Hacker Cinema
Air Force One
1997 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
When Russian neo-nationalists hijack Air Force One, the world's most secure and extraordinary aircraft, the President is faced with a nearly impossible decision to give in to terrorist demands or sacrifice not only the country's dignity, but the lives of his wife and daughter.
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13 comments on Hacker News
So all the news outlets are crowing about the old and the new "Air Force One", but security/aviation wonks all know that "Air Force One" (and "Marine One") is a callsign, not an aircraft designation.
So if the President snuck into a smaller decoy aircraft, what callsign did these planes use? Does "Air Force One" keep up the ruse over the radio as well? If this is the case, and considering how difficult it is to keep secrets secret, then how large of a circle needs to be "read in" about the true situation, in order to protect the right aircraft? What contingencies do they have if one of them is actually attacked... keep up the ruse?
Yes, I admit, we've all seen too many action/adventure films with complex decoy scenarios. It would seem that doing them in real life would just induce headaches.
Also, my father is totally convinced that Qatar loaded-up the new aircraft with bugs and surprises, and they won't in a hundred years sweep them all clean. I feel like maybe Qatar wouldn't be that nakedly stupid. I mean, the Russians were really coy about their gift of The Thing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
It's sort of ruined those movies where the president becomes an action hero though - 'Air Force one', 'White House Down' ....
The US did not keep bases in all of West Germany though.
There were different sectors. The US had essentially the South. There were also the British sector and French. The Soviets were the fourth sector but we all know how that one was quite different from the other three.
While the French and British have mostly left, the US stayed. Though to be fair even the British still do have some bases it seems as NATO troups. But no more large garrison in many larger cities.
The US on the other hand is still there with much larger force. Like think back to "Air Force One" (the movie with Harrison Ford) which used Ramstein Airbase in the movie (though they didn't actually film there) and that airbase has come up in the Iran conflict as a conflict of its own. Meaning Germany didn't want the US to use it as a hub for US operations (supply logistics) for the Iran war.
> They made a mistake and got too greedy and make a subscription I barely paid attention to something that got too expensive...
That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.
Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.
The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.
Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).
I have no problem to defend Drive against Fugitive, Fugitive aged really bad and it feels like cheap TV movie, Drive is obviously much newer, has great cinematography, great score, atmosphere, nice action and aged really good despite being 11 years already (but I am not really some big fan of Drive, just saying it's better than Fugitive). Btw. just because something is "stupid action flick" it doesn't mean it can't be good at it, you can have good stupid action flicks and you can have bad stupid action flicks. I don't usually watch stupid action flicks (I'm more (social) drama guy), but when I do I want to watch the good ones.
I'm recently rewatching movies starting from 90s and while The Rock was still enjoyable even in 2022 (8mm or Absolute power were meh, same as already back then), I remember Fugitive being pretty bad already many years ago. Movies like Die Hard, Speed, Con Air, Mission impossible, Enemy of the state, were all better than Harrison action movies, which always felt like cheap TV movies with low production value. Meanwhile we have 2 year newer Heat, which is still for sure in top 5 best action/crime movies ever and aged amazingly and could easily beat any day any new action/crime movie. The production value and director skills are on completely different level than Harrison action movies. I just checked the most famous Harrison action movies I remember from 90s - Fugitive, Clear and Present danger, The Devil's Own and Air Force one - all 4 have different director, 3 directors nobody remembers and 4th only thanks to Das Boot.
> After all, could you really, badly, critic a 30’s movie because it is not shoot in HD?
1930s films did "shoot in HD". Most films were either 16mm or 35mm, both of which have more than enough fidelity to represent video at 1080p or higher without loss of quality. Here's a copy of Wizard of Oz on 4K UHD: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Limited-Anniversary-Collection/dp/B07WT62PPT
A more realistic take is could you criticize 1920s films for not shooting with sound, and the answer is yes, absolutely. Films went from almost entirely silent to almost entirely talkies in roughly 3 years because of massive, unprecedented, and immediate commercial pressure to do so. Audiences ate up even mediocre talkies and shunned silent works now considered classics. The only reason colour film adoption wasn't similarly fast was because of Technicolor's monopoly.
