Plot
Evelyn Salt is a CIA agent and highly respected by all, including her boss, Ted Winter. Out of the blue, a Russian spy walks into their offices and offers a vital piece of information: the President of Russia will be assassinated during his forthcoming visit to New York City to attend the funeral of the recently deceased U.S. Vice President. The name of the assassin: Evelyn Salt. Concerned about the safety of her husband, who she cannot contact, she goes on the run. Winter refuses to accept that she is a mole or a double agent but her actions begin to raise doubts. Just who is Evelyn Salt and what is she planning?
Keywords: on-the-run, russian, russian-spy, spy, cia, defector, cia-agent, mole, new-york-city, russia
Who is Salt?
Salt Kills.
Don't Trust Salt.
Salt Must Die.
Salt Will Not Be Stopped
Evelyn Salt: What is your name?::Vassily Orlov: My name is Vassily Orlov. Today, a Russian agent will travel to New York city to kill the President. This agent is KA-12.::Evelyn Salt: The KA program is a myth.::Vassily Orlov: Don't you want to know the name?::Evelyn Salt: You're good. You can tell the rest of your story to one of my colleagues.::Vassily Orlov: Salt.::Evelyn Salt: Yes?::Vassily Orlov: The name of the agent is Evelyn Salt.::Evelyn Salt: My name is Evelyn Salt.::Vassily Orlov: Then you are a Russian spy.
Evelyn Salt: I'm not a goddamn Russian spy.
Name | Salt |
---|---|
Caption | Theatrical poster |
Alt | A woman's face with. The word 'SALT' is in the center, below it the question "Who is Salt?" |
Director | Phillip Noyce |
Producer | Lorenzo di BonaventuraSunil Perkash |
Writer | Kurt Wimmer |
Starring | Angelina JolieLiev SchreiberChiwetel EjioforAugust DiehlDaniel Olbrychski |
Editing | Stuart BairdJohn Gilroy |
Music | James Newton Howard |
Cinematography | Robert Elswit |
Studio | Relativity MediaDi Bonaventura Pictures |
Distributor | Columbia Pictures |
Released | |
Runtime | 91 minutes |
Country | |
Language | English |
Budget | $110 million |
Gross | $293.5 million |
Salt is a 2010 American action thriller film directed by Phillip Noyce, written by Kurt Wimmer, and starring Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Daniel Olbrychski, August Diehl and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Jolie plays Evelyn Salt who is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent and goes on the run to try to clear her name.
Originally written with a male protagonist, the film had Tom Cruise initially secured for the lead, but the script was ultimately rewritten for Jolie. Filming took place on a location in Washington, D.C., the New York City area, and Albany, New York, between March and June 2009, with reshoots in January 2010. Action scenes were primarily performed with practical stunts, with computer-generated imagery being used mostly for creating digital environments.
The film had a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con on July 22 and was released in North America on July 23, 2010 and August 18, 2010, in the United Kingdom. Salt grossed $294 million at the worldwide box office, and received mixed to positive reviews, receiving praise for the action scenes and Jolie's performance and criticism that the plot was predictable and implausible. The DVD and Blu-ray was released on December 21, 2010, and featured two alternate cuts which provide different endings for the movie.
Two years later, on Salt's anniversary with Krause, a Russian defector named Vasilly Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski) arrives at the CIA. During his interrogation, Orlov tells Salt about "Day X", a Russian plot to destroy the United States by using English-speaking sleeper agents trained from birth. Agent "KA-12" will kill the Russian President Boris Matveyev (Olek Krupa) at the funeral of the American vice president. Orlov reveals that KA-12 is named "Evelyn Salt".
Salt, shocked by the accusation, calls her husband. He does not answer, and she realizes that he is also in danger. When Winter and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) decide to detain Salt, she escapes and makes her way back to her apartment building. Finding signs that Michael was kidnapped, Salt takes her weapons and one of Michael's spiders.
