Review: The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023)

Flash Post #11

On October 6th, 2023–a date which will live in infamy–SHOWTIME released The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023) to its streaming platform. By sheer coincidence, I had been working on and off on a post about its source material–Herman Wouk’s original novel, The Caine Mutiny, released in 1951–and its then-existing derivates: the 1954 film of the same name and The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, which was originally performed as a stage play based on the novel, but which was then adapted as a made-for-TV movie in 1988. I then got it into my head to (1) write this review, (2) finish my original post, and (3) release it all together in a single post within a few days of the original streaming date. Well, I blew right past that deadline. And while the original post about the source material and its derivatives is now complete as well, the combined word count is somewhere north of 6,000, and I won’t fool myself into thinking anyone is going to read that much of my material in a single sitting. So, while my original post that delves more into analysis and themes will be coming out soon, it will be as a standalone. For now, here’s the review:

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (2023): A String of Unforced Errors

Up front, I think it’s fair to say that someone with no experience (or at least no recent experience) in the US Navy–and maybe even someone with experience in the Navy, but not on surface ships–might well enjoy this movie. The acting is very good, and the direction and cinematography are as good as they need to be (good enough that I, not being a professional film critic and having no experience in filmmaking, noted no glaring glaring errors as a casual viewer). As for the script… well, the script is great if you can get past all the gross technical errors the characters make, the worst of which are brought about by the curious (and unnecessary) decision to adapt the screenplay for the modern era, with the titular court-martial taking place not during World War II, but circa 2022 and explicitly in the context of the post-9/11 Navy.

For context, Wouk’s original novel is set primarily aboard a US Navy minesweeper (converted from an old destroyer) in the Pacific Theater of World War II, circa 1943-44. Wouk himself served as a naval officer in the same theater, aboard the same kind of ships, and during the same time period and doubtless drew upon his experiences in crafting what I consider an engaging narrative of shipboard life from the point of view of its junior officers serving under a toxic and incompetent leader, one Lieutenant Commander Phillip Francis Queeg, USN. And that last bit, the “USN,” actually matters, because unlike Queeg, almost every other character in the novel and its subsequent adaptations is not a professional or “regular” Navy officer (as would be indicated by the postnominals “USN”), but rather a reservist (making them “USNR” instead of “USN”) who joined up in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Wouk himself was such a reserve officer, joining the Navy from civilian life only after the war had already started. This is not mere trivia: in the context of the novel and its adaptations, the tension between citizen-sailors being called upon to engage in sustained combat operations on the one hand, and, on the other hand, professional officers like Queeg who chose to make a living in the pre-war Navy, is perhaps the most significant source of conflict between the characters aside from Queeg’s own personal shortcomings (of which he has many). It further serves as the basis for what is arguably the *second climax of both the novel and the 1954 film, and the climax for The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (which–and this is trivia–is based not on the earlier film, but rather began as a stage play, based upon the novel, and which was ably adapted for television once before, in 1988).

*[The first climax of the original novel and 1954 film adaptation occurs as the conflict between Queeg and his officers–and the peril of all aboard the fictional USS Caine–reaches peak intensity during a typhoon (based on a historical event), culminating in the titular “mutiny.”]

All that to say, the setting matters. Not just the physical location of the characters in the typhoon-ridden western Pacific, but the temporal setting, with a historically unprecedented surge of citizen-sailors trying to learn to do in a matter of months what men like Queeg spent their entire Regular Navy careers preparing for, and which most naval officers of any stripe have never seen and hopefully never will see: sustained operations against a peer Navy in a war at sea.

And yet for some reason, the director of this latest adaptation of Wouk’s work decided to rip the narrative from its critically important historical setting, copy/pasted it into a contemporary setting with only slipshod and superficial changes to dialogue, and filmed what is otherwise a shot-for-shot remake of an earlier–superior–adaptation of the same work (referring again to the 1988 made-for-TV movie adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which wisely maintained the WWII setting of the novel). Such minor tweaks, though mismanaged, might not detract from most viewers’ experience (hence my allowance that those without recent naval service might enjoy the film), but I question whether the change to a contemporary setting really enhances the average viewer’s experience, either. By contrast, for those with recent naval service–or maybe just a keener than usual interest in contemporary naval affairs–such changes were both unnecessary and greatly diminished the quality of the work by undermining the “five minutes in the future (or past)” sense of realism the filmmakers seemed to be going for.

