Air Force One (1997)

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Cast: Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman, Glenn Close, Wendy Crewson

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Even at the tender age of 13, I knew I was being sold a carefully crafted bill of goods. That’s probably not a great sign. At 13 you should just take a movie on its face and think that everything—especially the R-rated stuff you managed to sneak by your parents, as they were fine with violence, but squeamish in the face of sex--in a movie is just great! More, please!

The film is a rather brazen Die Hard (1988) clone, in an era where Die Hard clones proliferated at the point to define them as an epidemic. This at least has a hook beyond the same summer’s Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997). Die Hard on a… the President’s plane. Sure, let’s watch that. And the President is the one who has to re-take the plane? Bonus points, especially in a time where we had a President who—even if you supported Clinton—you couldn’t imagine taking any kind of actual active role in a situation…

Is it possible that a Jerry Goldsmith score is all I really need out of a movie? Well, that and Harrison Ford being demonstrably awake for the runtime will paper over quite a bit.

Come to think of it, have we ever had a President for which such a heroic role doesn’t seem like the height of silliness? Eisenhower? Washington? Even both of those guys feel like they’re going to be more at home in the scenes taking place in the Situation Room (which here looks more like the Roosevelt Room). Now that I think about it maybe Teddy Roosevelt could take something back from terrorists. Now there’s a movie Die Hard, but its Teddy Roosevelt.

Enemy Mine (1985)

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Louis Gossett, Jr., Bumper Robinson, Brion James

Have I Seen it Before: Never. No, I know. I don’t know what I had been doing this whole time, either.

Did I Like It: The film was largely forgotten in its time, but cannot be denied as the years progressed. It has proven plenty influential to filmed Sci-Fi that was to come. Pretty much every TV Sci Fi show from the 80s forward did some kind of riff on the theme. To my memory, Star Trek: The Next Generation did it twice, once with the not even hidden homage “The Enemy” and later, with one of it’s greatest episodes, “Darmok.” A quick look at Wikipedia indicates that Stargate SG-1 dropped all pretense with their episode, helpfully titled “Enemy Mine.”

And that’s all because the story is pretty great in its simplicity. Yes, it’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), except the Toshirō Mifune is now a space alien and played by Louis Gossett, Jr. One might argue that the story runs out of track after it—out of necessity—is no longer about Jeriba and Davidge (Dennis Quaid), and the story is artificially extended beyond the point where other humans arrive on the planet, but even films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) drag in the middle if you’re not in the right mood for it. Any Sci-Fi movie can feel like its treading water under the right circumstances.

Performance-wise, Gossett is flawless as one of the leads, never once betraying the fact that he is a human wearing a prosthesis. Quaid is good as the supposed hero, but at various moments throughout the film I got the overwhelming feel that not only was he trying to ape Harrison Ford (and doing it relatively well), but that the entire film had been created around the idea of him playing Davidge, but when he passed, they went with the next best thing. It’s so eerie at various points that if you had told me that Ford played the role for part of production, left the film, and Quaid filmed the remainder, I just might believe you.