Flash forward to the 1990s, where cinema as a medium was very sophisticated. Now look at blockbusters beginning to use CG rather than animatronics. The airplane in Air Force One. Jar Jar Binks in Phantom Menace. Hell, take the 1997 re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy which inexplicably added garbage like CG Jabba the Hutt. The purple stuff in The Langoliers. Even going back to Lord of the Rings, even going back to the Hobbit, even going back to "early" Marvel films there are tons of moments where CG is jarring. The Polar Express -- an excellent and heartwarming Zemeckis film -- is mostly known because no one likes the dead-eye CG. Yes, absolutely, technical barriers have affected peoples enjoyment of film and still do!
In video games the most obvious period of time that is conspicuously a donut hole is the Playstation 1 / early 3D era. The PS1s 3d games featured really quite nauseating affine texture warping due to a lack of hardware correction support. Here's one video of many talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI Early 3d controls are atrocious -- the "tank controls" of Resident Evil are famous for this -- because controllers initially didn't have analogue sticks and when they did, they didn't yet have basic paradigms around how to best use them. The Nintendo 64 was built around analogue control, which is why Mario 64 works so well, and yet it has a completely rotten camera system because there's only a single analogue stick and the c-buttons aren't a good substitute. And that's the PS1/N64. If you go back to the earlier era of 3D, especially on the Super Nintendo, you find low framerate, awkward controlling messes with flat polygon shading. Try playing an unmodified copy of StarFox or Stunt Race FX, I dare you.
No one is saying to throw Casablanca out with the bathwater, just as no one is going to throw Super Mario Bros, out with the bathwater. I'm not saying that technical issues mean we should never play old games or watch old movies. I'm saying that it shouldn't be surprising that people do count technical issues as part of the reason why they prefer newer stuff.
I also think the article misses widely when it pretends that "old ways" of making games don't exist today. Games are made in now-dead genres, with now-dead mechanics, all the time. They have commercial budgets at least as large as they ever did and large, warm communities. In many cases, the original teams working on games in the 1980s and 1990s still make games. I can't find an example in the article where you can't find similar games to play today.
The article mentions that isometric games would be anathema today. Disco Elysium is one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Wasteland has two recent sequels, both well liked. Hades is also one of the most acclaimed games of the last few years. Age of Empires IV retains a basically isometric perspective for an RTS. Diablo Immortal just launched and Diablo 4 is coming. Huh?
The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it. Majora's Mask (1999) is considered an excellent Zelda because of its time mechanics. Dead Rising (2006) was one of the first major hits of the HD era of video games and it's on a fixed timer. Final Fantasy XIII-3 (2013) uses a similar mechanic, and while the game is often criticized for being terribly written nonsense, it's not because of the mechanic.
Or if not the time mechanic, then needing to take notes? Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open, to say nothing of From Software (Dark Souls, Elden Ring) suddenly becoming the apex of prestige developer. Point and click adventures are still quite popular: The Return of the Obra Dinn is widely considered among the best games of the 2010s.
The article claims unnamed gamers today are reacting negatively to the visual choices of the new Monkey Island. This just seems entirely untrue. The reaction across the internet, including on gaming forums, reddit, and here, was overwhelmingly positive. A few people said "okay, this style reminds me a bit of the not-great LucasArts Singapore modernizations of the first few Monkey Islands". This does not presage a great backlash against the game, it's just people shooting from the hip, the vast majority of anyone who cares to comment is excited even if they have concerns about the visuals. And anyway, 99% of the people commenting are greybeards like the rest of us, not young people.
Overall I can't find much here that resonates with me.
> A Tupolev Tu-144 in flight over Moscow as part of a NASA-sponsored research project in 1998.
Photo five, featuring a Tu-144 with a US and Russia flag on it. Ah the brief optimistic days before the Cold War resumed. There are even a smattering of Hollywood movies over that span of time where the Russians and Americans work together in friendly fashion. When you view those movies now (eg Air Force One 1997), it seems entirely bizarre, from some fantasy world. Movies before: Soviets, Cold War, enemies; during the thaw: yay, Russia, democracy, friends, hugs all around; after: Putin, Cold War, quasi-enemies.
Air Force One is based on a civilian airframe. Of course the Hollywood movie was full of exaggerations, but I wouldn't be surprised if the actual Air Force One was reinforced in some ways to afford a certain level of protection for its precious cargo.
