I was watching Wolfgang Petersen's epic action film Air Force One last night. In the 1997 film, the president's airplane is hijacked by a group of fanatical Russians and the president, himself a highly decorated veteran, must fight them to retake control of the craft and save his family. I know it sounds ridiculous -- and it is -- but I promise that if you've never seen it, you really are missing a superbly directed action film.
In some ways, the perfect action film really is nothing more than an excitingly and compellingly told story about truly unbelievable events. No one enjoys an action movie that incites the response, "Yes, I could totally see this happening." Instead, when we watch a good action movie, our cheeks literally hurt from the smile stretched across our faces as we think, "My God, this is absurd -- and I love it!"
As I watched the film, a few things popped into my head:
1.) A Harrison Ford/Glenn Close presidential ticket doesn't sound that bad. They could run as independents and campaign for social security reform under the slogan, "Old is the new glamorous."
2.) It's strange to see how cinematic presidential portrayals change with context. The film opens with Harrison Ford as the president declaring an open season on dictatorial regimes. His condemnation of a fake Kazakhstan regime run by a former Soviet nationalist resonates with how Bush reproached Hussein in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Ford then pledges to wage preemptive wars against dictators and receives a standing ovation from the Russian audience. Later in the film, he and his cabinet despair that, if the president gives in to the terrorists hijacking his plane, it will lead to a profusion of terrorism across the world, bringing the battle back to the United States. But everyone believes this new policy change will make the president wildly popular with the voting public.
I mention all this only because, first, I'm guessing all the administration's current talking points caome directly out of this film and, second, if a fictional president were portrayed as such now, the film would bomb at the box office. I predict that a remake of Air Force One (Air Force Two?) would feature a president pledging a new isolationism, only to see his plane hijacked by a band of rabid unilateralists (led by Bill O'Reilly and the senior editorial staff at Fox News).
3.) It finally struck me that Wolfgang Petersen has had a truly bizarre career arc. Born in Germany, his first major release, 1977's Die Konsequenz, was a controversial film about pederasty. But for a sophomore encore, he delivered the critically acclaimed Das Boot. A spectacular, gripping and deeply moving film, Das Boot follows a German U-boat crew during World War II on a claustrophobic and ultimately tragic series of adventures in the Battle of the Atlantic. Petersen is able to quite deftly divorce the immediate scenario from its context, permitting the viewer to engross himself in the plight of the submarine without any of the complications that attend the sailors' obvious political allegiance.
Contrast this effort with Air Force One, where the message is none other than absolute patriotism and allegiance, but to what is, for Petersen, a foreign government. His skill for inspiring even the most mildly devotional attitude to the United States proves little more than that nationalistic fervor is both hardly unique and all too easily replicated. Unlike Das Boot, Air Force One is gripping not for its intimate portrayal of the horrific experience that is war, but for its stirring orchestral strains and one-line winners like "Get off my plane!" (President Harrison Ford to awkward Russian terrorist Gary Oldman).
It is as if, at the outset of his career, Petersen actually got to the bottom of the human experience and, in recent years, has subsequently figured out how to mass produce it. What else could explain the most puzzling feature of Petersen's career, namely, that he seems almost addicted to making terrible films? Films so terrible, in fact, that they were clearly bad ideas from the beginning, rather than brilliant concepts that, for one reason or other, merely did not translate to the silver screen.
His projects include The NeverEnding Story, Enemy Mine, Outbreak, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm, Troy, and Poseidon.
With the exception of Das Boot and In the Line of Fire, it's difficult to find anything that one might consider a "good film" in his repertoire. There are plenty of watchable films in there, sure. And The NeverEnding Story certainly has something of an iconic status with a particular generation. But one look at that catalogue and I feel as though Petersen is the Johnny Depp of directing. Incredible skills, brings his best to every project, but suffers from literally the worst judgment when it comes to actual film selection.
So let us take a moment to salute Herr Petersen -- the man, the director, the sellout.
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