Unclear and Present Danger

On this week’s episode of the pod, Jamelle and John cover Michael Bay's 1998 asteroid movie Armageddon — the one where oil drillers, not astronauts, are sent to save the world. They discuss why it reads as the most right-wing film they've covered: a movie that valorizes blue-collar white masculinity and treats scientists and bureaucrats as obstacles, an opening sequence that prefigures 9/11, and a worldview that anticipates George W. Bush–era conservatism.

Also covered: the Michael Bay auteur-versus-slop debate, "space dementia," the movie's cynicism about government, and how impossible the physics actually is. Plus listener feedback and a look a...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched Roland Emmerich’s attempt to bring Godzilla to Hollywood in the appropriately titled Godzilla. Ostensibly a film about the dangers of nuclear testing, Godzilla is a total mess, a miserable failure that deserves its poor reputation.

We talked about that deservedly poor reputation, as well as changing American perceptions of the military as the 1990s came to a close. Tune in!

In our next episode, we tackle Michael Bay’s masterpiece Armageddon, one of two movies that year about an asteroid hitting earth. And ou...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Vinson Cunningham of the New Yorker to discuss Bulworth, the 1998 black comedy (no pun intended) written, directed by and starring Warren Beatty.

After working through their initial shock at the sheer weirdness of the film, Jamelle, John and Vinson explore its politics, its vision of American society, its critique of American media and the fact that the character of Bulworth is, himself, highly prescient. They also explore the strange racial politics of the film, as well as the extent to which it...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the 1998 Lifetime film Oklahoma City: A Survivor’s Story, starring Kathy Baker as Priscilla Salyers, a real-life U.S. Customs employee who survived the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The film follows the attack, Salyers's rescue, and her subsequent struggle with PTSD, as well as the way the tragedy shapes her family life (it is a Lifetime film after all). Notably, the movie avoids the political context of the attack, saying very little about Timothy McVeigh's motivations or the broader world of righ...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch the 1998 action thriller Mercury Rising, directed by Harold Becker and starring Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, and Miko Hughes.

The film follows FBI agent Art Jeffries, who goes on the run to protect a nine-year-old autistic boy after the child accidentally cracks a classified NSA encryption cipher — drawing the attention of a rogue intelligence official willing to use lethal force to keep the program secret.

In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss the film’s offensive depiction of autism, its vision of “the deep...

On this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch U.S. Marshals, the extremely lackluster sequel to The Fugitive which dispenses with a straightforward cat and mouse story in favor of a byzantine conspiracy involving government moles, foreign espionage and the Taiwanese government. Directed by Stuart Baird, U.S. Marshals stars Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Robert Downey Jr., Joe Pantoliano, Kate Nelligan and Irène Jacob. 

The tagline for U.S. Marshalls was "The cop who won't stop is back. But this time he's chasing down a lot more than a fugitive."

On this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John were joined by Hilary Matfess of the University of Denver to discuss G.I. Jane, the 1997 military drama directed by Ridley Scott and starring Demi Moore and Viggo Mortenson. The discussion for this film revolves around the evolving role of women in the military, post-Cold War anxieties about American military readiness, the gender politics of the film, and what the movie might signify today, in the present.

Matfess is the author of a new book, "Putting Women in their Place: Gender Power and World Politics,"...

The next episode of the podcast will be here soon, but while you wait, here is the most recent episode of our politics show on the Patreon. In it, we talk the most recent developments in the Trump administration's attack on Minnesota and what they might portend for both the White House and its opposition going forward. We also say a few words about Epstein because, you know, how could we not.

You can get access to this weekly show, as well as a few years of episodes on the political thrillers of the Cold War era...

Jamelle and John are back for the new year with an episode on the 1997 thriller Murder at 1600, directed by Dwight Little and starring Wesley Snipes, Diane Lane, Alan Alda and Dennis Miller. It is yet another entry into the mini-boomlet of films whose premise, essentially, is what if the president were horny…and murderous.

In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss the relationship between the media and Americans’ conception of power, and how this even influences decision makers at the very top. They also discuss the difference between conspiracies in the public mind and conspiracies in r...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John marked the unfortunate death of Rob Reiner by watching his 1992 military legal thriller A Few Good Men. In their conversation, they discuss Reiner’s career, the underlying liberalism of a film like A Few Good Men, and the continued relevance of Jack Nicholson’s performance as Colonel Nathan Jessup.

After this, we’ll be off for a few weeks, but then we’ll see you again in the new year with an episode on Murder at 1600. We’ll then finish out 1997 with an episode o...