After evading CIA pursuit Salt takes a bus from Washington,D.C. to a hotel in New York City, where she extracts venom from the spider. Salt makes her way to St. Bartholomew's Church, where the Vice President's funeral is taking place, evading pursuit and eventually setting off a demolition charge during Matveyev's eulogy. Matveyev falls through the floor and Salt shoots. She sees Peabody approaching through the rubble but does not shoot him. She surrenders but escapes NYPD custody and takes a boat to see Orlov. On her way, in a series of flashbacks, Salt remembers growing up in the Soviet Union where Orlov trained her and many other children to obey him and infiltrate the American government. Orlov congratulates her on killing Russia's president, but criticizes her decision to marry as it was not part of her mission. Orlov then has Michael killed in front of Salt as a test, but she does not react. He then briefs her on her next mission: the commandeering of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and the assassination of sitting American President Howard Lewis (Hunt Block). Once he has finished, Salt stabs Orlov with a broken vodka bottle and then kills the other agents as well.
Salt continues with Orlov's mission, meeting a fellow KA agent named Shnaider (Corey Stoll), currently disguised as a Czech NATO liaison. The two of them infiltrate the White House, where Shnaider sets off a suicide bomb, causing the President to be moved to the lower bunker, with Salt in hot pursuit. With everybody's attention focused on Salt, Winter kills everyone in the bunker except for President Lewis, whom he knocks unconscious, thus revealing himself to also be a Russian sleeper agent named Nikolai Tarkovski. He then takes over the defense computers enabled by the President, and begins preparations to launch nuclear missiles at Mecca and Tehran. Salt manages to penetrate the bunker, reuniting with Winter and realizing he is also a KA agent. Salt asks to join Winter in the bunker. Winter initially agrees, but he then refuses after seeing news that proves Salt's duplicity: Matveyev is alive. His mistakenly-reported death was actually a temporary paralysis caused by spider venom. Winter criticizes Salt for falling for Krause instead of trying to recruit him to their cause, and reveals he arranged for Orlov's appearance and Krause's kidnapping. Salt manages to break into the control room, where she fights Winter over the nuclear football; Salt eventually aborts the launch, but is arrested by Secret Service. On the way out of the White House, Salt manages to use the chain of her handcuffs to choke and kill Winter.
Salt is put on a helicopter with Peabody and she explains everything to him; because "they took everything from her" she wants revenge. Salt also tells Peabody that there are "many more" remaining agents trained by Orlov. A skeptical Peabody eventually accepts she is telling the truth after receiving an SMS saying that Salt's fingerprints were found at the barge, confirming her betrayal of Orlov. Peabody uncuffs Salt, and tells her to "Go get 'em" before she jumps into the Potomac River.
Terry George was the first director to join the project, and he also did some revisions to the script, but he soon left the project. Peter Berg was the next director to consider, but he too, eventually dropped out for undisclosed reasons. A year later it was confirmed that Phillip Noyce would direct. Noyce was attracted to Salt for its espionage themes, which are present in most of his filmography, as well as the tension of a character that tries to prove his innocence yet also does what he was previously accused of.
Columbia Pictures executive Amy Pascal suggested Angelina Jolie to Noyce, who had often spoken to Jolie in the past about a desire to create a female spy franchise. Pascal even invited Jolie for a Bond girl role, but the actress playfully replied that she was more interested in playing James Bond himself instead. Jolie was sent Salt's script in September 2008 and liked it. Wimmer, Noyce, and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura went to visit Jolie at her home in France to discuss a possible script and character change. Writer Brian Helgeland helped with the character development and dialogue of the script based on the notes that came out of those discussions with Jolie and to accompany the gender change, the title character's name was changed to Evelyn Salt. One of Jolie's requests was to rework the third act, which originally had Salt rescue his wife and son from a coalition of villains, because she did not believe a mother would neglect her child in this kind of situation.
