A Few Good Men Analysis: True Story, Beat Sheet & the Trap
In a 1993 television interview, a year after the film opened, an interviewer asked Aaron Sorkin what had changed between his play and the movie. His answer went to the ending, and it was not flattering. On stage, he said, the scene where Kaffee finally gets Jessep played as a thrilling piece of courtroom theater, full of pyrotechnics, and audiences leapt to their feet every night. It was also, in his words, “a bit of a lie, the whole thing.” Throw enough fireworks at something and people respond. Nothing about it was real. So he set out to get the same effect in the film by earning it, because he never wanted to fake it again.
That is the most useful thing anyone has said about this movie, and it frames this A Few Good Men analysis. Most people remember the film as a delivery system for one monologue. By the author’s own account, though, it is a second attempt at a climax he thought he had cheated the first time. So this runs in that order: the A Few Good Men true story the play took its facts from, then a timestamped A Few Good Men beat sheet, then the trap that replaced the fireworks.
What this A Few Good Men analysis covers
The A Few Good Men true story, and what got changed
The hazing at Guantanamo, 1986
Sorkin’s sister Deborah, serving three years with the Navy JAG Corps, called him about a case she was heading to Guantanamo Bay to work: Marines who had come close to killing one of their own in a hazing they said a superior officer had ordered.
PFC William Alvarado, of Rifle Security Company Windward, 2nd Platoon, was on the receiving end. He had written to a Texas congressman about conditions on the base and about Marines firing across the fenceline into Cuba, and he had asked for a transfer. Nobody granted it. One night in September 1986, ten Marines went into his room, restrained him, gagged him, and set about shaving his head. He began choking, spat blood, and lost consciousness. They stopped and called for help. Alvarado recovered fully.
All ten faced the same choice: a plea bargain with no criminal conviction but a discharge under other than honorable conditions, or a court-martial on charges of attempted murder and conspiracy. Seven took the plea. Three went to trial, arguing they had acted on an order and had never intended to kill anyone. David Cox was one of the three. The court cleared him of the serious charges, convicted him of simple assault, and sentenced him to thirty days he had already served. He left the Corps honorably in 1989, a corporal.
What the case refused to supply
Cox’s defense attorney, Donald Marcari, has described the real case in terms that explain almost every structural decision in the film. He told Cox that obedience to orders had failed at Nuremberg and had failed for Lieutenant Calley at My Lai, that the colonel denied ever giving an order, and that the defense was arguing an implied order rather than an explicit one.
Sorkin solves those obstacles on the page. In the film the order is explicit, because Kendrick gives it out loud, to two men, minutes after telling twenty-one others the opposite. The colonel does not deny it forever; he says it on the stand. But the Nuremberg problem never gets solved. It goes to Weinberg, who argues it at 55m and never gets refuted, and then to a verdict that convicts two men for following an order the film has just proved they were given.
Other changes cut deeper. Santiago dies, while Alvarado lived. The court dishonorably discharges Dawson and Downey, though the real Marines who stood trial stayed in the Corps and left it honorably. Ten men become two.
What happened to David Cox
Cox was not happy with the film. He told the Natick Bulletin in 1993 that if he had not known the truth of it, it would probably have been the best movie he had ever seen — less flattery than a man watching his own worst week rewritten by strangers. His specific objection was the dishonorable discharges, which had happened to none of the three who stood trial. Five other Marines from the group sued Castle Rock in Texas state court for $10 million. The suit produced nothing.
On January 5, 1994, Cox disappeared from his apartment in Natick, Massachusetts. His truck sat in the driveway, keys in the ignition, an uncashed paycheck on the dashboard. On April 2 a canoeist on the Charles River near Medfield found his body three-quarters of a mile into the woods. The medical examiner counted four gunshot wounds. Cox was 27.
The case remains open and unsolved. Some of Cox’s family have said publicly that they believe the killing connects to the Code Red or to the film. Massachusetts State Police investigators who reopened the case in 2019 have said publicly that they investigated both the Hollywood and the military angles and found no evidence supporting either. Both positions sit on the record, and nobody has resolved them.
A Few Good Men beat sheet: where the structure lands
Every timestamp below rounds up to the whole minute and matches the film. Runtime is 138 minutes, and the last line of dialogue lands at 135m.
