Zombie Column: Olympus has Fallen

This past Saturday, I got a sudden invite to see Olympus has Fallen, and I'm not one to turn that kind of thing down. Not when such a cinematic masterpiece is being offered (alright, enough sarcasm). I went with some of the same people as last week (GI Joe), and it had enough of the same audience that I thought we were going to get the same trailers. Nope. I can't really remember which ones they are, except that The Internship was one of them, and that they were pretty much all movies that I would pass on.

In case you didn't know, Olympus Has Fallen is one of two movies released this spring in which the White House is taken over. The second one is called White House Down (so Olympus definitely won the battle of the names) and comes out in June. That one was Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, while this one has Aaron Eckhart and Gerard Butler. I'm not quite sure who I'd give the casting nod to, but I'm going with Olympus, since even thought Channing is red hot right now, Olympus has Morgan Freeman and can afford to have Ashley Judd cameo after her TV version of Taken set in the Amazon didn't pan out.

Anyway, this movie opens sometime right before Christmas (possibly Eve) up at Camp David, as the first family is getting ready to go to a fundraiser or event of some sort. It's quite snowy outside, and the motorcade spins out on a bridge (because of course it does). Mike Banning (Butler, and let me say what a great action name Mike Banning is. I'm pretty sure it's the best hero name ever. I mean, we're all attached to John McClane, but that might just be because Die Hard was so good it coloured our perceptions. If Die Hard had had a detective Banning, Hans Gruber would've given up on the spot. There's just no fighting a guy like that) pulls the president to safety just as the limo plunges into the icy waters below, carrying the First Lady with it (good-bye, Ashley Judd. Thanks for coming out. Now you have more time to cheer on Kentucky. Or Kansas. Or whichever College Basketball team you're wildly overrated to cheer for).

18 months later, Banning has been reassigned to the treasury building (fun fact: The Secret Service is under control of the treasury. I don't know why, that's just the way it is. That means that threats to the president get even more jurisdictional, since you now have the treasury involved, the justice department involved, Homeland security, possibly the military, and whoever the CIA and NSA answer to. The state department, maybe? I don't actually know that one) where the desk job is slowly driving him insane. Let me tell you, Banning, I have a desk job and it's actually pretty awesome. But I'm not used to throwing my body in front of bullets, so I gather that cubicles might be kind of boring for you.

There's a South Korean delegation that's meeting with the president to discuss the rising threat of North Korea (wow, the standard of movie villains has really fallen off. First we had Nazis, who were legitimately terrifying, since they were winning World War Two and one point. They gave way to the Russians, who were smart and resourceful, not to mention big, but had also had a lot of shoddy business practices. And they gave way to North Korea, whose people are starving and only credible threat is a nuclear weapon or two. We could glass the entire country several times over. You know, if we didn't care about the civilian population or anything. So that's why we don't do that. Anyway, if NK isn't the main enemy, it's terrorists, who can be counted on to strike anywhere, but can't really maintain a sizeable standing army).

During the meeting a plane enters the no-fly zone around the white house and shoots down the jets sent to intercept it. Then it starts randomly shooting people on the ground before it's shot down as well. The president and the SK delegation have been hustled to the Presidential Security Bunker, where it turns out the SK delegation was made up mostly of terrorists, who kill everyone they want to and take the president and some high-ranking cabinet members hostage, thus forcing the military to back off instead of retaking the White House, which has been taken over by those same terrorists posing as tourists with a rather cool strategy, actually. Mind you, there's a lot you can accomplish when all your followers are ready to die. The secret service puts up a valiant fight, but they get overwhelmed (fun fact: the Secret Service employs less than 1000 people, most of whom are deployed elsewhere, or at home in their off time. It's not like you can have all your employees working around the clock, every day). Banning hears the devastation from the plane and then sees the invasion going down. He fights through it from the rear, eventually making it into the White House, where he runs and guns with the terrorists for the rest of the movie.

I liked this movie. Not as much as I could have, maybe, but enough. It's not a great movie by any means, nor a fantastic example of what a mindless movie can be (last week's was much better). But it's competent, and has a lot of action, and even some humor. Yes, there's a scene specifically inserted so that Banning can be proven right and a four star general proven wrong (because nothing makes a hero as heroic as having the opportunity to say "I told you so", especially when people's lives are on the line). So, some problems, including a baffling nuclear decision that I want to rant about, but realize that this post is long enough as it is, without getting into the nuclear nonsense of the past two weeks.

Maybe that'll come next week. All in all, I think it's a blu-Ray movie. Almost a theatre quality movie, but I think they just left something on the table, even if I can't point my finger at it. Too many unfired Chekhov's guns, maybe. Still, good movie. Now, let's see about that one in June.