UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, August 18, 1997
5D
Air Force One flies audience into presidential nightmare
The Associated Press
In the movie business today, there is a small fraternity of star performers who can lend
credituity
e v e n
verisimiilitude,
to the
most outrageous of film
plots.
Harrison Ford
Gene Hackman, Sean Connery and Harrison Ford are names that spring to mind.
With Air Force One, Ford faces his biggest challenge yet. The whopper of this Wolfgang Petersen film is that the presidential plane gets hijacked by eight Russian dissidents, with the president, his wife and daughter aboard. Ford is the president.
Dogfighting with the Jedi was a cinch compared to this one.
Happily, old (55) faithful Ford rises to the occasion and whips the bad guys.
Was there ever any doubt?
The film begins with all the pomp and ceremony of a summit meeting in Moscow. The United
COMMENTARY
States and Russia have just completed a commando raid to capture the genocidal leader of the former Soviet Union state of Kazahkstan. At a huge dinner, President Marshall (Ford) issues a manifesto: The United States will combat murdering tyrants anywhere in the world.
Now for the pleasant flight home to Washington on Air Force One.
Eight Kazakhstan terrorists, led by Gary Oldman, board the flight posing as a Russian TV crew (whom they have murdered). Their weapons are on board, thanks to a Secret Service mole.
The rebels take over the plane in the most brutal manner, slaying passengers at will. The president seems to have eluded them, perhaps leaving in an escape pod.
The top officials of Washington, D.C., led by Vice President Glenn Close, gather to deal with the crisis. Oldman tells them by phone that unless his leader is freed from prison, he will kill a hostage every half-hour. The first victims are the national security adviser and press secretary.
The violence continues as the
'Air Force One' results in two hours of almost unbearable tension. Yet it is utterly fascinating to watch.
president appears from hiding and begins his own war of attrition against the terrorists (he's a Vietnam War vet).
Just when you think he has triumphed, another crisis arises: how to fly the damaged 747 to safety with all pilots dead and Kazakhstan MiGs firing rockets.
Climax piles upon climax. The thinking of filmmakers seems to be: If you're going to spend $100 million, you might as well give the audience the works.
Air Force One results in two
hours of almost unbearable tension. Yet it is utterly fascinating to watch — especially since the events, while far-fetched, are not the otherworldly, computer-generated excesses of much of this summer's movie fare.
Wolfgang Petersen is expert in presidential matters, having directed In the Line of Fire. He is totally in charge of this complex film, combining crowd scenes, aerial combat, daring stunts, face-to-face violence and high-level intrigue with a steady hand.
Ford continues in top form, conducting himself as everyone would hope for in a president. Close brings equal decisiveness as vice president. Oldman conveys unspeakable cruelty without going over the top.
The rest of the cast is first-rate, especially Wendy Crewson and Liesel Matthews as first lady and daughter, Dean Stockwell as the ambitious secretary of defense, and Jurgen Prochnow in the non-speaking role as the jailed despot.
The Columbia Pictures release was produced by Petersen and Gail Katz and written by Andrew W. Marlowe.
Ford plays on emotion,not action
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Harrison Ford won't touch it with a 39 1/2-foot pole.
Because he's playing a U.S. president who's a faithful husband, devoted father, and world leader committed to doing the right thing no matter what's politically expedient or popular in his latest film, it's suggested that some would say his role really isn't that rooted in reality.
"Not my job." the actor said.
Together, they say: You're breaking up the wrong cinematic superstar if you're looking for political pontifications or soapbox solutions to society's problems.
Instead, he wants to focus on how he considers Air Force One much more than an action picture, and how he feels it has a strong emotional underpinning.
And he proceeds to promise that never again would he allow U.S. self-interest to deter him from doing the morally right thing.
"It makes his dilemma more than just physical risk," said Ford, who stars as President James Marshall.
Marshall doesn't want to be lionized for his part in a military operation to capture a Russian separatist because it took too long to happen. (He waited two months to build a political constituency in his own country that allowed him to give the go-ahead.) He says: "While we watched it on TV, 200,000 people died."
In that context, Ford said he thought the film took on considerably larger emotional heft as his character eventually faces a choice between his daughter's life and the policy decision he's made.
