A Film Canon

Although Wolfgang Petersen received a steady stream of Hollywood direction in the aftermath of Das Boot, it was only with Air Force One that he was really able to draw on the strengths of his masterpiece - namely, presenting a people in miniature, or microcosm, and dovetailing nostalgia for classical chamber cinema with nostalgia for the nation-state. As a result, Air Force One is set more in a United State than the United States, a combination of President James Marshall's (Harrison Ford) aircraft, which is hijacked by a group of Kazakhistani extremists, and the White House Situation Room, where Vice-President Kathryn Bennett (Glenn Close) co-ordinates the tactical response. At first glance, this resembles Michael Bay's post-action, deterretorialized Distributed States - and while there are certainly moments where the action freefalls into galactic, atmospheric updraft, the tightrope strung out between two planes, it's a testament to Petersen's classicism that his concepts feel heavy, and that the aircraft and Situation Room come to feel like actual places, or at least actual objects, much like the role that Hawaii plays in From Here To Eternity. In particular, Petersen suffuses the aircraft itself with a sublime monumentality, as if the fact of it crashing were less extraordinary than the fact of it getting off the ground at all - the last, inviolable aerial bunker, a mobile skyscraper that's done away with scraping - while drawing on Ford's consummate gift for liberal moral certainty, to create what is possibly the greatest Democratic action film. Certainly, the Kazakhistani extremists, led by Ivan Kurshunov (Gary Oldman), are presented as a Russian-Republican alliance as much as anything else, outraged by Marshall's opening tribute to the dignity of the former USSR, as well as his promise to stop hiding behind "economic sanctions and the rhetoric of diplomacy". Similarly, like any good liberal, Marshall isn't interested in the hallucinatory horror of Communism so much as showing that he's absorbed its message into his own democratic agenda and moved on. Not only does this make Oldman's performance particularly nuanced - or, perhaps, simply allows Oldman to explore the vast nuance of which he's capable - but it delightfully implodes the Republican equation of action with going above and beyond policy, with a conception of action as simply implementing policy consistently and courageously. From that perspective, Marshall's decision to remain on the plane, rather than escape in his special pod, doesn't simply embody the film's refrain from what could have been a fairly uninspired, dated pastiche of 70s science fiction and aerial disaster films, but suggests that the best Democratic politician is always, at some level, a counter-terrorist action hero - and a classical action hero at that, stealthing his way through the perilous pitfalls of Republican terror, and speaking so silently he almost needs subtitles.