Air Force One
I miss the era of Hollywood blockbusters where it felt like every movie was populated with faces you knew, and knew generally what to expect from them. Wolfgang Petersen’s “Air Force One” is a great example of this, and it helps to understand why we react to certain events the way we do as the film progresses. This film came during a run in Harrison Ford’s career where he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, without Han Solo and Indiana Jones to fall back on. If you’re going to cast someone as an action hero President of the United States in the mid-’90s, you couldn’t have picked a better person than Ford to play that role.
By this point in the decade, we had gotten a couple of different variations of “Die Hard on a Plane” from Hollywood- heck, after “Con Air” this was the second variation in 1997- but this film landed, I think, not just in the casting of Ford as James Marshall, but because the film was following up the previous summer’s “Independence Day,” which had Bill Pullman as a youngish, bold Commander-in-Chief who could take action when faced with unprecedented challenges. The next year, we got Morgan Freeman as president in “Deep Impact”; the Clinton years, after 12 years of Reagan/Bush Sr., was a year of changing ideas of what a president looked like. Audiences were ready for this type of president.
Andrew Marlowe’s screenplay is so streamlined a narrative we just go with it, from the opening raid to capture rogue Kazakhstani General Radek (Jürgen Prochnow, Petersen’s star in “Das Boot”) to Marshall’s joint appearance with the Russian president to him arriving on Air Force One to the terrorist team- posing as pre-approved journalists- to Marshall’s wife and daughter coming aboard to the actual moment when the terrorists, led by Gary Oldman’s Ivan Korshunov, take control of the plane. The way Petersen and editor Richard Francis Bruce lead in and out of each scene while cinematographer Michael Ballhaus lays out the geography and atmosphere on the plane is exceptional, and immediately makes us feel like we’re fully oriented into where the story is headed, and how- after Marshall eschews the escape pod- things are going to play out when the terrorists take control of Air Force One.
At this point, let’s go back to the supporting cast. Seeing Ford, the ultimate cinematic hero for a generation, go up against Oldman, who was establishing himself as a wild and sinister villain, is reason enough to watch this film. But we also get Glenn Close as Marshall’s VP, who has to deal with ridiculous misogyny from both Oldman and the people in the War Room with her; Dean Stockwell as the Secretary of Defense, who has one way of looking at the situation than Close’s Kathryn Bennett; Philip Baker Hall as the Attorney General; William H. Macy as a Major on board of Air Force One; Paul Guilfoyle as Marshall’s Chief of Staff; and Xander Berkley as a Secret Service agent whom might be responsible for all of this. When we see all of these actors, we have an idea of what to expect from them, and why they will matter to the story.
“Air Force One” is an excellent piece of entertainment. Petersen was at his peak as an American filmmaker when he was given straightforward narratives that he could give to capable actors and just let them cook while he orchestrated the suspense and set pieces. That’s what he did so brilliantly in “Das Boot” and “In the Line of Fire” before this, and sadly, when spectacle became the main point of blockbusters (see “The Perfect Storm” and “Poseidon”), he seemed to get in over his head. Here, the third act gets plenty silly, but the throughline of Marshall saving as many people as he could is what keeps us watching, and cheering by the end. It also helps having one of the biggest movie stars of all-time, at the peak of his powers, in a role we believe him in.