Wag the Dog tells the story of a scandal-ridden president whose chief spin doctor, Conrad Brean (De Niro), decides to distract the public with a fictional war with Albania. To pull this off, he hires Stanley Motss (Hoffman), a prominent Hollywood producer who throws himself into orchestrating an imaginary war, complete with fake footage, fake war heroes and a popular theme song. The hoax is successful, but it soon comes with a host of complications which require Brean and Motss to take quick action to further deceive the public.

In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss the...

Every week, we do a political discussion show over at the Patreon. We wanted to offer you a preview of that show in the form of a full episode, which happens to be our most recent episode, on the Graham Platner affair in Maine. If you like our discussion, sign up for the Patreon to get an episode very week at patreon.com/unclearpod.

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Tomorrow Never Dies, the 1997 action thriller, the eighteenth film in the James Bond series and the second to star Pierce Brosnan as fictional MI6 agent James Bond. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, it follows Bond in his effort to stop the media mogul Elliot Carver, played by Jonathan Pryce, from starting World War III in order to expand his reach over the world’s information environment.

Is Tomorrow Never Dies the superior film to Goldeneye? Is the power-mad media mogul a more relevant villain in 2...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched the (rightfully) forgotten thriller The Jackal, a loose adaptation of The Day of the Jackal directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere, Sidney Poitier and Diane Venora.

In The Jackal, Willis plays the titular assassin, a feared hitman who has been hired by Russian mobsters to assassinate the director of the FBI, in retaliation for American activity in Russia. As the Jackal makes his arrangements, FBI Deputy Director Carter Preston (Poitier) and Russian Police Major Valentina Koslova (Venora) scour their so...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 science-fiction action thriller Starship Troopers, starring Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyers, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Ironside and Clancy Brown. An adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same title, Verhoeven’s film takes a satirical pass on the material, turning a fascistic coming-of-age tale into an unusual piece of meta-propaganda.

Starship Troopers takes place in a future, fascist society, where democracy and universal suffrage have been overthrown, and a military government leads humanity, with full citizens...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Red Corner, a 1997 legal thriller directed by Jon Avnet and starring Richard Gere, Bai Ling, Bradley Whitford and Peter Donat.

In Red Corner, Richard Gere plays Jack Moore,, an American businessman who becomes entangled in nightmarish legal ordeal after he spends the evening with a Chinese fashion model and wakes up the next morning to find that she has been brutally murdered.

Jack insists that he’s innocent, but learns that the Chinese legal system is very different than what he’s used...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Hostile Waters, a 1997 made-for-TV movie directed by David Drury and starring Rutger Hauer, Martin Sheen and Max von Sydow. 

Hostile Waters — based on a real-life incident, the loss of the Soviet Navy’s K-219 — was a joint production of HBO and the BBC, released first in the United Kingdom and then the United States. It received good reviews from critics on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Hostile Waters takes place on October 1986, off the east coast of the United States. A Soviet ball...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched The Assignment, a 1997 political thriller directed by Christian Duguay and starring Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland and Ben Kingsley.

In The Assignment, Aidan Quinn plays Annibal Ramirez, a U.S. naval officer recruited by CIA agent Jack Shaw — played by Sutherland — for a special operation to capture the elusive terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Shaw, with the help of Mossad agent Amos, played by Kingsley, trains Ramirez to impersonate the terrorist so convincingly that he can infiltrate Carlos’s network and destroy it from within. As Ramire...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Executive Power, an obscure made-for-TV movie directed by David Corley and starring Craig Sheffer as Nick Seger, a Secret Service agent who gets entangled in a web of political intrigue and moral compromise after he assists the president in a deadly cover-up.

There is not much more to the movie, but Jamelle and John try very hard to extract something like political insight from the proceedings! You can watch Executive Power for free on YouTube (although I would not recommend it).

Ou...

On this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched The Peacemaker, a 1997 political action thriller directed by Mimi Leder and staring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman.

When a train carrying nuclear warheads crashes in rural Russia, nuclear specialist Dr. Julia Kelly is brought in by the U.S. government to investigate. She quickly discovers the incident was no accident, but part of a larger conspiracy to steal the warheads. Assigned to work with her is Lt. Col. Thomas Devoe, a brash U.S. Army intelligence officer who specializes in field operations.

...

On this week's (somewhat delayed) episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Matt Duss to discuss the 1998 conspiracy thriller Enemy of the State, directed by the late great Tony Scott and starring the late great Gene Hackman, as well as Will Smith, Jon Voight and Regina King.

