[Demi] Moore plays a smart and ambitious Navy Intelligence officer, Lt. Jordan O'Neil, who is prodded by a female senator from Texas to become the first woman in combat training for the Navy SEALs. The senator, played with waspish venom by Anne Bancroft in a creek-bottom accent, hopes to win votes by pushing for women as equals in military combat (although I'm not sure that idea would win her votes anywhere in real life).

Actually, there's lots more action in G.I. Jane than there was in the male-dominated Officer, because it was directed by Ridley Scott, who goes for thrills with a feminine bent. Alien with Sigourney Weaver and Thelma & Louise are his films. So is Blade Runner. G.I. Jane shares Alien's dark, sometimes industrial strength look. Check out the many eerie nighttime basic training maneuvers in mud and drenching rain and especially the sequences where O'Neil works out to hone her razor-sharp muscles in a steely gray storeroom.

She needs them for this tough movie in which O'Neil goes head to head - and later in the film quite literally head to head - against the tight-lipped Master Chief John Urgayle (Viggo Mortensen), a drill instructor who doesn't cotton to the idea of women in combat. He wants to preserve his all-male bastion and pushes O'Neil hard - real hard - through basic training, hoping she'll be the one who rings the big bell outside the barracks signaling that she's quitting the program. Master Chief, for that's what he's called, says his goal is always to get one quitter on the first day of basic training.