Act I — The path of least resistance (2m–59m)
Sorkin has said the first few scenes he pitched to Reiner before writing a page — the Code Red before the titles, then Kaffee plea-bargaining at a softball diamond — survived every draft. They are the design in miniature: show the crime, then show the man who will make sure nobody looks at it.
Act I runs long for a reason. Kaffee has plea-bargained 44 cases in under a year and has never seen the inside of a courtroom, so getting him into a trial means stripping away every exit. Dawson does the stripping, and it takes almost an hour.
The case lands on the wrong desk (2m–34m)
| Time | Beat | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 2m | Opening Image | The Code Red on Santiago, before the title sequence. No dialogue until 3m. |
| 5m–8m | Set-Up | Lt. Cmdr. Galloway asks for the case and gets refused. A hell of an investigator, her superiors agree, but not cut out for litigation. |
| 9m | — | Kaffee plea-bargains a case about ten dollars of oregano down to a C misdemeanor, in a parking lot, during softball practice. |
| 11m | Catalyst | Kaffee takes the Guantanamo file. His only question is whether the 0600 flight is in the morning. |
| 23m | Debate | Galloway tells him she does not think he is fit to handle the defense. He more or less agrees, then keeps hitting the ball. |
| 26m | — | First brig meeting. Dawson explains what a Code Red is, while Downey says they were only going to shave Santiago’s head. |
| 29m | Theme Stated | Dawson: “Unit, Corps, God, Country.” Kaffee’s reply — “It’s your code” — is the position the film spends two hours dismantling. |
| 31m | B Story | Ross offers twelve years, then volunteers, unprompted, that Kendrick told the platoon not to touch Santiago. Kaffee has never mentioned Kendrick. He notices at 34m. |
Cuba, and the refusal that ends the act (36m–59m)
| Time | Beat | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 36m–47m | Break into Two / Fun and Games | Cuba. The fenceline, Kendrick’s theology, Jessep’s office at 37m, and the transfer order Kaffee has to ask for nicely. |
| 50m | Rising Action | Dawson says Kendrick ordered the Code Red — information he never volunteered because, as he puts it, nobody asked. |
| 53m | Plot Point I | Dawson refuses the deal, since signing it would mean signing a paper saying he has no honor. This ends Act I, not the brig meeting 27 minutes earlier. |
| 55m | — | Weinberg puts the Nuremberg and My Lai objection on the table. Nobody answers it. |
| 59m | Point of No Return | Kaffee stands and enters a plea of not guilty. He has never tried a case. |
The Cuba sequence carries the beat that pays off two hours later. Jessep hands over the transfer order, but only once Kaffee asks for it nicely — and that request is what Galloway later identifies as an instinct Kaffee did not know he had.
Act II — A case that cannot be proved (59m–111m)
Act II demonstrates, at length, that Kaffee is right about the facts and can prove none of them. Every piece of evidence he acquires turns out to be a photocopy, an unsigned letter, or a dead man. Sorkin stacks the losses rather than spacing them, and the two heaviest land in the same intercut sequence.
The prosecution case (66m–78m)
| Time | Beat | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 66m | Bad Guys Close In | Trial opens. Ross’s opening statement, Kaffee later admits, was all true. |
| 72m | — | Cpl. Hammaker testifies to Kendrick’s standing order. The defense concedes 22 more witnesses would say the same. |
| 73m | — | Cmdr. Stone testifies that someone poisoned Santiago, even though the lab and coroner’s reports found no trace of poison. |
| 78m | Setback | Galloway’s “strenuously objects”: a procedural own goal that tells the jury the defense fears the witness. |
The collapse (90m–111m)
| Time | Beat | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 90m | False Victory | Markinson is waiting in the back of Kaffee’s car. The transfer order is phony, Jessep never intended to move Santiago, and a flight left seven hours before the one Jessep named. |
| 100m | All Is Lost | Markinson puts on full dress uniform, writes to Santiago’s parents, and shoots himself. His letter runs in voiceover across the courtroom. |
| 101m | — | Intercut with the same sequence: Ross puts Downey’s timeline against the switch log, and Downey admits he was not at the 1620 meeting. Witness and testimony gone in two minutes. |
| 105m | Dark Night of the Soul | Kaffee, drunk, tells Galloway that Markinson is dead, then quits in everything but name. |
| 106m–110m | — | Galloway asks why he wanted the transfer order in Cuba if not to test Jessep’s reaction. |
| 111m | Break into Three | Kaffee decides to call Jessep — not to expose the cover-up, but because Jessep wants to say he ordered the Code Red. |
Reiner singles out the stretch running through 106m–110m on his commentary track as the most crucial scene in the film. People always talk about the courtroom scene with Nicholson instead, he notes, before describing this one in character terms rather than plot terms: Kaffee getting out from under his father’s shadow. It was also, he says, the scene that mattered most to him personally and the reason he wanted to direct the picture at all.
