Trailer
Plot summary
Off the Mediterranean, the civilian cargo ship Kuwaiti Star radios a mayday: it has been attacked, is burning and adrift. The Navy helicopter that flies to lift off its crew is shot down, and the terrorists holding it answer to Ben Shaheed. The SEAL team of Hawkins, Curran, Graham, Leary, Rexer, Dane and Ramos is pulled from a bachelor party for Graham, whose wedding to Jolena is put off. The team frees the captives, but Hawkins meets Shaheed in an adjoining room and breaks silence, alerting the terrorists; Shaheed slips away dressed as a sailor. Leaving, Hawkins and Graham spot a warehouse of Stinger missiles, and Curran orders the team to withdraw without them. Naval Intelligence challenges that call, and Curran asks the Joint Chiefs for leave to destroy the missiles.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Navy Seals (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The script came from inside the teams: Chuck Pfarrer was an active-duty Navy SEAL writing screenplays on the side when agent Brenda Feigen urged him to write from his own service. He wrote it after retiring, and Feigen took it to Orion, Warner Brothers and United Artists hoping to start a bidding war.
- Richard Marquand was hired to direct, but he died in 1987 and pre-production halted until Lewis Teague was brought in to replace him.
- Kevin Jarre first refused a rewrite because of the 1988 Writers Strike. He delivered once it ended that August, and producers found the draft stronger but gratuitously violent, thin on character and carrying a line of dialogue they judged sexist.
- Rewriting never stopped: uncredited script doctors and even Charlie Sheen and Michael Biehn reportedly reworked scenes during shooting. "The more involved we got the worse we realized the script was," Sheen said later, though only Chuck Pfarrer and Gary Goldman ended up credited.
- Producer Brenda Feigen wrote that Orion wanted to replace director Lewis Teague because the footage was dull and lifeless; instead the studio replaced the cinematographer Teague had insisted on, bringing in John Alonzo.
SPOILER
Lewis Teague shot an ending in which crowds in Beirut chanted as the dead terrorist's body was carried above their heads. Feigen and Orion executives first saw it at previews, were shocked, and voted it out in favour of one of three other endings already filmed; Teague was the only dissenter.- Cartagena in southern Spain stood in for war-torn Beirut because of its Moorish Revival architecture, while the Spanish Navy lent submarines, battleships and helicopters and the army supplied tanks and extras. Teague ran up to seven camera crews at once on the bigger action scenes.
- Before filming the cast went through a two-week course of field maneuvers and weapons training in Northern Virginia, and eight former Navy SEALs were hired as technical advisers, training the actors and sometimes performing stunts.