Wimmer decided to then make Salt more crucial to the villain's schemes, and add a sequence where Salt breaks into "a place harder than Fort Knox" - after considering Camp David, Wimmer settled on the White House. When asked if the script written for Cruise was the same for Jolie, he said "I think that it’s just been a continual process, obviously accelerating by changing the central character. But the ideas—the locomotive of ideas that drive the film are the same. An undercover CIA operative is accused of being a Russian mole, and has to go on the run to defend himself. That’s been the same since day one. The tone of the film has changed in this evolution. In the same way, I guess, as—you know—action thrillers have changed along the lines of the Bond films and the Bourne films".
On February 19, 2009, it was reported that Liev Schreiber would play the role of Ted Winter, Evelyn Salt's friend and colleague in the CIA. Three days later Chiwetel Ejiofor named as CIA Agent Peabody, who is in pursuit of Salt. Noyce said Ejiofor, who he first saw in Dirty Pretty Things, seemed to have the "intelligence and disarming sort of obsessiveness" that a counter-intelligence agent would need. August Diehl, who played Salt's husband Mike Krause, came after a recommendation from Jolie's partner Brad Pitt, who had worked with Diehl in Inglourious Basterds, and Daniel Olbrychski was chosen for Orlov because Andrei Konchalovsky told Noyce that such an evil Russian character could only be played by a Polish actor.
After Jolie had just given birth to twins, she spent time training before filming to get fit in order to perform almost all of the stunts herself. Bonaventura said, "She is so prepared and so ready and gung-ho, she'll do any stunt. We had her jumping out of helicopters, shooting, jumping off of all sorts of things and infiltrating places that are impossible to infiltrate". Salt's fighting style was described as a mixture of Muay Thai, which was considered by the stunt team the most fit for Jolie's physique, and Krav Maga, for its rawness and aggressivity. Noyce wanted to film the scene where Salt hangs from the edge of the building in a studio with chroma key, but Jolie insisted on doing it herself in the actual location. On May 29, 2009, filming was temporarily halted after Jolie suffered a minor head injury during filming an action scene. She was taken to a hospital as a precautionary measure and released on the same day with no serious injuries, allowing filming to resume. Salt's escape after being captured in St. Bartholomew's originally involved jumping her off a building into a window cleaning machine, but budgetary constraints caused the scene to be changed into a car chase.
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) was used extensively throughout the film to create environments and elements, such as bullet holes and flames. More dangerous objects such as a taser or the handcuffs used to strangle Winter were also made from CGI. Five companies were responsible for visual effects. The two most involved were CIS Vancouver and Framestore. CIS Vancouver recreated the White House since the crew did not have permission to shoot in the building, and made a digital elevator shaft for the scene where Salt goes down into the White House bunker. Framestore was responsible for the assassination attempt on the Russian president, which combined actual shots of St. Bartholomew's Church, a digital recreation of the church's interior, and scenes with actor Olek Krupa falling down a collapsing floor.
Female CIA agents were consulted about the creation of disguises, leading to the scene where Salt undergoes subtle changes to disguise herself as a Puerto Rican. The "sweet and caring" blonde Salt dyeing her hair black would represent the shift to Chenkov, the menacing Russian agent. For the scene where Salt disguises herself as a Major, pictures of Angelina Jolie were treated on Adobe Photoshop to create a believable male version, with the resulting image being used by the make-up team as an inspiration for the prostethics.
The Director's Cut was described by Noyce as "my own personal take on the material, free from the politics and restrictions of producers, studio or censorship ratings." Four minutes of film are added, leading to a running time of 104 minutes. More flashbacks are added, and the violence is amped up - an example being Mike dying by getting drowned instead of being shot. The ending is also different: in the bunker scene, Winter shoots the president instead of only knocking him unconscious, and a voice-over during the final scene implies that the new US President is another of Orlov's Russian moles. Noyce has described this ending as "an ending yet just a beginning -– and it's an ending that turns the whole story on its head". The Extended Cut only adds one minute of running time, but rewrites the plot by removing, rearranging and adding scenes. The ending has Salt escaping custody from the CIA and going to Russia, where she kills Orlov - his death scene at the barge does not appear in this cut - and destroys the facility where new child spies are being trained.
