Chapter 74: A First-Rate Designer

The Los Angeles premiere had just concluded. On the East Coast in New York, midnight screenings were about to begin across the major theater chains.

"Look, this is Christopher Lee..."

Stepping out of a taxi in Times Square, Aerin unfurled the poster in her hands and held it up to her friends. "He is absolutely the coolest, most charismatic old man in all of Hollywood!"

"Aerin, how many times are you going to repeat that?"

A black-haired girl curled her lip in annoyance and motioned for their four other friends to head toward the AMG Cinema across the square. "Even if Lee is incredibly cool and charismatic, and no matter how legendary his life has been, it doesn't change the fact that he's an old man! We like young, handsome guys..."

"Oh, God..." She put on a lovestruck expression. "Just thinking about Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt makes me swoon."

"So you guys are definitely going to see Interview with the Vampire?" Aerin asked, clearly annoyed.

"Yeah!"

Three of the girls answered in unison. "We came specifically for Interview with the Vampire!"

"What about you, Anna?"

As they walked into the theater, Aerin asked her close friend. Although studying film at New York University, Anna preferred fast-paced movies. She shrugged. "I'm not interested in those two poker faces."

That remark earned them death glares from the other three girls. Anna and Aerin quickly slipped out of their line of sight and headed to the box office. Because it was so late, the line for tickets was short.

"The Rock, midnight screening, two tickets!" Aerin said.

"Interview with the Vampire, midnight screening, three tickets!"

The girls' voices caught the attention of a middle-aged woman in the lounge area. Her name was Chris, an employee of a market research consultancy hired by Warner Brothers. She was there to observe on-the-ground ticket sales for The Rock and its biggest competitor, Interview with the Vampire.

She had sat there for a full two hours, and her observations offered little suspense. Just like the girls who had just bought their tickets, Interview with the Vampire was firmly beating The Rock in sales during these midnight screenings, which relied heavily on fan support.

As midnight approached on the East Coast, fewer and fewer people entered the theater. The vast majority walking in at this hour were there for these two newly released films. Chris occasionally chatted with a few of them to gauge their mindset as moviegoers.

Most of the audience choosing Interview with the Vampire did so because of the original novel and the star power of its leads, while supporters of The Rock were mostly action movie fans who had kept an eye on it since the Super Bowl commercial.

Among the moviegoers Chris questioned, nearly two-thirds said they first learned about The Rock from the Super Bowl halftime ad. The chase scene between the Hummer and the Ferrari, as well as the unique "bomb perspective," had left a deep impression on them.

With targeted advertising on the right promotional platform, Warner's marketing team seemed to have done a solid job. From all this scattered information, Chris keenly grasped one fact: The Rock's Super Bowl commercial had played a significant role.

Sitting in the auditorium, Anna accepted a bottle of water from Aerin and set it aside. She glanced around the room. There were nearly forty people in the audience, the vast majority of them male. Female action movie fans like them were still a minority.

The movie soon began. Just like Duke Rosenberg's previous film, The Rock moved at a blistering pace. Transitional plot points flashed by in an instant, constantly relying on action, explosions, and car chases to stoke the audience's adrenaline. From the very first action sequence, Aerin kept shouting and cheering beside her, completely abandoning the poised demeanor of a girl from a prestigious family.

Anna was different from Aerin. Because she majored in film production, she watched the movie with a cool head, continuously analyzing the plot. By the time the film neared its end, she had already formed a number of insights.

In Anna's view, the film's story was driven from start to finish by high-stakes trial and error.

In General Hummel's storyline, to seek justice for fallen subordinates denied proper compensation, he brazenly stole VX Poison Gas Missiles, losing one of his men in the process. Taking over Alcatraz Island and enlisting two Marine Corps elites recommended by an acquaintance was a massive strategic blunder and a fatal mistake. Annihilating the Navy SEALs led by Commander Anderson but missing the two protagonists was his first tactical error. Luring out John Mason with hostages and locking him and Goodspeed up, only for Mason to escape and pick off the Marine Corps elites one by one, was his second tactical error. Rerouting the missile because he didn't want to strike downtown San Francisco, sparking a mutiny that ended with his death at the hands of his own men, was his third tactical error.

The protagonists were also constantly stumbling through their own trials and errors. Goodspeed, for instance, nearly died during a bomb disposal because his colleague messed around with a doll. Summoned to the airport without knowing the situation, he rambled on about his understanding of VX poison gas and inadvertently made himself the prime candidate for the bomb-defusing mission. During an argument with John Mason, his complete lack of physical prowess left him hopelessly outmatched. Because he lacked combat training, even though he narrowly won a brawl, he ignited the green flare a second too late and was hurled into the ocean by the shockwave of the explosion.

