Hacker Cinema
Die Hard 2
1990 · Film · 124 min
Part of Die Hard Collection
Directed by Renny Harlin
One year after his heroics in Los Angeles, John McClane is an off-duty cop who is the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. On a snowy Christmas Eve, as he waits for his wife's plane to land at Washington Dulles International Airport, terrorists take over the air traffic control system in a plot to free a South American army general and drug smuggler being flown into the US to face drug charges. It's now up to McClane to take on the terrorists, while coping with an inept airport police chief, an uncooperative anti-terrorist squad, and the life of his wife and everyone else trapped in planes circling overhead.
2 mixed9 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
Very nice. I checked and, yes, my favorite is on there:
“The Santa Rosa Air Center was used to film Bruce Willis' 'Die Hard 2' in 1990
according to an article in the July 22 [2009] issue of the San Jose Mercury News.
The airport was used to depict [Washington] Dulles [International Airport] in the movie"
Sounds like the start of the Die Hard 2 movie
This is actually a very interesting essay.
I always liked Die Hard way better than its sequels (Die Hard 2 is merely acceptable, and the rest are embarrassing), but I never thought about this use of space and architecture. "Military parkour", as the article calls it.
Also insightful are the comparisons between Jason Bourne and the latest Bond movies; Bond feels sterile, and I find myself in agreement that some of the reasons for this are:
> Jones writes that “there’s no travel in the new Bond”; there are simply “establishing shots of exotic destinations.” By the end of a Bond film, he adds, you simply “feel like you are in the international late-capitalist nonplace,” a geography with neither landmarks nor personal memory.
Whereas
> “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armor.”
There's a Die Hard 2 movie tie-in game: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Die_Hard_2_-_Die_Harder_1992
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
Yes, it's like a movie series. It's Die Hard 2. That's one name, not two, "2" and "Die Hard", but one: "Die Hard 2".
Translations of movie titles are a pet peeve of mine. They are bad everywhere, and have been since way before the times of Internet streaming.
My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.
judges and juries are perfectly happy to side with police no matter how egregious the shootings are
Like many I watched Die Hard and Die Hard 2 over Christmas, and it struck me how deeply the rogue, trigger-happy cop is embedded as a folk hero in American culture. The real life John McClain is George Zimmerman or Mohamed Noor. You guys have got to stop making these movies if you want to make any progress
Comparing to Citizen Kane seems unfair as it's not an action movie. So here are some other action movies. (NB: There are multiple entries for some of these but I'm not listing them all).
Die Hard 4.5 Die Hard 2 3.1 Die Hard 3 1.8 Armageddon 2.2 -- at least he's ben consistently on the quick side Total Recall 3.7 -- original, 1990 Robocop 3.7 -- original Haywire 6 And I keep trying to search for movies they don't have in the database. So certainly for action movies (1980+), at least for some popular ones, the ASL isn't out of the ordinary.
But then I searched for Alfred Hitchcock and got some interesting results. This database has many duplicate entries and some wildly different values. The Skin Game had 3 entries at about the same time (17.1, 17.3, 17.4). However, Rear Window has an entry at 3.7 and another at 8.8, and several at 10.5. I suppose I need to read about their methodology to understand why there's so much variance.
It didn't originate in the Die Hard movie. There was a media fueled rumor about the Glock 17 containing so little metal that it wouldn't show up on metal detectors, and Die Hard 2 merely perpetuated that idea. However, none of it was ever true.
In the mid '80s there was a rumor about a Soviet all-plastic 3-shot gun, and there was a guy who patented the idea of an all-plastic gun, and then the media picked up on Glock making guns using plastic frames (but still more than 80% metal by weight). Then someone wrote a breathless story about how Libya was trying to buy Glocks, and this rapidly snowballed into a media fueled freakout about plastic guns and the Glock became a "terrorist special" and so forth.
Excellent find. However he mischaracterizes one segment of Die Hard that would actually strengthen his thesis.
The article argues that the logic of Die Hard rewards those who "infest" the spaces they inhabit, traversing them creatively rather than via their intended corridors, elevators, and doorways.
He uses the L.A. SWAT team running across Nakatomi Plaza's rose garden as an example of this.
I'd counter that the SWAT team's approach was actually conventional. They try to get in through the front door, and get blown away. Had they tried to tunnel in from below, for example, in Die Hard's world they would have been more successful.
Also, his point that the subsequent Die Hard films would have been improved by holding onto the premise of exploring an architectural space rings true. Die Hard 2 tried to do this with an airport, but it was a much less interesting locale. You could debate whether or not Die Hard 3 was taking the same approach to NYC or not...
If, as he says, Die Hard is more about architecture than characters, I'd argue that the true spiritual sequel to Die Hard is Steven Seagal's Under Siege, aka, "Die Hard on a boat." Throughout the (awesome) film, Seagal travels around a navy ship in all sorts of unconventional ways, letting the viewer explore the unfamiliar space in a fashion similar to John McClane's adventure in Die Hard.