Taps (1984)
Taps pretends to examine a clash between the military, which
gets its idealism from Patton and the Pentagon, and the new
society, which gets its idealism from computers, home economists,
real estate developers, and Erma Bombeck.
The question it raises - Do we need military schools anymore? -
is all but bludgeoned to death in a spray of gunfire as everything
in the film gets annihilated in the crossfire of confused motives.
You go away saddened and depressed without even knowing what
you're supposed to be depressed about. What begins as food for
thought ends up a big mess.
George C. Scott, in an aging pastiche of his General Patton
role, makes an all-too-brief appearance in the opening scenes,
playing the general who runs a highly respected old school called
the Bunker Hill Military Academy.
"Man was meant to be a warrior . . . we're all sons of our
Viking fathers" is the motto he delivers between old stories
about long forgotten battles at the dinner table. Honour is the
talisman by which he lives, and generations of cadets have adored
him for it, looked up to him and tried to emulate him.
Timothy Hutton is the highest-ranking student, the boy with all
of the best qualities of leadership, the cadet most likely to
become a star at West Point. But there is bad news: After a
century and a half, the board of trustees has decided to close
down the school and turn the property into real estate blocks for
condominiums.
The outside world, with its capitalist greed and its disregard
for the value and endurance of traditions, believes military
schools are anachronistic and soldiers passé.
The old general came here when he was twelve and spent the rest
of his life in uniform. He has no intention of giving up his fight
now. When a local punk agitator is accidentally killed in a brawl
at the school dance, public opinion rises in a rage against the
school. It is ordered closed immediately. Following his beloved
general's philosophy, Hutton convinces the other cadets they are
the real proprietors and must defend their home.
With military talent for organisation, the boys take over the
school, turning it into a fort against the outside world,
confiscating the weapons in the school arsenal, and (just like in
real life) an act of aggression turns into a full-scale war
without anybody wanting one. This hypothetical situation turns
into a microcosm of the world situation, as the boys imitate
adults (a trace of Lord of the Flies here) in a cold war
that turns the school into a battlefield.
The most important thing they've learned from the old general
is "Defeat and dishonour are worse than death," but the
old man has just died of a stroke (eliminating Scott from the film
early and freeing him for other film commitments) and the boys are
left to fight to their own devices.
The school turns into a trashy, sentimental metaphor for
Vietnam with obvious factions representing the US military and the
Viet Cong. Practically everyone in the film is riddled with
bullets and tear gas and by the end the cast has been reduced by
half. Small boys lie in pools of blood and guts, and one of the
hothead cadets who took his role too seriously even stages his own
My Lai massacre.
The helpless, horrified viewer who lasts this long will learn,
like so many disillusioned soldiers do in battle, that honour
doesn't mean much when you're holding a dead child or staring down
the barrel of a National Guard rifle.
Some people have called Taps a fascist movie, but it
doesn't even really have the courage of that conviction. It is not
sympathetic to the military and it doesn't show much humanity
toward civilians, either.
The gung-ho cadets and even the cowards are played with honesty
and fervour (look closely and you'll spot Tom Cruise and Sean
Penn); the bewildered civilians are handled with just the right
amount of moralistic confusion. But they're all on their own,
fighting not for beliefs or issues but for close-ups.
Director
Harold Becker treats them all like clichés auditioning for body
bags.
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