Under Siege

Andrew Davis’s film began as J. F. Lawton’s spec script Dreadnought. When that title tested badly, Warner’s marketing department replaced it with Last to Surrender. Seagal and Lawton hated it, Seagal sent a blunt letter of protest, and the picture opened under a two word title, breaking the three word pattern of his four earlier films. Many of the Missouri sequences were shot aboard USS Alabama, a museum battleship in Mobile, with the museum submarine USS Drum as the North Korean boat. The real Missouri comes in through footage from Pearl Harbor, the Pacific and San Francisco Bay. The war room scenes were staged on a set built in a high school gymnasium. To dodge the cost of bluescreen work, Davis used a front projection process called Introvision, which he used again on The Fugitive a year later. At the 65th Academy Awards it was nominated for Best Sound and Best Sound Effects Editing and lost both, to The Last of the Mohicans and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A good fit if you value the technical attention gathered in the sound work and do not mind circling the same decks again and again. Not for viewers put off by period reflexes such as Jordan Tate’s entrance out of a cake; Seagal turned the job down at first over that character.