"It also reminds us to take into account the human factor, that judging by ourselves from some distance the moral leadership that we have ... is not the same as standing there with your daughter's life in jeopardy," Ford said.
Judgments of real-life public officials and their morality can have
"Unfortunately, it's about personal behavior instead of about the real questions of our country's moral behavior."
Harrison Ford
the wrong focus, he said.
"Unfortunately, it's about personal behavior instead of about the real questions of our country's moral behavior. A lot of it is very much misplaced and incorrectly applied. Of course, we should have an interest in the character of the person we elect to the presidency, but we have unnatural expectations of our political leaders."
Much of what President Bill Clinton is accused of (philandering, in particular) we now know other presidents have been guilty of — in spades, Ford acknowledged.
"The press used to be protective of the personal lives or our leaders, almost complicitous in maintaining their dignity and their privacy. Now everyone's a tabloid journalist," he said.
Ford likes to guard his own privacy. He spends much of his free time on his 800-acre spread near Jackson Hole, Wyo., with his two children — 10-year-old Malcolm and 6-year-old Georgia — and second wife Melissa Mathison, a screenwriter whose credits include E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Similarly, he stays away from spouting his social and political views.
"I have very strong interests.
keen interests, in a lot of social and political issues, which I discharge as a private citizen, not as a celebrity spokesman."
Still, he wants to make sure no criticism of more vocal stars is implied.
"I'm not in a position to discuss anybody else's behavior or how they conduct themselves. It's purely their choice. For myself, I'm not interested in becoming a poster boy for any particular cause. I don't think that's useful to either the cause or to myself. But mostly I don't think it's useful to the cause.
"I think that those issues which are decided on the basis of what kind of celebrity all-star team is mustered to support the cause often suffer from a less interesting discussion of the issues and a concentration on who the supporters are. I'd rather see complicated issues discussed by experts and decided on by an informed and interested body politic rather than consumers of entertainment."
For consumers of entertainment, Ford stands as a one-man, all-star team. He's been in not one, but three, successful movie series: the Star Wars trilogy, which was released this year, the adaptations of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books and the Indiana Jones thrill rides.
He starred in the box-office blockbuster The Fugitive and received an Academy Award nomination for playing a Philadelphia detective who tries to blend in with the Amish in 1985's Witness. And he's displayed his acting range in such disparate films as Blade Runner, The Mosquito Coast, Working Girl and Regarding Henry.
In picking roles, Ford said he looked for things that engaged him, and that he could give an emotional expression to, because he thinks that's the way to connect with an audience — emotionally, on a gut level.
"I've always tried to do all kinds of films, from little romantic comedies to larger dramas," he said.
Through it all, however, he's never considered what he does mysterious or complicated.
"It's storytelling. There's a story, and I help tell it," he said, making it sound so elementary.
Ford — who's been a tremendous commercial success, starring in five of the 25 biggest-grossing films of all time — considers himself more of a craftsman, like the carpenter he was before his career breakthrough 20 years ago, than an artist.
"I don't have time to work with wood anymore, and I've lost my chops," he said. "It's like a skill that you lose. Like a musician loses his skill if he doesn't practice every day."
And at this point his chops for big, commercial films are well-practiced. In between, he has no hankering for a small role in an independent film, like Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land.
"I like what I do," says Ford, who's known as being much more hands-on about every aspect of his work than most actors.
Just in recent months, he reportedly has:
Lobbied a rival studio to delay release of competing potential blockbusters, which were scheduled to come out the same day as Air Force One.
— Fumed over the public declarations of love for Ellen DeGeneres by Anne Heche, his leading lady in his next film, a romantic comedy.
— Fought over script rewrites for his last movie *The Devil's Own* and feuded with co-star Brad Pitt. (Which both publicly deny.)
"I like being involved in the production of the film. I like being involved in the decision-making process that goes on. I like being involved in the casting, the writing and all of those other aspects", he said. "That's not something I would do if I were playing a small part in a film.
"I like going out to big fires. I don't like to go out and put out a fire in a Dumpster. If I'm going to go roll the engines out, I want a blaze."
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