Taps

A film set in a military academy. Bunker Hill is a hundred-and-fifty-year-old institution. Cadet Major Brian Moreland is its senior student. Something happens one night. A fight breaks out outside the school dance and a townsman dies. The academy is to close. The land will be sold to a developer and the students dispersed. Brian will not accept it. The students open the armoury. They take the school and begin to run it from inside. Outside are the National Guard. A cordon, a negotiator, and a shrinking amount of time. From there the film takes place indoors. Watch rosters, food, electricity, a telephone line and a command that grows harder to hold. Brian is applying a code. Honour, loyalty and the chain of command as taught in the school; he applies them to the letter, and that is exactly why he does not stop. David is beside him. He believes in the rules but sees where they lead. Alex is different. He likes the gun and does not hide it. What the narrative is interested in is not mutiny but instruction: the question it asks is what these boys were taught, and what happens if what they were taught is followed all the way. General Bache is the school's symbol. The students repeat his words and he never told them what he was actually saying. Tom Cruise was originally cast as a background player. After four weeks of military rehearsal before the shoot, Harold Becker moved him up to third lead on the second day of filming; his reason was that Cruise was out-marching the other cadets on the parade field. Timothy Hutton was twenty-one, a few months past the Oscar he had won for Ordinary People. George C. Scott, Timothy Hutton, Ronny Cox, Sean Penn and Tom Cruise are in the cast. Harold Becker directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1980s American drama and tension in a closed space. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action; the narrative moves slowly and most of the tension comes out of talk.