How much could Boeing, for example, modify one of their civilian airframes to support active countermeasures and make it capable of withstanding more stressful maneuvers without altering the outside too much? Quite a lot, I would think.
Adapt? Really? It doesn't seem so. They are in their own world, and don't care.
But no wonder when you read about the crazy head of Sony Pictures, the woman that got kicked because of the scandals that got made public (emails leaked). For example we can "thank" her for that the Steve Jobs movie lost the The Social Network director and is now such a boring piece of movie.
We don't need hundreds of super hero movies, such a mass is stupid. Where are the funny movies, the action movies, the adventure movies? We want less CGI and more real action, or CGI looking like real action.
We want movies not boring hour long series, we have no time to waste hours for a stretched story arc.
The Accountant, (second half of) Bourne 2016, Jack Reacher 2, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation ... were good movies. But it gets harder and harder to find a few movies per year that are watchable. The last two X-Men movies were so bad, so many CGI effects, so dark, so little content that made the previous X-Men movies great. Were are the Die Hard 1-2, Air Force One, first three Tom Clancy movies of this decade - right, directors and script writers forgot how to pace a movie, as constant action is just wrong, you need intense action then calm situations and then action again and a bit humour does't hurt (something almost completely forgotten). I just saw a 1968 action movie and it was so much better (Steven Spielberg mentioned it's his favourite movie he sees up to), this decades Hollywood is in a sad state.
Because Americans are so used to being told they are the good guys, "the shit", and the world's only saints. Their media (even "serious" media, like the NYT) is the most patriotic in the whole western world. Of course it helps that there's a trillion dollar defense industry to benefit from all of that too.
So, when they meddle 10.000 miles from their borders it's their right and they do it "for democracy".
But when another country (let's call it R) tries to meddle in a place where actual pro-fascists toppled a voted-for government in a country in its borders, where tons of people with R ethnic origins live -- then they don't have the right.
People speak about communist countries propaganda art portraying their leaders as "heroes" -- and it's indeed idiotic. But then again, the US is the only other place where they can produce and watch movies and shows where the President is a hero fighting bad guys with his bare hands (from Air Force One to numerous tv/cable series).
And people watch that with a straight face -- in any other western country this would be considered only acceptable for comedy.
How about a comeback of 1990s style action movies like: Die Hard, Air Force One, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, etc.
Instead Sony plans new movies like Captain America, Avenger, Ants Man. They milk the Marvel brand to death. Sad and boring.
Sounds more like calculated BS to make a backwards country in the middle of nowhere sound like a credible threat to anything...
Then you have all the movies and tv series, which, without any hint of irony, show "spies" and the like from such countries, operating in the US (and with full teams and equipment), even infiltrating the secret agencies and such.
So you have uneducated people from rural fly-over country that cannot even pin-point Germany on the map, believe what they see in those series, not as an actual fact, but as something that could potentially happen or is credible. (Just imagine what the kind of people who think evolution is bad for school curriculum believe about foreign countries).
To convey the BS-detection levels a European feels, consider a report were Inuits are the major threat and Inuit operatives are preparing an attack on the US, hacking networks, and the like... Or maybe Mexico, or Canada... (This BS doesn't work as well when it's about a place you know, that you might have visited and that's close to home, right? Whereas anybody can imagine any kind of BS for some remote third world place with 1/1000 the resources).
(Of course there are people that watch non-ironic action movies were the President bare-handedly fights the bad guys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_One_%28film%29#Plot !!! We might watch them for the special fx and action scenes in Europe, but we call them typical hollywood BS and use huge tons of irony about them).
I think you're over-analyzing it.
Speechwriters are largely unknown, at least relative to the "performer" -- the same goes for comedy (let's say stand-up comedy since it's differentiated from theater and film in your list), and even film, quite often. On the converse, when you see a performance of "Hamlet", who's better-known? The high school kid bemoaning Horatio, or Shakespeare? I think it's just a convenient shortcut for people to attribute a quote to a performer rather than original author, in cases where the original author may be difficult to discern.
I mean, I can go to imdb.com and find out who wrote the screenplay for "Air Force One", but that still doesn't tell me for sure who originated the line "Get off my plane!" Harrison Ford may have ad-libbed it, or the director may have added it, for all we know.
Thus far I guess our society hasn't found it that necessary to create a culture of strict attribution.