No piece of film this year had a more wounding impact on our national psyche than the video shots of two airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center twin towers.
Those images still stun us, leave us drained.
It was a panorama of horror, but a horror that seemed strangely familiar.
“It’s like a movie,” many people remarked.
But was it?
When people compare that real-life massacre to movies, they’re often thinking of the big disaster films such as “Independence Day” and “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” where whole cites or whole planets are suddenly assaulted, and where familiar places go up in smoke.
But they’re also thinking of movie thrillers that use terrorism as a plot device: “True Lies” (Arnold Schwarzenegger battles Arab terrorists), “The Siege” (New York is besieged by terrorists, leading to martial law and Arab persecution) or the film most frequently cited after Sept. 11, “Executive Decision.”
Silliness holds true
That film, which stars Kurt Russell as a mild-mannered intelligence agent, Halle Berry as a plucky flight attendant and David Suchet as a glowering Arab terrorist leader, is often called “prescient” these days, because it deals with armed Muslim fanatics taking over a plane, some of them intent on decimating the U.S. East Coast with nerve gas bombs.
Back in 1996, the plot was dismissed by many critics (including me) as preposterous or goofy. But were writer-producers Jim and John Thomas and director Stuart Baird really ahead of the curve?
The movie, you may remember, is about a group of U.S. commandos, led by Steven Seagal and joined by tuxedo-wearing intelligence expert Russell, who sneak onto a hijacked jetliner via an experimental air taxi and secretly combat the terrorists and their nerve gas plot. In 1996, I wrote that “Executive Decision” was “grimly absurd, relentlessly batty,” “stripped of real emotions or logic.” Like many other critics, I complained about the movie’s obvious stereotyping and saw no sense in its hijack-a-plane-and-destroy-America plot.
Recently, I watched “Executive Decision” again, half expecting to have to eat my words. But, though part of it rang true, most of it still seemed grimly absurd, batty, forced and laughable. It was still a movie with ridiculous situations: the terrorists sneaking on an arsenal of rifles and a complex bomb and Russell forced to land the plane after both pilots are shot. It still had obvious stereotyping. Suchet’s well-spoken but sinister Nagi Hassan walks around frowning and reading the Koran, and when Halle Berry’s Jean asks him how he reconciles peaceful Islam with terrorism, he murmurs “according to the Koran . . .” and that’s all.
Movies are cliches
“Executive Decision” looked forced and silly the first time around and the second time around as well. So does the more obviously tongue-in-cheek “True Lies” and even Ed Zwick’s “The Siege,” an honest attempt to be more realistic and even-handed about international issues and anti-Arab prejudice.
That may be a big part of the reason we didn’t take any of those movies more seriously — because, for the most part, they didn’t take their subjects seriously either. They presented a world of ghastly supervillains and invincible superheroes in broad cartoonish strokes that made everything look contrived and implausible. Reality, as usual, was much more complex — and far worse.
Maybe we would have worried more if we had seen something more like two 1964 films, “Fail-Safe” and “Dr. Strangelove,” that dealt with another clear and present danger: the world arms race and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Neither was completely realistic: Stanley Kubrick’s “Strangelove” was deliberately played as a cartoonish burlesque full of clownish characters with names like President Merkin Muffley and Gen. Jack D. Ripper. But watching them today, you sense an artistic and intellectual engagement — an attempt to really confront and understand the issues involved — mostly absent from the recent terrorist movies.
“Fail-Safe” honestly tries to extrapolate how the world might be plunged into nuclear war; “Dr. Strangelove,” despite its playful satire, was so well researched and re-created that the climactic bomber scenes, with Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) closing in on his Russian targets, can still freeze blood.
Shallow `Decision’
That surface realism is what makes “Strangelove” work so well, even 37 years later, as both comedy and nightmare — and also as an argument for nuclear-age responsibility.
“Executive Decision” had no such clear agenda. If it’s a convincing argument for anything, it’s perhaps for air taxi research and definitely for employing flight attendants who look and act like Halle Berry. The movie’s very superficiality almost ensured that the audience wouldn’t keep thinking about it — or plane safety and terrorism — after they left the theater. Why worry if Russell, Denzel Washington (in “The Siege”) or President Harrison Ford (in the equally absurd and profitable “Air Force One”) will always be around to take care of business?
What’s wrong with these films and most of our big studio movies these days is that they take very little seriously — except, of course, the business of attracting huge audiences and generating multimillion-dollar revenues. They pretend to court controversy but really eschew it, pretend to explore issues but really avoid them. They wrap everything up in over-tidy packages, dance around with gorgeous smiles, trying to sell themselves — and often succeed. They are ambitious financially, but they are woeful underachievers intellectually, artistically and sometimes even as entertainment. This is the prime major studio malady of the post-“Star Wars” era and, in many ways, we haven’t recovered from it yet.
It would be better if we lived in a movie era more like the one that produced “Dr. Strangelove” — or even the failed “Fail-Safe.” Back then, people argued afterward about how the movies reflected life and the issues they raised, as well as about actors they liked or killer scenes.
Unfortunately what those TV images of the Trade Center under siege finally showed us was that the unthinkable can become reality — and that reality can beggar even the most amazing special effects and the wildest movie fantasies.