Act III — The trap (111m–135m)
| Time | Beat | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 113m | Gathering the Team | Kaffee works out that Santiago’s clothes were still folded in a closet on the night he was supposedly flying home. |
| 115m | Storming the Castle | Defense calls Colonel Nathan Jessep. |
| 117m | — | Jessep testifies to two orders: Kendrick heard that Santiago was not to be touched, and Markinson got instructions to transfer Santiago off the base for his own safety. |
| 120m | — | The footlocker and the phone records. Kaffee: “The fact is, there was no transfer order.” Randolph overrules the objection. |
| 123m | High Tower Surprise | Jessep demands his rank. Randolph reminds him the court has earned one too. |
| 125m–127m | Dig Deep Down | The two-orders question. If your men always follow orders, and you ordered that Santiago not be touched, why did he need to be transferred? |
| 127m | Execution | “You can’t handle the truth!” |
| 128m | Climax | “You’re goddamned right I did.” |
| 132m | Resolution | Not guilty on murder or conspiracy; guilty of conduct unbecoming, with dishonorable discharge. |
| 134m | Final Image | Dawson salutes Kaffee. “You don’t need to wear a patch on your arm to have honor.” |
What the percentages say
Against a standard beat-sheet template this is a lopsided film. The break into Act II lands at 26 percent, close enough. But the point of no return arrives at 43 percent, the All Is Lost at 72 percent, and Act III gets 24 minutes, nine of which are one witness on one stand. Nothing about that is thriller pacing. It is the pacing of a case that keeps failing.
The two-orders trap: a scheduling question, not a confession
Two orders, one witness
Here is the machinery Sorkin built to replace the version he thought was a cheat. Kaffee never accuses Jessep of murder and never proves the Code Red order exists. Instead he gets Jessep to state two things under oath that cannot both be true, and then declines to move on.
Order one, at 117m: Kendrick heard that Santiago was not to be touched, and Jessep confirms Kendrick was crystal clear on it, did not ignore it, did not forget it, would not have questioned it. Order two, in the same breath: Santiago was going off the base immediately because his life might be in danger.
Before any of that, though, Jessep spends two minutes establishing that he outranks the room, which is why Judge Randolph has to remind him who runs a courtroom. Kaffee lets him do it. A witness busy insisting on his own authority is a witness committing to the proposition that authority always holds.
The question with no good answer
Then comes the question at 125m. If you gave an order that Santiago was not to be touched, and your orders are always followed, why would it be necessary to transfer him off the base? Jessep reaches for “sometimes men take matters into their own hands,” which contradicts the doctrine he has just spent five minutes defending. Kaffee names it as a paradox. At that point Jessep can have the truth or he can keep the one claim he cares about, which is that his men obey.
On the commentary at 127m, Reiner credits the construction of that conundrum to producer Andrew Scheinman, Sorkin, and himself. It is the one piece of the film that is pure engineering, and a committee did it.
Why the technique travels
The technique has nothing to do with courtrooms. Get a character to commit to two propositions in separate scenes, each one sounding like a strength. Then put them in a single sentence. He is not caught lying. Instead he stands caught believing two things at once, so he has to choose which belief to abandon in public.
What the film added, and why “the play” is hard to check
Three changes, one job
Reiner has named three things the film built and the stage version lacked: the unpacked footlocker, Markinson telling Kaffee the truth in person rather than by note, and the two airmen. Sorkin’s account matches on mechanism — six months of page-by-page work with Reiner, a first draft he calls long, clumsy and overwritten, and a director who would stop on page one to ask why the film faded in there.
