Unclear and Present Danger

In Independence Day, humanity makes its first contact with an alien race. What follows is one day of destruction, one of despair, and one day where the human race, led by the United States, fights back. Jamelle and John use the film to discuss the triumphalist American optimism of the 1990s as well as the political afterlife of the imagery of the film, which extends into the post-9/11 era.

Some of the taglines for Independence Day were “We’ve always believed we weren’t alone. On July 4th, we’ll wish we were,” “The day we fight back!” and “Welcome to earth.”

Independence Day is available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime or Apple TV. You can also stream it on demand at Hulu.

Episodes come out roughly every two weeks, and we’ll see you then with an episode on Mars Attacks, Tim Burton’s satirical counterpoint to Roland Emmerich’s earnest blockbuster.

And don’t forget our Patreon, where we watch the films of the Cold War and try to unpack them as political and historical documents! For $5 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month as well as access to the entire back catalog — we’re almost two years deep at this point. Sign up at patreon.com/unclearpod.

The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on Rambo, the 2008 legacy sequel written and directed by Stallone.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

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For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Star Trek: First Contact, the eighth movie in the Star Trek film series and the first film in that series to focus solely on the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

First Contact stars Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden, Brent Spiner Marina Sartis, Michael Dorm, Alfrie Woodard, Alice Krige and James Cromwell. It was directed by Frakes with a score by Jerry Goldsmith.

In First Contact, Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of Enterprise races through time to Earth’s past to confront the Borg, a cybernetic hivemind that has gone back to humanity’s moment of first contact with an alien species in order to destroy the Federation and change the future. Picard and his team must fight two battles. On Earth, they must ensure First Contact. On the Enterprise, they must defeat the Borg, who have taken root on the ship.

The tagline for Star Trek: First Contact is “Resistance is futile.”

You can find Star Trek: First Contact to rent or buy on demand on Apple TV or Amazon Prime.

Episodes come out roughly every two weeks, and we’ll see you then with an episode on Independence Day, the 1996 blockbuster directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman and many others.

And don’t forget our Patreon, where we watch the films of the Cold War and try to unpack them as political and historical documents! For $5 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month as well as access to the entire back catalog — we’re almost two years deep at this point. Sign up at patreon.com/unclearpod.

The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on Rambo: First Blood Part II, the second film in the Rambo franchise starring Sylvester Stallone.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

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For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Courage Under Fire, a 1996 war drama directed by Edward Zwick and starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, as well as Lou Diamond Phillips, Matt Damon, Michael Moriarty and Bronson Pinchot.

In Courage Under Fire, Denzel Washington plays Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Serling, an army tank commander who accidentally fires on and destroys one of his own tanks during a nighttime battle in the closing days of the Persian Gulf War, killing his best friend in the process. The Army covers up the details and assigns Serling to a desk job, where he is tasked with investigating and determining whether a solider should receive the award for which they were recommended.

He is assigned the case of Captain Karen Walden, the commander of a Medevac Huey helicopter sent to rescue the crew of a Black Hawk helicopter. She was killed in the line of duty, saving both the lives of her crew and those of the downed helicopter. The Army, and the White House, wants to give her the Medal of Honor.

As Serling interviews the men involved in the incident, he notices inconsistencies in the testimonies of Walden’s crew. Some praise her strongly, others say she was a coward. Still others testify to events that cannot be confirmed.

Under pressure from both the White House and his commanding officer to authorize the award — and struggling with PTSD from his experiences on the battlefield — Serling resolves to discover the truth of the matter, even if it costs him his career.

The tagline for Courage Under Fire was “In wartime, the first casualty is always truth.”

You can find Courage Under Fire to rent or buy on demand at Amazon and iTunes.

Episodes come out roughly every two weeks, and we’ll see you then with an episode on Star Trek: First Contact, the second film starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here is a brief plot summary:

The Borg, a relentless race of cyborgs, are on a direct course for Earth. Violating orders to stay away from the battle, Captain Picard and the crew of the newly-commissioned USS Enterprise E pursue the Borg back in time to prevent the invaders from changing Federation history and assimilating the galaxy.

