appear….a foreshadowing of another “Camelot” type enterprise ready to hit a wall of harsh reality..days later as America is sending its first astronaut into space heard over the radio, the weather worsens…

Now that the boys who are now more mature, young men, most would expect a return home in a happy ending, but the storm hits and they lose the ship and some very fine people. Then in typical American fashion, we hold a court-room trial or a hearing to pin the blame on a “scapegoat” rather than face the truth that its our own mentality that is at fault. That scapegoat is the Skipper and his judgments when it should be the soundness of the entire sailing-ship-as-retro-character-builder-for-teenage-boys-in-an-unforgiving-environment-of-the-sea. Full grown MEN die at sea in much larger, more seaworthy vessels. A similar tragic ending took place later by unrealistically wishing 7-year old Jessica Dubroff to pilot an airplane across the U.S. Even with the best humanism, the skipper loses the ship and his lovely wife, several staff and boys to the sea. He is devastated. Is his idealism destroyed for good? Jeff Bridges in the courtroom says that control and the ship “got away from him” and “he didn’t see it coming”—–humanistic hubris will do that to you. This is exactly what took place with JFK and his Camelot humanism (phrase coined by his wife Jackie, afterwards): it ran head first into failures caused by unrealistic planning/preparations at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and the conspiracy of gunmen at Dealey Plaza. It continued with RFK throwing “caution into the wind” and not having adequate security in place before he too, was gunned down.

The surviving boys rally to the Skipper’s side in the end, reminding him that in life we have to band together during the hour of crisis, that sometimes in life you have to “take your lumps” and “drive on”. The film suggests this fatalism should be accepted, I disagree. We should accept that its a possibility that the elements might get the better of us, but to do EVERYTHING IN OUR MEANS TO DEFEAT them, to include—but not over-depend on—human skill and have the HUMILITY to also use technology to help overcome the elements. That’s what men do if we are going to make headway in this dangerous, challenging world we live in eloquently told by the Party of Five actor at film’s end, and foretold earlier by Alan Shepherd’s space capsule spotted by the boys in their lifeboats. But that’s not what happens in America, lately every time we “fall off a horse”, we “wash our hands of it” in a senate hearing or a courtroom (Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia…) and then vow to never “get back on”, LEARNING HOW TO DO IT BETTER—Not more humanistic hubris but PHYSICAL means; life jackets, more bouyant sailing ships, better self-righting life boats, navigation/weather aids, recovery parachutes to prevent Jessica Dubroff-type aircraft crashes etc., This propensity to “throw the towel in” is how we drift from a nation of doers to a nation of talkers and computer game players. Jeff Bridges and his crew were trying to “pass the torch” of direct engagement of reality with high ideals, that he continued on to be one of the first Peace Corps Directors and the boys went to Vietnam and survived is testimony that their character didn’t fail.

The director of the film seems confused about whether the message should be to accept idealism with fatalism or if idealism is non-functional in the world; the real message is to make idealism functional.
Rating: 5 / 5

Then, following is a serious assassination involving the killing of the Secretary of Defense at this Boxing Match in which there are numerous suspects and possibilites. De Palma sets it up so strategically and annoyingly blaze, that the audience can’t seem to follow. There are many stories through the several different characters Cage interacts with to get his investigative story. However, a few of the stories don’t seem to cope with reality. Cage pieces it together in a way we don’t seem to understand, which makes us wonder if he really solved anything at all, or is just leaving us to believe that somehow the film has such a confusing conclusion to the madness, that an everyday audience wouldn’t be able to understand easily. Then, maybe we’re just supposed to accept that theory and pretend that this movie is very intelligent, with a mind-bending craft even Einstein couldn’t comprehend in two-hundred years. The film is such a disastrous jigsaw puzzle that seems to lead us in a direction where we can finally say “OK, I get it now”, but then it totally dismantles it all, creating more lies and scandals for us to realize, until we are sucked into the ruthless truth of who is really truthful and an ally to Cage, and who is not. Seriously, Cage’s character seems more of a villain as well. One scene following the assassination pits him (AS A COP) telling his best friend (Sinise), who is the Secretary of Defense’s bodyguard to lie to the other agents and officers to prevent his deserved imprisonment. We think we understand that Sinise’s hormones detured him from being at his post with the Secretary of Defense by scoping out a red headed beauty queen, and then we are lured into the backdoors of plot working in which we might as well give up and surrender to its actual stupidity. It completely sets a point to make the audience disturbed with its constant character and story manipulations. By the time we are introduced to the actual “real” bad guy scenario, we don’t even care. So many people could actually guess who the villain(s) turned out to be. The ending is more of a relief than an actual ending. So many good performances, so many interesting techniques, but so little excitment and creativity, and no sense of reality. Snake Eyes is more of a blood bath mystery with no desire to entertain, but to rather convince its audience that it is more mature than any other plausible film to date. Don’t be shocked when you realize that the film ends after 100 minutes, and you realize that if there weren’t so many scandelous scenes and obscure plot tugs that rip you in the wrong direction the whole way through, the film could’ve ended with a beginning that delivers, and a simple ending in which we could easily understand.

QUOTE: “Snake Eyes is a maze of annoyance, and simply that. It tries to be smarter than the audience, with emphasis on TRIES. The manuevers it plays with don’t entertain, but simply create more plot problems than thought possible. This film is like a “snake”, slithering in so many directions that we can’t keep up with its abnormality and constant shifts of the underminded. Maybe that was the original visualization from De Palma’s mind, but doesn’t it seem he might have explored the imagination a little bit much? My point is- if this would’ve been De Palma’s last film, would he have been proud of it, or ashamed? I think the answer is obvious.”
Rating: 1 / 5

Snake Eyes instantly begins with an awesome theme played out on lush violins. It echoes Bernard Herrmann classic scores to Hitchcock movies. And seeing as how with this movie Brian DePalma was paying tribute to Hitchcock it’s only fitting that Sakamoto would be such a sport. Usually when a score imitates another movie it doesn’t stand on its own. But Snakes Eyes sounds soooo cool. Track 10 ‘The Storm’ is worth buying the CD on its own.

Ignore the meaningless songs tacked on at the end. Sakamoto’s score ends with the beautiful ‘Snake Eyes-Long Version’. It’s a shame that this came out in the modern day. If this score accompanied a classic movie it would have been well-remembered. Find a copy and buy!
Rating: 5 / 5