Though the story pushed forward through these constant blunders, it never felt abrupt or forced.

General Hummel knew full well that answering violence with violence wouldn't awaken the conscience of Congress, yet his actions finally drew the President's attention. He didn't kill a single civilian from start to finish. Although his kidnapping, imprisonment, and missile launch were acts of terrorism, his dying words—"How did it come to this, what have I do—"—were enough to reveal his deep-seated patriotism.

In practice, his methods were wrong, but in spirit, they were right.

On the side of the protagonists, when the Pentagon, the politicians, and the FBI discussed the crisis, they knew that carpet-bombing Alcatraz Island would kill civilians, yet they resolved to do it anyway in the name of national justice. They knew imprisoning Mason was wrong, yet they still fully intended to lock him up again once the mission was over. They knew Goodspeed was just a rookie, yet they still ordered him to defuse the deadly missiles—simply because no one else could do it.

On paper, these decisions were correct, but in reality, they were blind, desperate, shallow, and short-sighted. This was especially true during the shower room ambush. When the Navy SEALs found themselves cornered beneath the Marine Corps elites holding the high ground, the MP5s in their hands were completely useless against heavy firepower like assault rifles.

This simple, direct emotional punch left a profound impression on Anna. If Mason taking revenge on Womack represented an individual's localized rebellion against an unfair system—one that narrowly succeeded—then the shower room ambush symbolized "high-sounding justice suffering a complete defeat in the face of evil"!

Of course, this was only her own interpretation of the film.

At first, the Navy SEALs tried to climb out of the storm drains. Confronted with a laser alarm on the grate, they used mirrors to reflect the lasers and evade detection, unaware that it was actually a vibration-triggered alarm. The slightest touch and vibration would set it off.

So, the SEALs climbed right out into the open shower room, where a hail of merciless bullets awaited them. Although Commander Anderson's impassioned speech almost shook the Marines' resolve, war never cared about sentiment.

Because the entire conflict of the film rested on General Hummel's initial motives for committing his terrorist acts, the symbolism of this sequence was exceptionally brilliant.

"First, hypocritical justice waves its moral club to test the bottom line of evil. When it finds evil ignoring it, it struts right out into the open..." Sitting in her seat, Anna shrugged. "Only for the awakened evil to grab it by the throat and tear it to pieces like a chicken."

The dying struggles of Commander Anderson and his men conveyed a profound sense of helplessness. In fact, that imagery struck her heart far harder than his impassioned speech ever could.

Even though the film constantly drove its plot forward through trial and error, that didn't mean it couldn't arrive at an idealized ending.

Anna could see exactly what the young director—a man her own age—was doing. In The Rock, the premise of this trial and error was not lack of preparation, but careful preparation, and it achieved the most ideal effect.

Although the movie reverted to the old trope of individual heroism saving the world after the shower room battle, the director managed the shift with such masterful execution that Anna didn't find it off-putting at all. Instead, she found it just as thrilling.

Having studied film production for a few years, she quickly arrived at an analysis.

In dramatic expression, the multiplicity of conflict is limited. A localized scene conveyed through cinematic language might have 100 different angles to shoot a single second of plot, but they cannot all be presented to the audience—movies simply aren't made that way—especially not in a tightly paced action film like The Rock.

After fully escalating the conflicts in the first 70 minutes, the story could no longer rely on grand set pieces to drive the plot forward. So, director Duke Rosenberg simply introduced an upward-spiraling structure here, shifting the perspective from the whole to the local, and using character conflict to drive the overall story's development.

It was a very clever technique transition. It sounded simple in theory, but executing it in practice was quite difficult.

'That young director is clearly getting more mature!' Anna marveled inwardly.

As a result, the film shifted from the overall trial and error between the protagonists and antagonists to individual trial and error between specific characters on both sides.

From then on, even though the visual tension was no longer as exaggerated as the earlier heavy traffic and team combat, the details became far more refined. The cinematic language and the actors' individual performances showed greater tension, and as the many narrative seeds planted earlier in the script were resolved one by one through dialogue and action, the film grew even more brilliant.

In The Rock, this transition was very natural, and because so many seeds had been planted early on, the final effect was...

"Like adding Gothic stained glass to Romanesque architecture, sweeping away the heavy, oppressive feeling caused by poor lighting in a single stroke."

Without realizing it, Anna had spoken her thoughts aloud. "If you use architectural concepts to describe The Rock, director Duke Rosenberg is absolutely a first-rate designer and general contractor!"