Tommy Lee Jones and His Full Leather Jacket
We’ve all seen a John Carpenter movie, and if you haven’t, you need to pull the rock off your head and touch some classic cinema grass ASAP. It will be a liberating and thought-provoking experience, and more importantly, you will be a better person for it, I promise. For those of us already in the cult of JC—not Jesus Christ, he has more than enough sheep in his herd—how many of us have seen a John Carpenter movie directed by somebody else? Only two such films exist because Carpenter was a chain-smoking, obsessive control freak. And with some help from Debra Hill (an ace writer of conversational dialogue) in the early days, JC wrote, directed, and scored his films. He also hated mornings, so every scene heading was NIGHT when he clicked and clacked on his typewriter. Yes, readers, it was an awesome time to make movies in the late 70s and early 80s. Now, well, the talent is at the mercy of dumb-headed power tie-wearing producers and bean-counting lawyers who give fuck all nothing about making a movie that’s entertaining for people with IQs higher than 113.
But… I… digress…
We gather here today to chat about 1986’s Black Moon Rising, a sci-fi action movie in the not-quite-Z genre that has the heart of a Carpenter movie but none of his signature nihilistic testosterone and progressive politics. JC could offend some viewers with the above (even if he was 100% right in predicting the capitalist hellscape that has arrived). Directed by Harley Cokliss, a second unit director on the best Star Wars movie ever, The Empire Strikes Back, Black Moon Rising is a peculiar machine of Knight Rider meets Escape From NY. Carpenter was actually filming EFNY while writing the script for Black Moon Rising. Let us never underestimate the creative might of nicotine and cheap beer. BMR’s plot is very straightforward as our antihero, Tommy Lee Jones, is tasked with stealing something important for the government, losing what he stole, and getting it back before it’s too late. Jones stars alongside a confident Linda Hamilton and a prototype supercar called the Wingho Concordia 2. It’s a coin flip if you can’t decide which is more offensive to the eyes: Hamilton’s hella-grody 80s perm job or the Concordia 2’s Cybertruck-esque (fuck you, Elon) design.
I must admit that I’ve only known geriatric Tommy Lee Jones, surly No Country 4 Old Men Tommy Lee Jones. But a young and unibrowed Tommy Lee Jones, while not as handsome in the 80s action que as Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, or… Jones was one suave and charming son of a gun. He effortlessly fires off Carpenter’s Western-inspired zingers with a wisenheimer smirk, making his character as cool as the leather jacket and the Camaro IROC he drives. With one line, Jones tells us everything he stands for, given the context of a scene where a well-dressed man of industry asks Jones if he’s ever been to a ritzy diner spot in Los Angeles. Jones answers the yuppie, “That place? Too rich for my blood.”
Like Snake Plisken, Jones (Quint) is doing the government’s dirty work because it pays well, and since he’s survived outside the establishment, he can think outside the box and improvise when needed. He’s a mercenary, a man without a country, and whoever offers him the best pay for the job, that’s the job he takes. Coincidentally, Carpenter gave no creative input or notes while BMR was in production, received an executive producer title, and cashed the check the studio wrote him (badass shit that doesn’t, but should, occur in today’s movie market). Black Moon Rising has a firecracker first act filled with CGI-less Fast and Furious-esque car chases and bad bros with Uzis who couldn’t hit the ocean if they fired from a dock.
Like most Carpenter scripts/movies, Act Deux suffers from a sudden absence of quirky dialog and general fatigue. This is the moment you’ll wish Carpenter was behind the camera because his superhuman gift gave the mundane an edge, a detailed mood that kept you on high alert when literally nothing was happening (or was it?). Knowing this was JC’s script, your brain will wander, asking itself things like…
- “How would Carpenter have shot that action scene?” In a low-CU or 1st person POV that somatically registered the close calls from the out-of-control cars and near-miss bullets.
- “Would Carpenter have paced the scenes better and not rushed to the next action scene like a kooked-out kid high on Pixy Stix?” Yes.
In a time when everyone is digitally copying and pasting (or writing about) the creations of others, I think it’d be fun to see some talented humans make a “JC cut” of BMR—if you have the time, why not? It’s noticeable that Carpenter’s personal politics (a clean energy future) were excised from the script via the studio autocrats, and while we still got a damn good movie, yeah, it could be better. Funny, the ugly supercar runs on hydrogen power in the movie. In reality, it ran on a Porsche twin-turbo engine and probably got 10 to 12 miles to the gallon; the shareholders at Exxon were glad.