Star Trek: First Contact is available to rent or buy on demand and it is available for streaming on HBO Max and Paramount+.

And don’t forget our Patreon, where we watch the films of the Cold War and try to unpack them as political and historical documents! For $5 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month as well as access to the entire back catalog — we’re almost two years deep at this point. Sign up at patreon.com/unclearpod.

The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on First Blood, the first film in the Rambo franchise starring Sylvester Stallone.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

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On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched the 1996 science fiction conspiracy action thriller Chain Reaction, directed by Andrew Davis — whose previous UnclearPod films are The Package, Under Siege and The Fugitive — and starring Keanu Reeves, Morgan Freeman, Rachel Weisz, Fred Ward, Kevin Dunn and Brian Cox.

Chain Reaction revolves around a group of scientists at the University of Chicago who are working to convert hydrogen from water into clean energy. They find their breakthrough when their machinist, Eddie Kasalivich (played by Reeves), discovers the secret — a sound frequency that stabilizes the process. Later that evening, a group of mysterious assailants kill the lead scientist and destroy the laboratory. Kasalivich, who had returned to retrieve his motorcycle after escorting Dr. Lily Sinclair (Weisz) home, is the only witness.

When the FBI arrives to investigate, they zero in on Kasalivich and Sinclair as their chief suspects, goaded along by the mysterious presence of advanced technology in Kasalivich’s apartment and evidence of espionage in Sinclair’s. With the help of Paul Shannon, the leader of the Chicago project, they escape the clutches of law enforcement only to find themselves fleeing the armed agents of a secretive industrial group.

As Kasalivich and Sinclair race against time to uncover the mystery of the explosion, and clear their names of wrongdoing, they realize that their scientific breakthrough is a threat to some very powerful people, and that their friends aren’t who they seem to be.

You can find Chain Reaction to watch on demand on HBO Max and also to rent or buy on Amazon and Apple TV.

We’ll see you next in two weeks when an episode on Courage Under Fire, the 1996 legal drama directed by Edward Zwick and starring Denzel Washington, Meg Ryan, Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

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John Ganz

Jamelle Bouie

UnclearPod

And don’t forget our Patreon, where we watch the films of the Cold War and try to unpack them as political and historical documents! For $5 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month as well as access to the entire back catalog — we’re almost two years deep at this point. Sign up at patreon.com/unclearpod.

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched “A Time to Kill,” Joel Schumacher’s 1996 adaptation of a 1989 John Grisham novel by the same name.

Starring Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey, with supporting performances from Kevin Spacey, Oliver Platt, Charles S. Dutton, Ashley Judd, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Cooper, “A Time to Kill” concerns the trial of Carl Lee Hailey, a black man on trial for capital murder after killing the two men who assaulted his 10-year-old daughter.

When Jake Brigance, a white lawyer who previously defended Hailey’s brother, takes the job to keep Carl Lee out of the execution’s chamber, the small Mississippi town of Canton, where the film takes place, is plunged into chaos. Brigance and his team must navigate national attention, a skilled and ambitious prosecutor, and a revitalized Ku Klux Klan, willing, able and eager to derail the trail and stop Brigance by any means necessary. All the while, Brigance must handle the strain on his family and his marriage.

The official tagline for “A Time to Kill” was: “A lawyer and his assistant fighting to save a father on trial for murder. A time to question what they believe. A time to doubt what they trust. And no time for mistakes.”

You can find “A Time to Kill” to rent or buy on demand at iTunes and Amazon.

For our next episode, we’re watching “Chain Reaction,” a science-fiction thriller directed by Andrew Davis and starring Morgan Freeman and Keanu Reeves.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

Contact us!

Follow us on Twitter!

John Ganz

Jamelle Bouie

UnclearPod

And join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our latest episode of the patreon is on the 1995 cyberpunk film, “Virtuosity.”

For this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, we watched “Johnny Mnemonic,” a 1995 cyberpunk action film directed by Robert Longo and adapted from a William Gibson short story of the same name, by Gibson himself. “Johnny Mnemonic” stars Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Takeshi Kitano, Ice-T and Dina Meyer.

