starring JAMES BROLIN, MICHAEL YORK, RAE DAWN CHONG, ALEXIS ARQUETTE , CORIN NEMEC, JOHN HAYMES NEWTON

USER REVIEWS

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5 Reviews
5 star: (2)
4 star: (2)
3 star: (1)
2 star: (0)
1 star: (0)
Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Remembering the P.I., January 1, 2001
As a former Navy Vet who spent more than 6 years in the philippines this movie brought back a lot of memories. I left just a couple years before the base closure. While this movie was not 100% accurate some of it was right on. Especially the blackmail attempt, and the semi-accidental killing of the filipino. While I was station-dito there were more than several instances of Filipine Marine or locals and Navy or marine sentries shooting each other and worse. The women were very enticing its true many of my friends including myself brought home Filipina brides (16 years and counting). I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and will definately buy it on DVD. BTW if you are reading this and remember me for P.I… drop me an email.

5.0 out of 5 stars Goodbye America, September 20, 2009
I enjoyed this movie. I have been to Subic so that made it even more enjoyable to watch.

A great fictional movie about the closing of Subic Naval Base., December 28, 2008
A movie that touches on a historical moment in the Philippines. The Philippine Congress decided not to renew the pact that allowed the U.S. to operate and maintain the U.S. Subic Bay Naval Base and the U.S. Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. This movie takes place on the Subic Naval Base and was filmed on location in the Philippines. A great collection of American Actors and Filipino Actors performed in this fictional, high energy, action packed film. A great movie.

From IMDB.com

The World as we leave it, 29 March 2006

I had the chance to be there when the movie was filmed in Subic Bay, I recently was reading the script again and I realized things I didn’t realize when it was made. This is a movie where you need to open your eyes and heart, some people take it serious but you need to realize “How it was then” and thus is why one can find a lot of issues about females. Now it didn’t portray the women as being bad, So one can say that this is a balanced movie. Some females might get offended but normally those are the ones who live a different lifestyle and made find it hard to adapt to how the navy is. For the budget was not high but made it work with what they had. And it made everyone I know happy,sad,and fruitful. I like the fact that the Michael Sellers made the effort to get production with the aircraft carrier. clever. Everything shown was actually in a building that existed, unlike other movies they have to make the scene, here again Clever mike used natural resources to make it come together. Wonderful movie just remember open your thoughts.

PRODUCTION NOTES

By Michael D. Sellers, Writer/Producer I first visited Subic Bay in November of 1992, a few weeks after the US Navy had left. The departure had come about as the result of the Philippine Senate rejecting an extension — a decision that most Americans viewed as foolhardy, tiven the thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic benefit that the bases provided. But the Philippines’ fledgling democracy under Corazon Aquino saw the US Military Bases as the last vestige of America’s colonial rule of the Philippines, and clearly felt that it was time for the Philippines to step out on its own, without the US presence.

The idea of a film that centered on those final days of the US military presence in the Philippines began to filter into my conciousness on that first visit. I didn’t have a storyline fully in mind — only a title, “Goodbye America”, and the notion that the story would center around the lives of three American servicemen manning the base in its final days, and three Filipinas who would be involved in different ways with the Americans–and who would have different views on the American departure. Two years later I found myself invited to pitch a proposed international film to the top executives of Philippine broadcast giant ABS-CBN, and it was then that I began to seriously flesh out the story with my co-writer Bob Couttie. ABS-CBN liked the concept and we were commissioned to write a screenplay, which we did over the next six months — helped along the way by top Filipino screenwriter Ricky Lee. The film would be a coproduction – with funding from both the Philippines and the US- and there was a strong commitment from the beginning to craft a story that gave equal weight to the Filipino and American characters, and which would try to do honest justice to the point of view of each side.

All of us who were involved in crafting the screenplay had serious roots in the Philippines. I had been in the country four 8 years by the time we started writing Goodbye America; Bob Couttie had been there a bit longer, and Ricky Lee was Filipino through and through. I was particularly excited at the prospect of presenting America as seen through the eyes of characters from a country which had spent most of the last century learning to love and hate America at the same time. My favorite line from the movie — and one which I believe I can claim authorship of — is when Hawk, one of the Navy SEALs, says to his girlfriend: “You sound like you hate us.” Her reply: “I don’t hate Americans. I hate us, for loving America too much. You’re in everything — what we see, what we hear, what we wear. For as long as you’re everywhere around us, we’ll never know who we truly are.”

We did most of the writing holed up in a small beach cottage at the same beach bar that James Brolin’s character owns in the movie. One commitment we had made to the financiers is that the film would be one that could be sold internationally as a bona-fide “Hollywood” movie with international stars and production and technical values that would qualify it for global distribution. It also had to be ‘commercial” … and we made a decision early on that the confrontations in the story would need to escalate to a level that was ultimately violent, even though the actual departure of the Navy had been difficult, but peaceful.

For that escalation we turned to two true events that happened around the time we were writing the story. One was the rape of a Japanese girl by an American marine in Okinawa. And the other was the Timothy McVeigh bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Appropriately, for a film that was intended to make an honest attempt to portray both sides of a contentious historical moment, we turned to Swiss director Thierry Notz. I had line produced a film, Fortunes of War, which Thierry had directed and which had been shot largely in Subic, so we knew each other and knew what the production challenges would be. One thing we didn’t count on was having to shoot “through the raindrops” of 6 typhoons which blew through the Philippines during the shoot. We never got shut down, but more than one scene that was intended to be shot in sunlight ended up being shot in rain — which wasn’t a problem until the rain stopped int he middle of a scene. We had to have standby rain towers on hand throughout the shoot.

Our other challenge was that the US Navy was not going to provide direct support to the film because it depicted a Navy SEAL ‘going rogue’ — and we needed to film at least in close vicinity to US Navy ships. In the end we got very lucky when the US Navy made what was to be its last port call for several years at Subic (Navy ships continued to call periodically at Subic even after the base closed) during the time we were filming. We scrambled our schedule so that we could shoot all of the scenes which needed the Navy ships during the three days they were there. And while the commander of the group in port told us he could not actively support our efforts — he also said that he had been given approval to not oppose the filming. So we had Navy ships for backdrops and that helped tremendously.

Goodbye America represents, in the end, a hardworking effort to accurately portray the culture and circumstances in Subic Bay at the time of the Navy’s departure. It was shot entirely on location in Subic Bay.

To learn more about Subic’s history, visit the page “Rising Above the Storm – Subic Bay Documentary” to view a documentary which includes historical footage of the departure of the US Navy, and interviews with those involved.