All three do the same job. On stage the footlocker is a document: Galloway hands over an inventory, Kaffee jokes about socks and underwear, and much later he remembers the list. The film puts him in Santiago’s room with his hands on folded clothes, 77 minutes before the fact becomes useful. Markinson on stage is a letter, while the film’s Markinson is a man in the back seat of a car who dies anyway. The stage airmen are two names Kaffee says out loud; the film’s are two men in uniform sitting where Jessep can see them.
The acting-edition problem
Here is the complication, worth knowing before you go looking for yourself. In that same 1993 interview, Sorkin says that after finishing the screenplay — while the film was still shooting — he went back with Broadway director Don Scardino and rewrote the play for the national touring company. He calls it taking the play to a third level and doubts it had been done before.
So the acting edition sold today is not the text anyone means when they say “in the play.” It contains the courtroom footlocker inventory, the phone records, the airmen, and a Markinson letter that spells out the cover-up and encloses the logs. Read it cold and you would conclude the film added nothing. Set that against Sorkin’s account of the sequence, though, and the answer comes clear: the changes went into the film first, then back into the play.
The lesson generalizes. A published acting edition is evidence of what a text is now, not what it was at premiere. Checking a claim about an original production takes a dated script or a promptbook, not the copy on the shelf at the drama bookstore.
The Goldman question
One wrinkle nobody has settled: William Goldman did an uncredited pass on the screenplay, and accounts of what he changed point opposite ways. One credits him with inventing the flight logs, while another says he removed a forged logbook that had served as the play’s smoking gun.
Nobody ad-libbed “You can’t handle the truth”
This one gets repeated everywhere, including in places that ought to know better: that Nicholson improvised the film’s most famous line. Three documents say otherwise.
The line sits in the published play, mid-speech. It sits in Sorkin’s Revised Third Draft of July 15, 1991, on page 153, months before Nicholson shot a frame. And Sorkin has described writing it: around two in the morning, close to finishing the play, moving fast because he could see the end. It took as long to write, he says, as it took to type.
What Nicholson did instead
He performed the speech dozens of times. Reiner says they shot the reaction angles on the other actors first, and that Nicholson played it full out for every one of them, off camera, when he could have marked it. He stayed on set for days after the production no longer needed him, so the rest of the cast had something to act against. Sorkin tells the same story and adds Nicholson’s explanation: he likes to act.
Even the casting has a documented origin. Reiner came into a story meeting having watched Nicholson present a lifetime achievement award to Bob Dylan at the Grammys the night before, opened the script to the big speech, and read it aloud in Nicholson’s voice. Everyone in the room realized, Sorkin says, that he had written the part for an actor he had never thought of.
Ebert’s objection
Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars in December 1992 on one structural complaint. He described it as a movie that tells you what it’s going to do, does it, and then tells you what it did. His target is the scene where Kaffee previews his courtroom strategy. The plan then works exactly as described, which Ebert argued drains the surprise out of the film’s biggest moment.
A third position
Against that, the same scene is the one Reiner built the film around, and he describes it as character rather than plot. On that reading the previewed plan is not a spoiler at all. It is the moment Kaffee stops treating the case as someone else’s job, so the courtroom becomes the demonstration rather than the reveal.
Sorkin supplies a third option. If the stage climax worked on fireworks and the screen climax had to work on evidence, then letting the audience see the plan in advance is not a concession. It is the price of the fix, because a trap the audience cannot see is indistinguishable from a coincidence.
The cast, and what each part is built to do
The film keeps its people in two places that barely touch. One group argues about the code in air-conditioned rooms in Washington. The other lives inside it on a fenceline eighty yards from four thousand Cubans, and only one man crosses between them.
In the courtroom
| Character | Actor | Function | Craft note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lt. j.g. Daniel Kaffee | Tom Cruise | 44 plea bargains in under a year; has never seen the inside of a courtroom. | The flaw is competence used to avoid exposure, not incompetence. Harder to write, and much harder to resolve cheaply. |
| Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway | Demi Moore | Internal Affairs; asks for the case, gets denied, attaches herself anyway. | She fails in public at 78m. A supporting character who never fails is a mascot. |
| Lt. Sam Weinberg | Kevin Pollak | Assigned as backup with no responsibilities; supplies the moral objection nobody wants. | He raises Nuremberg and My Lai at 55m and the film never refutes him. Jason Alexander had the part first and left when Seinfeld got renewed. |
| Capt. Jack Ross | Kevin Bacon | Prosecutor; friend; wins nearly every exchange until the last one. | Opposing counsel is right about the evidence for two hours. Nothing raises stakes like a fair opponent. |
| Judge Randolph | J.A. Preston | Presides; overrules the objection that would have ended the film. | Every trap needs a referee willing to let it spring. |
On the base
Jessep gets three sequences in a 138-minute film. His introduction in Cuba does most of the character work by letting him be entertaining and contemptible in the same breath.
