The Rock (1996) on Netflix
R19962h 17mActionAdventureThriller
General Francis X. Hummel seizes Alcatraz and threatens San Francisco with stolen VX rockets. FBI chemist Stanley Goodspeed and jailed ex-SAS captain John Mason are recruited to disarm them.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.4/10384,657 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes67%
Trailer
Plot summary
Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel leads a band of Force Recon Marines who steal fifteen rockets filled with VX gas from a Navy facility. They take over the old prison on Alcatraz Island and hold its tourists and guards hostage, demanding one hundred million dollars from the government for the families of men killed under Hummel's command. The FBI and the Pentagon plan to reach the island through old tunnels, and they bring in Stanley Goodspeed, an FBI specialist in chemical weapons, to disarm the rockets. Nobody knows those tunnels, so FBI Director James Womack turns to John Mason, an imprisoned former SAS captain trained by MI6 who once escaped Alcatraz. Mason agrees to help after he is offered a pardon.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Rock (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Britain's MI6 was fed reports that Iraq was producing chemical weapons by a false agent whose claims echoed the nerve gas shown in glass beads or spheres in The Rock; by February 2003 MI6 had concluded its source was lying, but Prime Minister Tony Blair had already been briefed on the intelligence.
- Sean Connery, who also produced The Rock, followed Michael Bay into a meeting with studio executives and stood up for him, insisting to them that Bay was doing a good job and should be left alone, according to Bay.
- Jonathan Hensleigh worked on The Rock's screenplay but was denied credit after Writers Guild of America arbitration; Michael Bay wrote an open letter of protest calling the procedure a "sham" and a "travesty" and saying Hensleigh should have received screen credit.
- Most of The Rock was filmed on location in the prison on Alcatraz Island, which is governed by the National Park Service; the prison could not be closed to visitors, so much of the filming had to accommodate tour parties.
- The scene in which FBI Director Womack is thrown off a balcony was filmed at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, which led to numerous calls to the hotel from people who saw a man dangling from the balcony.
- At Sean Connery's request, British screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais were hired to rewrite his lines in The Rock but ended up altering much of the film's dialogue; Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin were also uncredited script doctors on it.