In “Johnny Mnemonic,” Keanu Reeves plays Johnny, a “mnemonic courier” who transports sensitive data for corporations via storage implant in his brain. He takes a job that requires him to store too much memory, threatening his life if he can’t make the delivery as quickly as possible. While getting the data, his clients are attacked and killed by the yakuza. Johnny goes on the run, where he is betrayed by his handler, befriended by Jane, a cybernetically-enhanced bodyguard, and brought to the attention of the Lo-Teks, an anti-establishment group.

They discover that the data Johnny holds is a stolen cure to a technological disease that afflicts much of the planet. The creator, a mega-corporation called Pharmakom, refuses to release the cure because they are profiting off of the treatments. As Johnny is hunted by hired assassins for Pharmakom, he and his allies fight to disseminate the cure and save Johnny’s life.

The tagline for “Johnny Mnemonic” was “The hottest data on Earth, in the coolest head in town.” You can find “Johnny Mnemonic” to rent or buy on demand at iTunes and Amazon.

For our next episode, we are watching “A Time to Kill,” directed by Joel Schumacher.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

Contact us!

Follow us on Twitter!

John Ganz

Jamelle Bouie

UnclearPod

And join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War. Our next episode, on “Virtuosity,” will be a companion to this one.

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle, John and special guest Laura Hudson (formerly of Wired and The Verge) watched the 1995 cyber-thriller “Hackers,” directed by Ian Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens and Lorraine Bracco, with supporting roles for Matthew Lillard, Penn Jillette, Wendell Pierce, Marc Anthony and Felicity Huffman.

“Hackers” centers on Dade Murphy, alias “Zero Cool,” who made hacking history 7 years before the events of the film when he crashed 1,507 computer systems and was banned from owning or operating computers and touch-tone telephones until his 18th birthday.

On his 18th birthday, he finds himself living in New York with his mother and attending a new high school, where he falls into a crowd of teen hacker. There’s Ramon, the Phantom Phreak. Emmanuel “Cereal Killer” Goldstein, Paul “Lord Nikon” Cook and Kate “Acid Burn” Libby, Dade’s hacking rival and romantic interest.

One night, one of the youngest hackers in the group, Joey, breaks into a supercomputer owned by a large energy company. He is noticed and arrested by the US Secret Service, which is working with the company’s security officer. Unbeknownst to the Secret Service or anyone else for that matter, the security officer — Eugene “The Plague” Belford — has essentially orchestrated a scheme in which Joey and other hackers are to be blamed for a virus he created, whose purpose is to extort millions from the company into a private account.

Thus begins a race: Belford is desperate to get the only evidence of the virus, downloaded by Joey before he was arrested, and our teen hacker heroes are trying to clear their names and get to the bottom of this conspiracy.

The tagline for “Hackers” was, of course, “Hack the planet!”

You can find “Hackers” to rent or buy on iTunes and Amazon.

Our next film is the 1995 cyberpunk thriller, “Johnny Mnemonic.”

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

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Follow us on Twitter!

John Ganz

Jamelle Bouie

UnclearPod

And join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our latest episode of the patreon is on the 1964 nuclear war farce, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

In this week’s episode of the Patreon we discussed Sidney Lumet’s heady Cold War thriller Fail Safe, based on a novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, published in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fail Safe stars Henry Fonda, Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton and Larry Hagman with cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld.

The story moves between three characters: U.S Air Force General Black who has been having a recurring dream in which a Spanish matador kills a bull before a cheering crowd, Dr. Groeteschele, a hard-line anti-communist and political scientist who believes it is possible to fight a limited nuclear war, and the President of the United States.

When a computer error causes a U.S. bomber group to erroneously receive valid orders for a nuclear strike on Moscow — and Soviet countermeasures jam U.S. radio communications, preventing Strategic Air Command from rescinding the command — General Black, the president, the Pentagon and eventually Soviet command scrambles to prevent a full scale nuclear exchange.

Working together, they manage to stop some of the bombers, but one fateful aircraft makes it through Soviet defenses to release its weapon. Faced with the unimaginable, the president and General Black decide to make a compensatory sacrifice, in the hopes of avoiding war.

