Saw it tonight. If you though it was ludicrous from the trailers just wait until you see the actual film. Leaving aside the whole “North Korean terrorists seize the White House” thing nothing about Cerberus makes any sense. :dubious: The whole setup is completely insane & moronic. Any country that ties it’s nukes into a system like that deserves oblivion. Nuclear warheads don’t even work that way. Then there’s the fact that Kang’s entire plan depends on Asher breaking protocol & inviting the delegation into the PEOC. :smack: They also got DEFCON wrong; DEFCON 4 is the 2nd lowest level of alert (& was actually the norm for most of the Cold War). This situation would be a DEFCON 3 or 2 even (9/11 was only 3).
That being said it was a decent action film once you stopping thinking. Plus it had Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart in it. Some of the Korean guys were nice eye candy too. I just wish they contrived some reason for Agent Banning to need to take this shirt off. Also I thought the torture the Defence Secretary and Joint-Chiefs Charman were subjected to was pretty lame, given how damaging their codes were. Twice I thought they were going to rape the SecDef. And how did they get the President’s code? Did I miss him giving it?
We never really found out how the rest of the world is taking it beyond news reports of declerations of emergency (& since when is Korea part of Southeast Asia), did we. South Korea’s probally on the verge of the coup, Chairman Kim’s probally busy shitting himself in terror , and the Chinese would be so desperate to deflect suspicion that they had anything do with it as to sterilze the DPRK. We should’ve at least gotten to hear one of the Acting President’s calls with world leaders. The one with NK sure would’ve been fun.
I could’ve done for a more bittersweet ending too. Say have Banning avert the nuclrear holocaust, but POTUS dies. Or even go really dark and have him kill the First Son to prevent Kang from using him against the President. That would probally test extremely badly with audience though.
As a March action movie it was fine. Lots to pick apart if inclined (down to a typo on a chyron about an attack on the Whitehouse and ABC apparently being allowed to have a new helicoptor right over the White House during a major terrorist attack and right after an air battle had taken place; or MSNBC sticking with Lawrence O’Donnell for 12 hours during the incident and not cutting over to actual newspeople).
But while he never did it after the attack started, there was the scene of Agent Banning in his underwear at home before heading to work that day.
Using that classic method wherein you crack a password by first figuring out what the first character is, then figuring out what the second character is. Because highly secure computer networks are big on telling you just how close you got in the last attempt.
The whole incident could have been avoided if the programmers had spent less time designing an awesome UI for once the world was ending and more time taking an hour to program in a velocity check to protect against brute force attacks.
I saw it tonight knowing full well that it was going to be a chessy Die Hard type flick where you need to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy fully.
I’m fairly sure that security experts would be able to shoot hundred of holes in the plot (no pun intended).
FWIW, this is a VERY violent movie. Not SAW violent, but much more than just dudes getting shot.
I agree that the “cracking” of the code was utter BS. They also never explained how the Hydra was stolen/installed/used at all.
I kinda laughed when one of the news tickers read “Terrorist attack the White House”. Did they just skip any and all proof reading?
You can’t go and watch a movie like this thinking that everything will make sense, or that it will be highly plausible. If it were highly plausible, then the Secret Service needs to take lessons from Hollywood. We all know that isn’t the case.
When I saw the trailer, I thought “looks like a good action flick, nothing more”. When I saw the rotten tomatoes reviews that had critics at about 50% positive, and viewers at about 80% positive, I knew it was going to be exactly what I wanted. It was.
I can see how some of the stars in the movie might make one think it could be a really good film (Aaron Eckhardt, Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Cole Hauser, Robert Forster, and the bad guy from The Fast and the Furious).
I thought that the fact that one of the world’s most wanted terrorists made it into the bunker was more unbelievable than anything else.
This was good, goofy fun where lots of things blew up real good. Like the OP, I had problems with the Cerebus system as well. Lots of Die Hard and ID4 references, however, in this film
the dog dies!
The kid was surprisingly normal - not a computer genius, not a spunky “My dad’s going to get you!” shout to the terrorists, just a scared kid who was glad to be rescued.
