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:
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)