History Headscratchers / OlympusHasFallen

* The entire EvilPlan doesn't make sense at all, for a number of reasons: 1) They are a rogue faction, not affiliated with North Korea. If NK condemns the attack, then they have no sovereign backup. 2) When he demands the 7th Fleet retreat from Korean territory, what can he do if they say no? Kill a hostage, yes people will die but more will die if the US give in; and the hostage is probably dead anyway. He had a finite amount of troops and hostages, and the USAF were ready to retake at a moments notice. 3) The CERBERUS system. It has already been discussed elsewhere how stupid it is, but from a luck viewpoint, Kang got everyone he needed right when he needed it. He got the POTUS, [=SecDef=] and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all at the same time, which from a story perspective is a good thing as they can stop nukes if they have been launched, but in this case is bad... Except if they didn't give up their respective codes, then the rebels would need to brute force the code for all three, which would take a lot longer than one code. The system itself seems bizarre that it could detonate the missiles within the bunkers as opposed to those that have been launched. 4) The hostages. When the Cabinet is taken hostage, did it not occur to anyone to just storm the place? Even if he killed all the hostages, he is still no closer to getting what he wanted, and he just assassinated a POTUS...

* How come the army didn't just walk in the front door and help Gerard Butler. The whole premise of Kang telling them to stay out or he'd kill hostages was defeated by the fact that they needed the Cerberus codes and he was killing hostages anyway as Butler was raising hell. This could have ended much sooner if the snipers just killed every terrorist they saw and and the army rushed the building. Sure some may have died, but it's less of a risk than flying six helicopters against a huge anti-air gun.
Even at the end, with all the terrorists dead, the shot President still had to walk from the bunker out the front door to get a medic.

* How come the army didn't just walk in the front door and help Gerard Butler. The whole premise of Kang telling them to stay out or he'd kill hostages was defeated by the fact that they needed the Cerberus codes and he was killing hostages anyway as Butler was raising hell. Even at the end, with all the terrorists dead, the shot President still had to walk from the bunker out the front door to get a medic.

** Because it would take far too much effort to research every single defensive system in place around Washington D.C. and then develop a way to circumvent each one, especially if the director or producers didn't really care how realistic anything is. As a disclaimer of sorts, I find it absurd that they'd think anyone would believe the capital of the most powerful nation in the world would be so poorly protected, but I guess that's what the writers figured suspension of disbelief was for.

* The film makers also don't seem to realize that DC is ringed by patriot missile batteries, in the movie they admitted that the plane had no proper transponder codes so why did it take that long for somebody to send F-22's up, and when those got blown up (if they were going to shoot it down why not use radar guided missiles) why didn't dozens of patriot missiles take that plane out of the sky?

* As much as it would be of course very bad to lose the US President, how important is keeping him alive compared to having the KoreanWar from reignite by agreeing to the terrorists' demands, which could easily escalate to a nuclear exchange? Not to mention [[spoiler: [[ApocalypseHow what would happen if Cerberus was activated]]]]...

** A bigger problem is that the White House missiles simply detonated in typical action movie fireballs that look pretty but do nothing. In reality, a missile detonating at that proximity to an AC-130 would pepper it with shrapnel and likely knock it clean out of the sky, or at least force an emergency landing.

** He's still willing to let what he thinks is the President and the remaining hostages be kidnapped by Kang, with the assumption that they'd just follow the tracking beacon and rescue all of them after the fact. If Kang didn't simply kill all of them before they were saved, he probably would have done it after he found out that the new President put the 7th Fleet and DMZ troops back into place. The Speaker was actually pretty shitty at the job: most of what he did consisted of watching what happened and giving in to Kang's demands, including supposedly letting the terrorist get away with [i]most of the remaining Presidential administration[/i], and fully allowing the Korean War to reignite all in the name of not letting the Cabinet die.

* Alright Mr. Acting President, you have five minutes before the entire land based nuclear arsenal of the United States blows up in its silos and covers the nation in nuclear fallout. Why not launch the nukes so that when they go off, they'll be way up in the air, showering the country in EMP, but sparing the worst of the threat, as this would result in no explosive damage on the surface and minimal fallout?

* Why do the four missiles fired from the White House go for the flares while the one fired from the Raptor hit home? Because the missile fired from the Raptor is AIM-9X which has a nice little computer chip that tells it to ignore flares and go for the REAL target.

** He knew the president would break protocol, since that's who the president is as a person, and considering the timing, the last thing either of them needed was for the Prime Minister of an allied nation to basically be told to 'fend for himself'. So while the movie shows it to be a stupid move due to the people that snuck in, it's a move that makes sense in context.

* Kang's whole plan relies on several factors that he could not have possibly accounted for. The Vice President and Secretary of Defense had to be in the bunker, and his plan would have been stopped cold if the President hadn't broken protocol by bringing the South Korean PM and ''his entire security detail'' with them.

* They run facial-recognition on Kang (before they knew who he was) but it came up with no matches. But then, as soon as they find out he's Kang, they pull up his file on the computer- WITH HIS PICTURE!

** Presumably, the complete control that the Cerberus system gives over the nuclear arsenal would have been able to prevent just that.

** Presumably, the complete control that the Cerberus system gives over the nuclear arsenal would have been able to precent just that.

* Alright Mr. Acting President, you have five minutes before the entire land based nuclear arsenal of the United States blows up in its silos and covers the nation in nuclear fallout. Why not launch the nukes so that when they go off, they'll be way up in the air, showering the country in EMP, but sparing the worst of the threat, as this would result in no explosive damage on the surface and minimal fallout?

* Is it just me, or is Cerberus among the worst-designed systems ever in fiction? They say it's a nuclear failsafe so that in the event of an accidental launch the missile can be self-destructed before reaching its target. Good so far. Except that in order to activate the failsafe, you need the codes of all ''three'' top-ranking government officials. But in the situation where you would need Cerberus, there's no guarantee that all three would be available and able to enter their codes. Second, the system is also able to detonate every nuclear warhead, even when in the silos. There is megatons of difference between "self-destruct" and "detonate". Third, once the codes have been entered, there is no way to shut down the system without entering yet another code, and the missile silos themselves seem to have no way to abort launch or detonation on their own. So a system that is supposed to be able to prevent nuclear weapons from going off accidentally would in practice do the exact opposite.

** Its implied throughout the movie that the Speaker thinks that the situation can be resolved with an assault on the White House. He doesn't think that the Cerberus protocol could be brute-forced, and that if they take out Kang they can just turn the Seventh Fleet and the 2nd ID back around. It takes time for a fleet and 28,000 troops to pick up and move. You're ''not'' going to get a force that entrenched to move itself completely from the Korean DMZ at the drop of a hat. It isn't until the very end that they realize the nuclear arsenal is actually in serious threat of subversion.