Setting aside some of the curious technical details that would appear to set the 2023 adaptation in an alternate-history version of Earth (examples include a Lieutenant Commander with 21 years of service, but no Good Conduct Medal, nor any other indication of prior enlisted service that might account for such a career trajectory; a full Lieutenant (O-3) serving as Communications Officer aboard a Mine Countermeasures vessel, rather than the more customary Ensign or Lieutenant Junior Grade; a not-at-all-shocking-to-the-characters tropical cyclone in the Arabian Gulf; a gray-haired aviator with a Distinguished Flying Cross who found time to go to law school and become an attorney on top of that and yet is still a mere Lieutenant; and US Navy warships recently engaged in minesweeping in the Straight of Hormuz, among other alt-history curiosities), are a series of more questionable decisions that even a viewer unfamiliar with the inner workings of US Navy surface ships might have cause to question.

The most significant–and preposterous–change to the setting is, however, the decision to replace the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (the impetus for a number of the characters to volunteer for naval service in the earlier adaptations) with the September 11, 2001 attacks. Not because the December 7 to September 11 comparison is completely off base (certainly both provoked large numbers of military-aged individuals to announce their intent to join the military–some of whom actually followed through and did so), but rather because, even if such a comparison were to be made, the temporal setting of 1944 (relative to the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack) is nothing like 2022 in relation to the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. This is because, even if one sets aside the comparative scale of World War II relative to the “Global War on Terror” (if you want to call it that), no one, and I mean literally no one, was rushing to join the US Navy in a patriotic fervor as a result the the September 11, 2001 attacks in the year 2022 (or 2021, or 2020, or 2019 for that matter). It’s a ridiculous comparison, particularly as the surface Navy’s role in the post-9/11 conflict, apart from certain self-imposed administrative and watchstanding requirements which could be eliminated at the stroke of a pen, is not remarkably different from pre-9/11 Navy life.

The reality is that, in spite of what this latest adaptation of Wouk’s work suggests, junior officers joining the Navy in the past two decades will have joined under essentially the same conditions as Queeg is supposed to have joined prior to September 11, 2001. Thus, the entire conflict between regular Navy Queeg on the one hand and the almost exclusively citizen-sailor officers and crew of USS Caine on the other is completely obliterated in a contemporary setting, because no such distinction exists in 2022. All the officers appearing in the 2023 adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial would themselves be regular Navy officers (as I was when joined the post-9/11 Navy in 2005, even though I earned my commission through the Navy Reserve Officers Training Crops), with many of them having already committed to making the Navy a career beyond their initial commitments (which, these days, tends to be four years or more for a surface line officer, which is also the minimum amount of time to become a full Lieutenant). It’s why, for example, the prosecutor’s question to Keefer about his profession in civil life (lifted straight from the play as set in 1944) makes sense in the context of World War II (when it was possible for someone to join the Navy and, in that time of rapid growth in number of ships and expansion in numbers of people to wage war against the Axis, become a Lieutenant within a couple years), but it makes no sense at all when you take that line out of its WWII-era context and have it delivered circa 2022 (in most cases today, if someone is already an O-3 and still serving aboard a minesweeper, they are either very close to the end of their active-duty commitment and about to be transferred ashore in any event, or have elected to make the Navy a career). These days, there is no draft, no rapid wartime expansion in the number of ships or personnel to warrant such rapid promotion as occurred during WWII. In short, trying to take Pearl Harbor, World War II, and 1944 and transplant them to 9/11, the GWOT, and 2022 is utterly nonsensical.

If Friedkin, the 2023 adaptation’s director, was so hell-bent on modernizing The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial for the GWOT-era, he might at least have set the mutiny and ensuing court-martial in 2003, perhaps using the invasion of Iraq (which had more lukewarm support, even within the military, than the invasion of Afghanistan–and actually did involve minesweeping!) as an added source of tension between Queeg and his officers, perhaps even in place of the USN vs. USNR tension featured in the original. It really is a shame this was Friedkin’s last film, coming at the end of a long career that included such phenomenal works as The French Connection and The Exorcist.

That said, I must grudgingly admit–as I have a couple times already–that this film isn’t so bad if the viewer isn’t attuned to how poorly adapted the source work is to a contemporary setting. I suppose it’s just possible that someone with an interest in court-room procedural dramas and no particular interest in a technically correct representation of the modern US Navy might genuinely enjoy this film. If you’re one of those people, and you’re already paying for SHOWTIME’s streaming service or you have a chance to catch it in a hotel room that offers the streaming service for free (that’s how I happened to see this film), I suppose you might as well give it a chance. Unfortunately, as someone who has served recently aboard both minesweepers and destroyers, the flaws in this most recent adaptation of Wouk’s are too glaring to overlook, amounting to a string of unforced errors.

In summary, I rate this film a “stab-stab-twist-stab” of the SWO dagger (“stabs” and “twists” are like the opposite of stars).