In their discussion, Jamelle, John and Matt talk the film's vision of the American surveillance state, its spiritual connection to The Conversation, Will Smith's superstar performance, and the ways the movie anticipated some of the political disputes of the post-9/11 era.

The tagline...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched the 1997 action thriller Conspiracy Theory, directed by Richard Donner (which explains a lot) and starring Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart.

In Conspiracy Theory, Gibson plays Jerry Fletcher, a cab driver who is consumed with all manner of conspiracies, using his captive audiences to share his ideas and delusions. He is fixated on Alice Sutton, played by Roberts, a Justice Department lawyer who tolerates him because he once saved her from a mugging. When Gibson is kidnapped by secretive government agents — led by the myst...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John are joined by Max Read — of the Max Read Substack — to talk Air Force One, the 1997 action thriller directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring none other than Harrison Ford as The President. Air Force One also stars Gary Oldman, Glenn Close, Wendy Crewson, Paul Guilfoyle, William H. Macy, Liesel Matthews and Dean Stockwell.

In Air Force One, as I’m sure you know, the president’s aircraft is hijacked by a group of terrorists who demand the release of their country’s imprisoned dictator. Rather than f...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Contact, the 1997 science-fiction drama directed by Robert Zemeckis. Based on the book by Carl Sagan, Contact stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway, a SETI scientist who discovers extraterrestrial life and is eventually chosen to make first contact with the alien life. Foster is joined by a stacked cast of character actors, including Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, Tom Skerritt, William Fichtner, John Hunt, Rob Lowe and Angela Bassett. 

In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss the distinctly neoliberal politics of the film as wel...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Men in Black, the 1997 sci-fi action comedy directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith, Linda Fiorentino, Vincent D’Onofrio and Rip Torn.

Men in Black was written by Ed Soloman and shot by the late Donald Peterman — whose credits include Flashdance, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Point Break — with a score by Danny Elfman.

In Men in Black, Smith plays James Darrell Edwards III, a New York City police officer who finds hims...

In The Saint, Kilmer plays Simon Templar, a professional thief known as “The Saint” for using Catholic saints as aliases. He steals a microchip from a Russian oil company but is caught by the owner’s son. He is then hired by the owner, a billionaire oligarch named Tretiak, to steal a cold fusion formula discovered by Emma Russell, an American chemist. Tretiak plans to use the formula to monopolize the Russian energy market. Once he obtains the formula, he also plans to kill Simon.

Simon seduces Emma but falls for her. He abandons his plan to steal...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched the The Second Civil War, a 1997 satirical film directed by Joe Dante for HBO. 

Starring James Earl Jones, Elizabeth Peña, Denis Leary, Beau Bridges, Phil Hartman and James Coburn, The Second Civil War takes place in a future where rapid, unlimited immigration has produced a balkinized society of ethnic enclaves. California is essentially been re-absorbed into Mexico and Rhode Island is home to millions of Chinese migrants. 

When an international relief organization makes plans to bring Pakistani refugees into Idaho, the state’s gover...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched the 1997 thriller The Devil’s Own, directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford.

In The Devil’s Own, Pitt plays Frankie McGuire, an IRA soldier who travels to the United States to obtain advanced weapons for the fight in Ireland. He is put up in the home of NYPD Sergeant Tom O’Meara, played by Ford, who does not know McGuire’s mission. The two develop an easy rapport and McGuire becomes a part of O’Meara’s family, of sorts. When Mc...

In this week's episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Absolute Power, the 1997 conspiracy thriller directed by Clint Eastwood from a screenplay by William Goldman and based off of a David Baldacci novel of the same name. In addition to Eastwood, Absolute Power stars Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Judy Davis, Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert. 

In Absolute Power, Eastwood plays Luther Whitney, a master thief who makes the fateful decision to rob billionaire Walter Sullivan, a close friend and ally of the president of the United States. During the burglary, Whitney sees Presi...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Shadow Conspiracy, the 1997 political thriller directed by George P. Cosmatos and starring Charlie Sheen, Linda Hamilton, Donald Sutherland and Sam Waterston.

In Shadow Conspiracy, a young White House aide uncovers a plot to assassinate the president, making him a target of the conspirators. What follows is a race to evade the assassin, expose those responsible, and save constitutional government from a shadowy group of deep state operators. If this sounds generic, that’s because it is! The movie feels like it was written by C...