The chain of command
| Character | Actor | Function | Craft note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Col. Nathan R. Jessep (Jessup in the film’s subtitle track and most secondary sources; Sorkin’s play and screenplay use Jessep) | Jack Nicholson | Base commander; believes he is load-bearing. | Under two weeks on the picture for the whole part. His first scene sits roughly 35 pages into the script and arrives at 37m. |
| Lt. Col. Matthew Markinson | J.T. Walsh | Executive officer; knew, signed, could not stop it. | A Captain in the stage text and in the July 1991 draft, but a Lieutenant Colonel on screen. The promotion makes his silence cost more. |
| Lt. Jonathan Kendrick | Kiefer Sutherland | Platoon commander; gave the order; keeps two books by the bed. | A true believer directly beneath a cynic is what makes a chain of command legible. |
| Cmdr. Walter Stone | Christopher Guest | Internist who signed the poison finding and cannot unsign it. | Every cover-up needs one person trapped by paperwork rather than loyalty. |
The squad, and the men who testify about it
| Character | Actor | Function | Craft note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lance Cpl. Harold W. Dawson | Wolfgang Bodison | Squad leader; refuses the deal; will not say he has no honor. | Bodison worked at Castle Rock and had never acted. Reiner cast him after seeing him in a hallway, then rehearsed him for months before his major scenes. |
| PFC Louden Downey | James Marshall | Followed his squad leader; does not understand the verdict. | His last question — what did we do wrong — is the film’s thesis, asked by the person least equipped to answer it. |
| Cpl. Carl Hammaker | Cuba Gooding Jr. | Testifies to Kendrick’s standing order. | Establishes the order everyone heard, which is what makes the order two men heard so hard to prove. |
| Cpl. Jeffrey Owen Barnes | Noah Wyle | Describes his own Code Red, and the beer his squad bought him afterward. | The film merges two stage characters, Cpl. Howard and PFC Curtis Barnes, into one witness. |
What the ending refuses to resolve
The court clears Dawson and Downey of murder and conspiracy, then convicts them of conduct unbecoming and discharges them dishonorably. MPs arrest Jessep. Nobody in the room looks satisfied.
Reiner addresses this on the commentary at 133m. He says he likes that the film avoids a happy-go-lucky resolution, that the situation is not clear-cut, and that these men did kill somebody and should have exercised better judgment even under orders. The ending is ambiguous, he says, and satisfying anyway.
Structurally, the two victories point in opposite directions. Kaffee wins by proving an order existed, while Dawson loses for having followed it. The verdict says both at once and reconciles neither, which is why Downey’s question at 133m goes unanswered on screen. Dawson’s reply — that it means they beat up the wrong guy — describes the crime, not the code.
Hold that next to the real case, where the Marine survived, the men who fought the charges kept their uniforms, and the commanding officer never confessed to anything.
What a screenwriter can take from it
- If the climax works on fireworks, it does not work — Sorkin had a standing ovation every night, but he rebuilt the scene anyway, because he knew what was carrying it.
- Set the trap in an earlier act and in a lower register — the footlocker is a joke about socks and underwear at 18m and a murder weapon at 120m. Nothing about the first appearance announces the second.
- Let the antagonist supply the confession — Kaffee never proves the order. Instead he builds a contradiction and waits, and Jessep walks into it because of what he believes rather than because he is careless.
Three more, about how the case around the trap gets built.
- Give the losses a reason to arrive together — Markinson’s death and Downey’s collapse are intercut at 100m and 101m. Two setbacks in one sequence read as a system closing, while two spaced apart read as bad luck twice.
- Make opposing counsel correct — Ross has the better case for two hours. The defense’s only edge is a question the prosecution never thought to ask.
- Solve on the page what reality left unsolved — the real defense argued an implied order against a colonel who denied everything. The film makes the order explicit and the colonel confess, then hands the audience the same unresolved question the real trial ended on.