I’m still trying to figure out Khan’s game plan after they escape through the tunnel - what, they’re going to hail a cab to the airport?
All-in-all, within its genre, I’ll give it a 8 out of 10.
And remember, his original plan had him escaping with 30 living compatriots (unless all of them had planned to blow themselves up on the helicopter (and it seems a bit excessive to blow up your best computer person as a decoy).
I saw it tonight and I thought it kicked major ass. Gerard Butler was great as a take-no-prisoners type and I loved the one-liners. It felt like stepping back into the 1980s and I mean that in the best possible sense of the phrase.
Yippee ki-ya shi-bal-nom-al!
Roger that. Saw it tonight and enjoyed it, even as my teenage son and I nitpicked it through whispers (“Why don’t they send the SEALs in now?”“Why not tell the kid to resume climbing now?”“Why not order all the nukes disabled in their silos now?”“How did they get that huge HYDRA system up to the roof?”“Since Kang knows about Mike’s wife, why not send a Secret Service team to bring her into protective custody?” etc.)
A question: Did something hit the lead car in the motorcade leaving Camp David? Seemed to me something hit its windshield, causing it to lose control and veer off the bridge. Then the Presidential limo skidded and followed it, teetering on the edge. (Odd to see Ashley Judd as the doomed First Lady, given her recent flirtation with a U.S. Senate run).
An EMT team should’ve been storming into the White House as soon as Mike gave the all-clear. POTUS’s gunshot wound did not look minor.
I hated seeing the Washington Monument get lopped off, too.
Yes, a branch fell from a tree and hit The Beast’s windshield, leading to the driver overreacting, swerving and losing control – the first of several questionable developments in the movie, like you mentioned. It is a fun movie, but you do have to “go with it.”
My whisper-comment was “we can always elect a new President, we can’t ‘elect’ a new South Korea.” :eek:
Actually, that’s not a nitpick of the movie: it struck me as consistent with the Speaker of the House that he was (1) not quite as decisive as he first appeared, and (2) understandably, way more focused on the domestic consequences. The Army chief of staff was IMHO correct about Korea, but he lost most of his credibility by discounting Butler’s character’s warning about the [del]Phalanx[/del] Hydra. :rolleyes:
Actually, I liked the casting of Morgan Freeman because it caused us to expect more from the character of Speaker as Acting President than the character (NOT Freeman as actor) could deliver. A more Deep Impact-style Freeman President would have made a speechlet to Kang about "you’ve underestimated us. Our President is not our Dear Leader, he’s an elected public servant that can be replaced, but our South Korean allies will not be left in the lurch."CLICK!
BTW, it was my impression that the attackers brought the Hydra with them in pieces and installed it in the hydraulic lift for the White House anti-aircraft rocket launcher we saw earlier in the movie.
Well, visually it was an unsettling reference to 9/11, of course, but it also struck me as a “ripped from the headlines” reference to the severe earthquake damage to the Monument.
For what it’s worth, all the “OMG can you believe there was a typo in the chyron” self-gratification, both here and in reviews…
It’s not as if a chyron being messed up during a live news broadcast is something completely unheard of and never happens IRL.
Chyron mistakes happen all the damn time. There’s even a cottage industry of sorts of people posting examples (some real, some airbrushed) of Fox News temporarily messing up the text entry on displays… gleefully posted as a way to justify one’s own sense of superior intellect, presumably. They do apparently have a bad record of occasionally misassigning party to pols when unsavory news breaks.
So let’s not act as if this never happens. Or maybe you think, like the CBC did, there really was a concern that “Lance Armstrong Used Rugs”.
I thought the movie was extremely derivative of Die Hard, almost beat-for-beat. The premise was goofy, which I can accept, but the total lack of original ideas I cannot.
It was MEANT to be derivative of Die Hard…that much was obvious. I think it was the Die Hard movie that A Good Day to Die Hard SHOULD have been. 8 out of 10.
Yeah, but that’s not a good thing. We already have Die Hard. This film, instead of stealing nearly every plot point from another film, could have done something more grounded in the novel location of the White House, or grounded in the semi-novel characters.
Did I miss him giving it?
