Plot
In Panama, a team of Army Ranger trainees and their instructor, Master Sergeant Nathan West (Samuel L. Jackson), engage in a training exercise: navigate the jungle in hurricane conditions, using live fire to hit targets, then rendezvous at a bunker.
Hours later, a trainee, later identifying himself as Ray Dunbar, emerges from the jungle carrying a wounded comrade, Second Lieutenant Levi Kendall, while a third soldier, Mueller, pursues, shooting. In self-defense, Dunbar kills Mueller. The mission had gone horribly wrong and the rest of the team with West are presumed dead.
In interrogation, Captain Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen) finds Dunbar refusing to talk. He insists on speaking to a fellow Ranger from outside the base, and draws an "8" inside a circle on a piece of paper. Spooked on seeing the "8", base commander Colonel Bill Styles (Timothy Daly), calls in an experienced interrogator and friend, Tom Hardy (John Travolta), an ex-Ranger, now a DEA agent under investigation for suspicion of bribery and assigns him to Osborne. Hardy and Osborne have only 6 hours before the CID transport from Washington arrives to take Dunbar and Kendall away.
Read more about this topic: Basic (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)