A Few Good Men

For my media critique, I decided to analyze the movie poster for “A Few Good Men,” starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. In this movie, Tom Cruise plays a brilliant but lazy military lawyer who is assigned a case where he must defend two innocent marines involving a mysterious death at Guantanomo Bay naval base. The two marines being accused, Dawson and Downy, are under trial for the murder of another marine, Santiago. For the whole movie, it appears that they will be thrown in jail for the rest of their lives unless Tom Cruise can find some way to prove their innocence. By the end of the movie, we figure out that Jack Nicholson’s character, a commander in the marines, ordered a “code-red” on Santiago, requiring Dawson and Downy to kill Santiago in a way that know body would ever find out.

            The movie poster effectively portrays the themes and ideas in the movie. In my analysis, I use semiotics to show why the poster is designed the way it is. Semiotics is the science of understanding what something stands for. In the case for this movie poster, there are multiple nuances that serve as representations for a deeper meaning tied to the themes of the movie. For instance, both of their faces are half dark and half white. This is a signifier for their dark pasts and struggles that continue to haunt them throughout the movie. Specifically, Tom Cruises character is a lawyer who graduated from Harvard and has failed to live up to the high standards that are expected of him. This internal struggle he deals with is what is signified by the dark side of his face. On another level, Tom Cruise’s internal struggle with his past can be a signifier for the internal decision he makes to put his career on the line by accusing Jack Nicholson’s character, a decorated marine, for ordering the “code-red”. If his accusation is wrong, he will surely lose his job. For Jack Nicholson’s character, the dark side of his face represents the lie he carries out the whole movie about ordering the “code-red” on Santiago, a lie we do not come to realize until the end when he finally admits that he ordered it. This lie can also be a signifier for the dark lifestyle many of the marines live and suggests that there are likely other scandalous events that are left unknown and kept in the dark.

            Furthermore, the white outfit Tom Cruise is wearing and the black outfit that Jack Nicholson is wearing is a signifier for the content of their character. In other words, Tom Cruise’s character is a good guy who intends to free Dawson and Downy of their charges and ensure that Jack Nicholson’s character is convicted so that a “code-red” will never be ordered again and that justice is served. His good intentions are signified by the white suit, a color commonly associated with hope, goodness, and purity. On the other hand, Jack Nicholson’s black suit is a signifier for the evil he has committed and the continuous lie he tells even though he knows that Dawson and Downy were merely following orders and that it is truly his fault for why Santiago is dead.

            Overall, these two aspects of the movie poster might seem irrelevant, however, by using semiotics, it is apparent that the designer of this poster intended to illustrate some of the deeper themes of the movie. In this situation, it is the contrast of dark versus light on both the characters faces and suits that depict the two main characters for who they are and the past struggles they have had to deal with.