Air Force One (film)

Air Force One is a 1997 American political action-thriller film written by Andrew W. Marlowe, and directed and co-produced by Wolfgang Petersen. It is about a group of terrorists who hijack Air Force One, and the U.S. president's attempt to retake the plane, to rescue everybody.

The film stars Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman, as well as Glenn Close, Xander Berkeley, William H. Macy, Dean Stockwell, and Paul Guilfoyle. A box office success with generally positive critical reviews, it was one of the most popular action films of the 1990s.

Plot
American and Russian Special Forces capture General Ivan Radek, the dictator of a rogue terrorist regime in Kazakhstan that possessed stolen Soviet nuclear weapons, threatening to start a new Cold War. Three weeks after the mission, U.S. President James Marshall attends a diplomatic dinner in Moscow in Russia, during which he praises the capture and insists the U.S will no longer negotiate with terrorists. Marshall and his entourage, including his wife Grace and 12-year-old daughter Alice, and several of his Cabinet and advisers, prepare to return to the U.S. on Air Force One. In addition, members of the press have been invited aboard, including Radek loyalists disguised as journalists led by Egor Korshunov.

After takeoff, Secret Service agent Gibbs, who is a mole, enables Korshunov and his men to obtain weapons and storm the plane, killing many of the other agents and military personnel before taking the civilians hostage. Marshall is raced to an escape pod in the cargo hold while pursued by Korshunov's men but they are too late to capture him as the pod is ejected. Korshunov breaches the cockpit and prevents the plane from making an emergency landing at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, and secures Grace and Alice separately from the other hostages. Several F-15s escort Air Force One as Korshunov has it piloted towards Radek-loyal airspace.

Unknown to Korshunov, Marshall, a veteran of the Vietnam War and a Medal of Honor recipient, has remained hidden in the cargo hold instead of using the pod, and begins to observe the loyalists using his military training. Marshall manages to kill some of Korshunov's men and then uses a satellite phone to make contact with his Vice President Kathryn Bennett, letting his staff know he is alive. Korshunov, believing that only a Secret Service agent is in the cargo hold, contacts Bennett and demands Radek's release, threatening to kill a hostage every half hour. Marshall and military advisors devise a plan to trick Korshunov to take Air Force One to a lower altitude for a mid-air refueling, giving time for the hostages to parachute safely off the plane. As a KC-10 tanker docks with Air Force One, Marshall helps to kill another loyalist and escorts the hostages to the cargo hold, where most parachute away; Korshunov discovers the deception and forces Air Force One away, causing the fuel to ignite, destroying the tanker; the shockwave disrupts the escape process, and Korshunov is able to stop Marshall, Chief of Staff Lloyd Shepherd, Major Caldwell, and Gibbs from escaping.

With the President and his family under his control, Korshunov forces Marshall to contact Russian President Petrov and arrange for Radek's release. Bennett is urged by Defense Secretary Walter Dean to declare the President incapable under the 25th amendment, so as to override Radek's release, but she refuses. While Korushunov and his men celebrate the news of Radek's release, Marshall breaks his bonds, and kills Korshunov and his remaining henchmen. Marshall then lifts his order, and Radek is subsequently killed when he attempts to escape.

Marshall and Caldwell direct the plane back to friendly airspace, accompanied by the F-15s, only to be quickly tailed by a second batch of Radek loyalists piloting MiG-29s. Marshall is able to evade most of the missile launches, while one F-15 pilot sacrifices himself to intercept a missile; the resulting explosion damages the plane's tail, and they start to lose altitude. A standby USAF Rescue HC-130 is called to help, sending parajumpers on tether lines to help rescue the survivors. Marshall insists that his family and the injured Shepherd be transferred first. When there is time for only one more transfer, Gibbs reveals himself as the mole, killing Caldwell and the parajumper. Marshall and Gibbs fight for control of the transfer line, and Marshall manages to grab and detach it at the last minute. Air Force One crashes into the Caspian Sea, killing Gibbs. The HC-130 airmen reel Marshall in safely. The HC-130 serves as "Air Force One" as they fly back to friendly space.

