One of these ideas is that the president's life is worth more than the life of any other citizen. At first, this may seem true or even obvious on some level. You may think, "He's the most powerful man in the world because he's in charge of the most powerful country in the world. Surely this makes his life more important somehow." But for one thing, the president's power has been greatly exaggerated over the years. He's not really our leader so much as the head of one third of the federal government, but I'm sure you all know all about that. Perhaps we're meant to think of him as in control of everything to draw attention away from the people who are really in charge. Or maybe the idea of a strong leader who's in control of everything is an image we're supposed to have. But for another thing, if someone assassinates the president then we just get a new president. It doesn't cripple the country in any way and it's crazy for our enemies to think that and it's crazy for us to go to any greater lengths bargaining for his life than we would for anyone else. He's just a representative of the people and there are plenty of people to take his place. Elevating him to the status of a king or holy man causes harm by discouraging criticism and questioning.
Another idea I consider harmful is the idea that our nuclear weapons keep us safe. This ties into the idea that we all need guns to keep us safe even though guns are weapons and are thus designed specifically for offense rather than defense. Nuclear weapons are made to kill as many people as possible, not to save anyone. And yet in this movie everyone's terrified of the idea that our enemies will gain the ability to disable our nukes because it will leave us vulnerable. It seems to me that an enemy crazy enough to sacrifice the number of innocent lives that would be lost in a nuclear assault is likely to be crazy enough to disregard the risk of us firing nukes back at them. So far there's only been one country that has ever done that. If I showed you a graph of how many nukes each country has used against other countries and then compared the data, you'd be dividing by zero to calculate the United States as being infinitely more dangerous than anyone else. Since we have proven we cannot be trusted with nukes, if an enemy gains the ability to render our nukes unavailable I'd call that a good thing. To be fair, the movie later shows that our nukes may well pose an enormous danger to ourselves, but it doesn't quite connect the dots to say that maybe we should think about getting rid of them. Mutually assured destruction really is as crazy as it sounds, and I would've thought enough people have watched Dr. Strangelove to know that.
The movie is a bit like Air Force One but instead of terrorists taking the president hostage in a plane they take him hostage in the White House. But in Air Force One they give you a reason to care about the president by showing him to be a genuine, honest man. In Olympus Has Fallen the president is accused of being corrupt and the movie makes no attempt to counter that accusation. But of course we're supposed to believe that the president is a good guy because it's the bad guys who are saying he's not. We're just supposed to hate the Asians. The turncoat who's working with the Asian terrorists is critical of the president because of the Wall Street bailouts among other things, so there's some indication that Wall Street protesters are villains here. The movie also demonizes the entire middle east by having the news say crowds were celebrating in middle eastern countries after hearing the news that the White House had been attacked.
Apparently the Asian terrorists who have taken over the White House want to get these super secret "Cerberus" codes from the president and two high ranking officials, all of whom are hostages. So naturally when they start threatening to kill one of the guys who has a code (smart), the president orders him to give up the code because he doesn't wanna see the guy get killed. Then the terrorists start beating up the female secretary of state who has a code, and she seems to be holding her ground pretty well. The president then orders her to give up her code, arrogantly saying, "They'll never get mine." What, so as the president you're allowed to proudly defy these terrorists by never revealing information under torture, but you assume that none of the people working under you are strong enough to do so? Anyway, apparently the terrorists didn't even need the president's code because with only one code remaining they were just able to "crack" it. You're telling me a code this important doesn't lock you out of the system with the first hint of an incorrect code entry? When the news of the third code being entered reached the pentagon or wherever it was the remaining government officials were meeting, they said "but the Cerberus code should take days for them to crack." Excuse me? According to password security testing software on the Internet, my email password would take CENTURIES to crack, and it's not exceptional in any way. But apparently the super secret codes to our massive array of nukes can be cracked in a few days. Great. Anyway, it turns out the reason the terrorists wanted the codes wasn't to deactivate the nukes, but to detonate them in the silos. Every nuke across the entire country, killing us all. Even though it's all fiction, I should say the movie presents the interesting possibility that our nukes may be used against us since no security system is perfect, so that's another reason why having all these nukes doesn't make me feel very safe. But anyway, when the codes are activated it starts a five minute countdown before they take effect, giving the hero time to get in there and shut it off. Apparently he needed another deactivation code to deactivate the deactivation codes. It seems to me like the five minute countdown wouldn't make sense considering that the whole point of the Cerberus codes is to stop a nuclear missile after it's been fired. Imagine getting to the bunker where the codes are meant to be entered just moments before the nuke reaches its target so you can enter the codes just in time, only to find that you have to wait five minutes after that for the nuke to be deactivated. That would be a fun countdown to just sit there watching helplessly.
If you're not convinced the movie is jingo by the end of it, they pretty much spell it out for you by having the end credits start up over a closeup of an American flag blowing in the wind. Hooray for us. We need more movies celebrating the glory of peace and fewer movies trying to make us afraid of everything and everyone. In case it's not clear, I recommend against seeing this movie.
(The title of this post refers to an inside joke used to make fun of the dialogue in the game Ghost Squad.)
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