The tagline for Fail Safe was “It will have you sitting on the brink of eternity!”

To listen to the whole episode, subscribe to the Patreon at patreon.com/unclearpod.

For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched Michael Bay’s weirdly prescient action thriller, “The Rock,” released in 1996 and starring Sean Connery, Nicholas Cage, Ed Harris, Michael Biehn and William Forsythe. The supporting cast is also chock full of compelling character actors, including John Spencer, Philip Baker Hall, John C. McKinley, Tony Todd and Bokeem Woodbine.

In “The Rock,” Ed Harris plays General Francis Hummel, a disillusioned Vietnam War vet who is angry with the American government for abandoning its soldiers to die behind enemy lines with little to no recognition or compensation. To get his revenge, and to get compensation for his men and their families, he leads his force of rogue Marines in a raid on a naval weapons depot, where they steal a stockpile of VX gas-loaded rockets. They then seize control of Alcatraz Island, off the coast of San Francisco, and hold the area hostage. Either the U.S. government pays him $100 million from a military slush fund, or he launches the rockets, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

To disarm the rockets and stop Hummel, the Pentagon and the FBI organize a joint-task force of Navy Seals, special agents and a former convict at Alcatraz. Nic Cage plays FBI agent Stanley Goodspeed, a chemical weapons expert asked with identifying and disarming the weapons. Sean Connery plays John Patrick Mason, a former MI6 officer and current maximum security inmate who was the only person to successfully escape from Alcatraz. The FBI has brought Mason out of prison to aid the mission.

The team successfully infiltrates Alcatraz, but then the plan falls apart. The Seals are killed, and Goodspeed and Mason are left trapped in Alcatraz. Their only hope of escape, and survival, is to complete the mission before an airstrike — ordered as a last resort — destroys the island and everyone on it.

The tagline for “The Rock” was “Alcatraz. Only one man has ever broken out. Now five million lives depend on two men breaking in.”

You can find “The Rock” to rent or buy on demand on iTunes and Amazon.

Our next episode will be on the 1995 film “Hackers.”

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

Contact us!

Follow us on Twitter!

John Ganz

Jamelle Bouie

UnclearPod

And join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our latest episode of the patreon is on the 1964 nuclear war thriller, “Fail Safe.”

For this week’s episode of the podcast, we watched director Brian De Palma’s 1996 adaptation of Mission: Impossible, starring Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Henry Czerny (Kittridge!), Emmanuelle Béart, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Kristin Scott Thomas and Vanessa Redgrave. It was shot by frequent De Palma collaborator Stephen H. Burum and edited by Paul Hirsch. Screenplay by David Koepp and Robert Towne.

Mission: Impossible, based on the television series, was the inaugural project of Tom Cruise’s production company, and the Mission: Impossible franchise has become a core part of Cruise’s celebrity career. The film was generally well-received by critics, although there were complaints about its convoluted plot, and was one of the biggest hits of 1996, grossing nearly $181 million on a budget of $45 million.

In Mission: Impossible, Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a member of the Impossible Missions Force who is on the run after his entire team — including its leader, Jim Phelps, played by John Voight — is killed in a failed mission to obtain a secretive list of every undercover CIA agent. When Hunt learns that the mission was actually a staged hunt for a mole within the IMF — and that the real mole is still out there, seeking the list — he goes on the run in an effort to obtain the list for himself, expose the mole, and regain his freedom. To do so, he recruits his own Impossible Mission Team — comprised of Ving Rhames, Jean Reno and Emmanuelle Beart — and stages a break-in at CIA headquarters in Langley. What unfolds next is a series of twists, turns, surprises and betrayals.

The tagline for Mission: Impossible was “Expect the Impossible.”

You can Mission: Impossible to rent or buy on Amazon and iTunes, and to stream on Amazon Prime Video and Paramount Plus.

Our next episode is Michael Bay’s action thriller, The Rock.

Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.

Contact us!

Follow us on Twitter!

John Ganz

Jamelle Bouie

UnclearPod

And join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. The latest episode of the Patreon is on the 1961 film “Judgment at Nuremberg.”