On this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched Tim Burton’s 1996 sci-fi comedy Mars Attacks!, starring Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Martin Short Pam Grier, Rod Steiger, Jim Brown, Lukas Haas, Danny DeVito and Natalie Portman.

Mars Attacks! was based off of the 1960s-era trading card series by Topps. In the series, Earth is invaded by cruel, hideous Martians who hope to colonize the planet and enslave its population. 

In the movie, Earth is invaded by cruel hideous Martians. But they don’t seem to want t...

In Independence Day, humanity makes its first contact with an alien race. What follows is one day of destruction, one of despair, and one day where the human race, led by the United States, fights back. Jamelle and John use the film to discuss the triumphalist American optimism of the 1990s as well as the political afterlife of the imagery of the film, which extends into the post-9/11 era.

Some of the taglines for Independence Day were “We’ve always believed we weren’t alone. On July 4th, we’ll wish we were,” “The day we fight back!” and “...

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Star Trek: First Contact, the eighth movie in the Star Trek film series and the first film in that series to focus solely on the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

First Contact stars Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner Marina Sartis, Michael Dorm, Alfrie Woodard, Alice Krige and James Cromwell. It was directed by Frakes with a score by Jerry Goldsmith.

In First Contact, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of Enterprise races through time to...

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Courage Under Fire, a 1996 war drama directed by Edward Zwick and starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, as well as Lou Diamond Phillips, Matt Damon, Michael Moriarty and Bronson Pinchot.

In Courage Under Fire, Denzel Washington plays Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Serling, an army tank commander who accidentally fires on and destroys one of his own tanks during a nighttime battle in the closing days of the Persian Gulf War, killing his best friend in the process. The Army covers up the details and as...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched the 1996 science fiction conspiracy action thriller Chain Reaction, directed by Andrew Davis — whose previous UnclearPod films are The Package, Under Siege and The Fugitive — and starring Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, Rachel Weisz, Fred Ward, Kevin Dunn and Brian Cox.

Chain Reaction revolves around a group of scientists at the University of Chicago who are working to convert hydrogen from water into clean energy. They find their breakthrough when their machinist, Eddie Kasalivich (played by Reeves), discovers the secret — a sound frequency that stabilizes the process. Later that...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “A Time to Kill,” Joel Schumacher’s 1996 adaptation of a 1989 John Grisham novel by the same name.

Starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey, with supporting performances from Kevin Spacey, Oliver Platt, Charles S. Dutton, Ashley Judd, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Cooper, “A Time to Kill” concerns the trial of Carl Lee Hailey, a black man on trial for capital murder after killing the two men who assaulted his 10-year-old daughter.

When Jake Brigance, a white lawyer who previous...

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 cyberpunk action film directed by Robert Longo and adapted from a William Gibson short story of the same name, by Gibson himself. “Johnny Mnemonic” stars Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano, Ice-T and Dina Meyer.

In “Johnny Mnemonic,” Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a “mnemonic courier” who transports sensitive data for corporations via storage implant in his brain. He takes a job that requires him to store too much memory, threatening his life if he can’t make the delivery as quickly as possible. While gett...

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle, John and special guest Laura Hudson (formerly of Wired and The Verge) watched the 1995 cyber-thriller “Hackers,” directed by Ian Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens and Lorraine Bracco, with supporting roles for Matthew Lillard, Penn Jillette, Wendell Pierce, Marc Anthony and Felicity Huffman.

“Hackers” centers on Dade Murphy, alias “Zero Cool,” who made hacking history 7 years before the events of the film when he crashed 1,507 computer systems and was banned from owning or operating computers and touch-tone telephones until his 18th birthday.

On his 1...

In this week’s episode of the Patreon we discussed Sidney Lumet’s heady Cold War thriller Fail Safe, based on a novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, published in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fail Safe stars Henry Fonda, Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton and Larry Hagman with cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld.

The story moves between three characters: U.S Air Force General Black who has been having a recurring dream in which a Spanish matador kills a bull before a cheering crowd, Dr. Groeteschele, a hard-line anti-communist and politi...

For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched Michael Bay’s weirdly prescient action thriller, “The Rock,” released in 1996 and starring Sean Connery, Nicholas Cage, Ed Harris, Michael Biehn and William Forsythe. The supporting cast is also chock full of compelling character actors, including John Spencer, Philip Baker Hall, John C. McKinley, Tony Todd and Bokeem Woodbine.

In “The Rock,” Ed Harris plays General Francis Hummel, a disillusioned Vietnam War vet who is angry with the American government for abandoning its soldiers to die behind enemy lines with little to no recognition or compensation. To get his reve...