Name | Salt: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack |
---|---|
Type | Soundtrack |
Artist | James Newton Howard |
Cover | |
Released | (iTunes) (CD) |
Recorded | 2010 |
Genre | Contemporary classical |
Length | |
Label | Columbia Records,Madison Gate Records |
Producer | James Newton Howard |
Salt: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was released on July 20, 2010 on iTunes and on August 11, 2010 as on-demand CD-R from Amazon.com. The music was composed by James Newton Howard and released by Columbia Records, Madison Gate Records. The song "Orlov's Story" includes a Russian lullaby which music editor Joe E. Rand found at Amoeba Music, and which served for inspiration for the choir heard in other tracks - but the chants in the rest of the score are only random syllables, as Rand and Howard thought actual Russian words would spoil about Salt's allegiance.
;Tracklist
Times reviewer Richard Corliss praised the action scenes and Noyce's persistence in keeping a serious tone - "he ignores the story's preposterous elements and lets the audience decide whether to laugh, shudder or both". Empires William Thomas praised Jolie's performance remarking that "when it comes to selling incredible, crazy, death-defying antics, Jolie has few peers in the action business", and Village Voices Karina Longworth considered that original star Tom Cruise would never express the protagonist's ambiguity as well as Jolie.
Among negative responses, The New Yorker's David Denby said Salt "is as impersonal an action thriller as we’ve seen in years", finding the supporting cast underexplored — "the tricky plot locks them into purely functional responses"; Claudia Puig of the USA Today considered the film a "by-the-book thriller" with Jolie's performance as the only distinguished feature; Lawrence Toppman of The Charlotte Observer was mostly critical of the writing, describing the film as absurd, overplotted and incoherent, and saying the villainous schemes "would have been called off 20 years ago at the latest, when the Soviet Union dissolved";
Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer described Salt as "commendably swift and progressively inane", saying the script was a "sloppy concoction of story elements from '70s espionage classics" that ended up not working right with its "nonsensical setups and wildly illogical twists". James Berardinelli of Reelviews considered that while the film was fast-paced and the action scenes competently shot, the plot was predictable and "the spy aspects, which are by far the most intriguing elements of the movie, are shunted aside in favor of spectacular stunts and long chases".
Noyce later said he was moving on to other projects and will not be involved in the sequel: "Those 3 [alternate] Blu-ray cuts [of the film] represent just about everything I have to offer on Evelyn Salt. If there ever is a sequel, better it's directed by someone with a completely fresh take on what I believe could be a totally entertaining and complex series of stories."
On June 6, 2011 it was announced that Wimmer signed on to write the script for the sequel with Jolie interested in returning "if it comes together right".
Category:2010 films Category:2010s action films Category:2010s thriller films Category:American action thriller films Category:American spy films Category:Cold War spy films Category:Girls with guns films Category:Films set in North Korea Category:Films set in New York City Category:Films set in Washington, D.C. Category:Films shot in New York City Category:Films shot in Washington, D.C. Category:Films directed by Phillip Noyce Category:Relativity Media films Category:Columbia Pictures films Category:Russian-language films Category:English-language films
bn:সল্ট (২০১০-এর চলচ্চিত্র) ca:Salt (pel·lícula) de:Salt (Film) es:Salt (película) fa:سالت (فیلم) fr:Salt (film) id:Salt (film 2010) it:Salt (film) he:סולט (סרט) nl:Salt (film) ja:ソルト (映画) no:Salt (film) pl:Salt (film) pt:Salt (filme) ru:Солт simple:Salt (2010 movie) sr:Солт (филм) fi:Salt sv:Salt (film) tr:Ajan Salt uk:Солт (фільм) vi:Salt (phim 2010) zh:特務間諜This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The World News (WN) Network, has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to user privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for wn.com, as well as e-mail newsletters.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you, except when you provide it to us. For example, if you submit an inquiry to us or sign up for our newsletter, you may be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details (name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.).
When you submit your personally identifiable information through wn.com, you are giving your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. If you would prefer that we not collect any personally identifiable information from you, please do not provide us with any such information. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to third parties without your consent, except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.