Cast

 * Harrison Ford as U.S. President James Marshall: Popular president and a family man who loves his wife Grace and daughter Alice. Marshall is also a decorated Vietnam veteran and a Medal of Honor winner, speaks reasonably fluent Russian. Feigning escape during Air Force One's hijacking, he attempts to retake the aircraft, to rescue everybody.
 * Gary Oldman as Egor Korshunov: A Russian Radek loyalist who leads the hijacking of Air Force One.
 * Glenn Close as U.S. Vice President Kathryn Bennett: The Vice President of the United States, Bennett, throughout the Air Force One hijacking crisis, commands operations from the White House Situation Room, alongside Secretary of Defense Walter Dean and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Northwood. Despite all the tension, Bennett remains calm and collected during the entire ordeal, and refuses to make risky or poor decisions.
 * Wendy Crewson as U.S. First Lady Grace Marshall
 * Liesel Matthews as the President's daughter Alice Marshall
 * Dean Stockwell as U.S. Defense Secretary Walter Dean
 * Elya Baskin as Andrei Kolchak, Korshunov's best friend and pilot
 * Levan Uchaneishvili as Sergei Lenski, Korshunov's henchman
 * David Vadim as Igor Nevsky, Korshunov's henchman
 * Andrew Divoff as Boris Bazylev, Korshunov's henchman
 * Ilia Volok as Vladimir Krasin, Korshunov's henchman
 * Paul Guilfoyle as White House Chief of Staff Lloyd Shepherd
 * Xander Berkeley as U.S. Secret Service Special Agent in Charge Gibbs, of Presidential Protective Division. A mole who secretly helps the terrorists take over Air Force One. The hijackers never reveal to anyone Gibbs' true intentions, to the point where they also hold him hostage along with everyone else.
 * William H. Macy as Major Norman Caldwell, USAF, military aide to the President
 * Alan Woolf as Russian President Petrov
 * Tom Everett as U.S. National Security Advisor Jack Doherty: Korshunov executes Doherty. The first hostage to die when the terrorists demand Radek's release.
 * Jürgen Prochnow as General Ivan Radek: The dictator of a rogue terrorist regime in Kazakhstan that had taken possession of former stolen Soviet nuclear weapons, threatening to start a new Cold War, Radek's regime has taken the lives of 200,000 people. Captured by a joint Russian-American military ops team, Radek is currently imprisoned in Russia, awaiting trial. The terrorists who take over Air Force One, demand Radek's release.
 * Donna Bullock as Deputy Press Secretary Melanie Mitchell: Korshunov, believing that a Secret Service Agent is in the cargo hold, executes her.
 * Michael Ray Miller as Colonel Axelrod, USAF, pilot of Air Force One: Axelrod attempts to make an emergency landing after the hijacking begins. He orders the flight crew, "No matter what happens, we land this aircraft, is that understood?"
 * Carl Weintraub as Lieutenant Colonel Ingraham, USAF, co-pilot of Air Force One: Ingraham attempts to help Axelrod emergency land the plane after the hijacking begins.
 * Spencer Garrett as White House Aide Thomas Lee
 * Bill Smitrovich as General Northwood
 * Glenn Morshower as U.S. Secret Service Agent Walters
 * David Gianopoulos as U.S. Secret Service Agent Johnson
 * Dan Shor as Notre Dame Aide
 * Philip Baker Hall as U.S. Attorney General Andrew Ward
 * Richard Doyle as Colonel Bob Jackson, USAF, Air Force One Backup Pilot
 * Willard Pugh as White House Communications Officer
 * Don R. McManus as Lt. Colonel Jack Carlton, F-15 "Halo Flight" Leader
 * J.A. Preston as USAF Major General: Having been President Marshall's Commanding Officer during the Vietnam War, he is the first to anticipate that Marshall is battling the hijackers.

Production
A large part of the crew took a tour of the real Air Force One before filming. They based some of the film's scenes, where the terrorists disguised as journalists survey the plane's layout and begin to take their seats, on the touring experience. The character of Deputy Press Secretary Melanie Mitchell was based largely on their real life tour guide, and the crew felt uncomfortable having to film the character's execution by the terrorists.

For the exterior scenes, the producers rented a Boeing 747-146 aircraft, N703CK from Kalitta Air and repainted it to replicate the iconic Air Force One livery.

Air Force One is shown as being equipped with a one-person escape pod for emergency use by the President of the United States. It was also done this way in at least three other films, Escape from New York, Bermuda Tentacles and Big Game. The actual Air Force One does not have an escape pod.

Scenes explaining Agent Gibbs' motivation for being the mole were cut from the final script. According to director Wolfgang Petersen, Gibbs was a former CIA agent who lost a lot after the end of the Cold War and thus became angry with the American government and wanted revenge. He knew the terrorists from his CIA days, so they included him in their operation. The scene was considered too long to tell, so it was cut from the film. The director also felt that it was unnecessary to add in the film so it was removed as it was irrelevant to the plot. He felt its something insignificant that the audience doesn't really need to know about.

Gary Oldman did not stay in character between the scenes. The director later said he called the filming experience "Air Force Fun" because of how comic and genial Oldman would be off-screen. He also said that Oldman would suddenly return to the menacing film persona like a shot.

General Radek's palace, seen in the film's opening, was portrayed by two locations in Cleveland, Ohio: the exterior was Severance Hall, and the interior was the Cuyahoga County Courthouse. The Russian prison where Radek was incarcerated was the Ohio State Reformatory, previously seen in The Shawshank Redemption. Ramstein Air Base, Germany was portrayed by Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base, Ohio. The diplomatic dinner scene was shot at the Ebell of Los Angeles while a second unit captured scenes in Red Square in Moscow. Moscow Airport scenes which show the boarding of the plane and departure were shot in Los Angeles International Airport.

F-15 Eagle aircraft from the 33d Operations Group, 33d Fighter Wing at Eglin AFB, Florida were used in the movie.

Critical response
At aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, Air Force One has an approval rating of 78%, based on 54 reviews, with an average score of 7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "This late-period Harrison Ford actioner is full of palpable, if not entirely seamless, thrills." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film 3.5/4 stars, describing it as "superior escapism", and concluding, "Air Force One doesn't insult the audience. It is crafted by a film-maker who takes pride in the thrills and sly fun he packs into every frame. Welcome to something rare in a summer of crass commercialism: a class act." Todd McCarthy of Variety described the film as "a preposterously pulpy but quite entertaining suspense meller" that is "spiked by some spectacularly staged and genuinely tense action sequences." He lauded the film's antagonist: "[Gary] Oldman, in his second malevolent lead of the summer, after The Fifth Element, registers strongly as a veteran of the Afghan campaign pushed to desperate lengths to newly ennoble his country."

In a lukewarm review, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4 and found it flawed and cliché-ridden yet "well-served by the quality of the performances ... Air Force One is a fairly competent recycling of familiar ingredients, given an additional interest because of Harrison Ford's personal appeal." Adam Mars-Jones of The Independent was more critical, calling it "so preposterous that it begins to seem like a science-fiction artifact...the product of a parallel-universe 1990s which somehow by-passed the decades since the 1950s."

President Bill Clinton saw the film twice while in office and gave it good reviews. He noted, however, that certain elements of the film's version of Air Force One, such as the escape pod and the rear parachute ramp, did not reflect features of the actual Air Force One (though since many Air Force One features are highly classified and "need-to-know", these features cannot be completely ruled out). In the audio commentary, Wolfgang Petersen mused that although the real plane did not have those features at the time of the filming, they would probably be added by future governments.

During his campaign for the Presidency of the United States in the 2016 presidential election, businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that Air Force One was his favorite film role of Ford's, because he "stood up for America". Instead of thanking Trump for the compliment, Ford, adhering to his own left-wing political beliefs, reasoned that "it was just a film" and doubted that Trump's presidential bid would be successful.

A Wall Street Journal poll in 2016 named Harrison Ford's James Marshall as the greatest fictional president.

Box office
One of the most popular action films of the 1990s, Air Force One earned $172,650,002 (54.9%) domestically and $142,200,000 (45.1%) in other countries. It grossed a total of $315,156,409 worldwide in the box office. It was the year's fifth highest-grossing film worldwide.

Accolades
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
 * 2001: AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills – Nominated

Score
Randy Newman was initially hired to write the film score; however, Petersen considered his composition to be almost a parody and commissioned Jerry Goldsmith to write and record a more somber and patriotic score in just twelve days, with assistance from Joel McNeely. After the harrowing experience, Goldsmith vowed never again to take on such a last-minute task. Newman used some of his material from the rejected score in Toy Story 3.

The music label Varèse Sarabande released a soundtrack album featuring Goldsmith's music. McNeely receives a credit on the back cover for "Additional Music in the Motion Picture", but none of his work is on the CD, although his cues include the material heard when Air Force One is under attack.

The first track of the soundtrack, "The Parachutes", was used by Donald Trump during his campaign for President of the United States in 2016. The track was played in the background at the New York Hilton Midtown prior to Trump's victory speech, following Hillary Clinton's concession. This was not the first time; he had used the theme tune he had used it several times previously at campaign event leading the writer to ask him to stop using it.

Novelization
A novelization of the film was published in June 1997 by author Max Allan Collins. Although the book has the same central plot and outcomes as the film, its main storyline has additional scenes and lines not in the film. The book develops characters more than the film. Marshall is described as possessing a smile that is described (in the novelisation of the film by Max Allen Collins) as "the most valuable weapon in his public relations arsenal" (p. 11). He promotes an interventionist line on foreign policy and a strong stance against terrorism (met with political opposition from the opposition Speaker of the House, Franklin Danforth, in the novel). He is described as a first-term President, up for re-election later on in the year that the film is set in. In the third year of his presidency (novel). Marshall's Home State is Iowa. Two-term former Governor of Iowa (in the novel). The film also states that his first campaign was for the U.S. House. He graduated from University of Iowa in the early 1970s (novel), may also have attended the University of Notre Dame. His senior Staff and Cabinet include Vice President Kathryn Bennett (former congresswoman and trial attorney from New Jersey), Chief of Staff Lloyd Shepherd (an old friend from U of I), National Security Advisor Jack Doherty, Secretary of Defense Walter Dean, Deputy NSA Thomas Lee, Deputy Press Secretary Melanie Mitchell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Northwood, Air Force General Greeley (who Marshall served under in Vietnam). His Party is Republican (novel). Marshall is described in the novel as "a moderate-Republican version of Bill Clinton, minus the womanizing reputation, and without a hint of personal or professional scandal" (p. 99–100). Korushunov's family is expanded upon, and it is revealed Korushunov is not his real name. Unlike the movie, Gibbs's identity as the traitor is not revealed until the end of the book. It also hints at his motivation; "What he did remember, as he sipped his coffee, was that he knew these men, had worked with these men, and it was a damn shame they had to die so that he could be wealthy.", and Korushunov later tells Marshall he "paid" him off. It also presents a slightly alternative ending; Air Force One crashes in the Russian countryside, whereas in the film, Air Force One crashes into the Caspian Sea.