Line #22 YMMV/AirForceOne


1	%%
2	%% Administrivia/ZeroContextExample entries are not allowed on wiki pages. All such entries have been commented out. Add context to the entries before uncommenting them.
3	%%
4	%%
5	* AccidentalAesop: Given what Marshall and his family go through, one may see the story as a warning about tit-for-tat political beefs between countries.
6	* CatharsisFactor:
7	** After seeing what a loathsome, monstrous bastard Korshunov was (which was an absolute far cry as you can get from his actor's later Russian military character [[VideoGame/CallOfDuty Viktor Reznov]] despite sharing some similarities), it's just absolutely satisfying to watch him [[spoiler:dispatched with his neck broken 3 ways to Sunday]].
8	** Same with [[spoiler:Gibbs going down with the plane]] when he helped cause all the trouble in the first place too.
9	* CompleteMonster: [[spoiler:[[TheMole Secret Service Agent Gibbs]] is the [[BodyguardBetrayal despicable turncoat]] who is in league with Russian [[WesternTerrorists terrorist]] Egor/Ivan Korshunov and his men, who seek to free the violent and oppressive General Ivan/Alexander Radek from a Russian prison. Gibbs starts by murdering three of his fellow agents in order to open the weapons vault onboard Air Force One, with multiple people killed as Korshunov and his men hijack it. Two other people are also executed by Korshunov as Gibbs idly stands by and plays innocent—and also watches without any response as US President James Marshall's wife and young daughter are threatened and another colleague is wounded. When freed with the other hostages, Gibbs continues [[FalseFriend pretending to be a friend]] as Marshall takes Korshunov and his men out as well—along with Radek being killed before he's released. Finally, Gibbs then murders both a paratrooper and Major Caldwell while attempting to not only escape the crashing plane, but [[DirtyCoward to also abandon Marshall]] to certain doom.]]
10	* EndingFatigue: Just when you thought the film was gonna end after Korshunov and Radek die, [[spoiler:[=MiGs=] loyal to Radek launch to shoot down the plane only to be stopped by friendly F-15 Eagles. ''Then'', it turns out the plane is almost out of fuel and thus unable to land. Marshall pilots the plane to the Caspian Sea and the USAF sends in an MC-130 to evac the president and everyone else via zip-line, ''but then'' Gibbs tries one last attempt to kill him, but fails to do so as the plane crashes, taking him with it. The film finally ends for real afterwards.]]
11	* EnsembleDarkHorse:
12	** Creator/WilliamHMacy makes Major Caldwell a very likable character, [[spoiler:causing many viewers to feel upset when he gets killed off]].
13	** The Special Forces team that captures Radek thanks to their sheer badassery.
14	* EvilIsCool: [[BigBad Egor Korshunov]] who [[ColbertBump to the film's audience members who are also military first-person shooter video gamers]] is basically an EvilCounterpart to his portrayer Creator/GaryOldman's later well known heroic video game character [[VideoGame/CallOfDuty Viktor Reznov]] as they are both badass Russian combatants who are AxCrazy {{Large Ham}}s, {{Blood Knight}}s and {{Sociopathic Soldier}}s, while three of his {{Mook}}s Vladimir Krasin, Andrei Kolchak and [[Creator/AndrewDivoff Boris Bazylev]] happened to be [[VideoGame/{{Battlefield 3}} Vladimir Kamarivsky]], [[VideoGame/CallOfDutyVanguard Boris Petrov]] the father of a ColdSniper ActionGirl and one of Reznov's personal mortal enemies himself and Dragovich's terrifying, AxCrazy, {{sociopath}}ic badass of a [[TheDragon lapdog]] [[VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps Lev Kravchenko]] (and both Kravchenko and Boris are "[[VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsColdWar not a patient man, Belikov. Or a compassionate one]]").
15	* HarsherInHindsight:
16	** A movie involving Creator/HarrisonFord and an airplane is this since [[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/harrison-ford-injured-plane-crash-n318301 he was in a plane crash in March 2015.]]
17	** The hijacked Air Force One's near-collision with a transport plane during takeoff is also this after [[https://www.ocregister.com/2017/02/15/harrison-ford-lands-plane-on-taxiway-instead-of-runway-flies-over-passenger-jet-at-john-wayne-airport/ Ford nearly collided with an airliner while landing his plane.]]
18	** Not to mention the idea of a plane being hijacked by terrorists post-9/11.
19	* HilariousInHindsight:
20	** TheMole is [[spoiler:[[Series/{{NCIS}} Agent Gibbs]]. [[Series/TwentyFour And he dies on a plane during a terrorist incident]]]].
21	** Creator/HarrisonFord played Jack Ryan in two movie adaptations of Creator/TomClancy's Literature/JackRyan novels. The novel published a year before the movie shows the character dealing with becoming the US President.
22	* JustHereForGodzilla: See President Creator/HarrisonFord kick ass! Unless you're amused or stirred by {{Eagleland}} PatrioticFervor, that's the appeal of the movie.
23	* MagnificentBastard: [[BigBad Egor Korshunov]] is the leader of a group of Russian terrorists who infiltrate Air Force One by means of killing and replacing a film crew and then by breaking into the weapons vault and killing most of the Secret Service, hijack the plane. He seeks to have Russian prisoner General Ivan Radek released from prison. He also successfully prevents an emergency landing while the plane is on the runway. Impeded by US President James Marshall, Korshunov first threatens a hostage to try to lure him out and then forces Vice President Kathryn Bennett to send for fuel when the plane loses it. Once capturing Marshall, Korshunov gets him to agree to and follow through with the release and later, Korshunov nearly escapes with a parachute. Korshunov proves constantly how he's a NoNonsenseNemesis with every challenge he's met with and manages to retain honor in the process.
24	* MemeticMutation: "Get off my plane" was an early popular meme on {{Website/YTMND}}.
25	* MoralEventHorizon:
26	** Korshunov crossed it when he [[spoiler:murdered Press Secretary Melanie Mitchell after making her beg for her life]].
27	** [[spoiler:If helping the hijacking go through to begin with didn't do it for Gibbs, murdering Caldwell did.]]
28	* NarmCharm: The shots of Egor's face as he tries to take off in Air Force One. He has a goofy excited grin at first, and as he barely avoids collision he starts straining in a way that seems like he's screaming silently. Very goofy, but how else would you react to hijacking and almost crashing a cool jet?
29	* NightmareFuel:
30	** Imagine being any one of those hostages sent tumbling out of the aircraft without a parachute when one of the terrorists blows the door to the rear ramp open. The President himself just barely avoids the same fate, all while the tanker jet ''explodes just a few hundred feet above'', nearly taking his own aircraft with it.
31	** And of course there's the death of Marshall's security adviser and press secretary; the latter is especially disturbing as we are forced to watch her plead for her life right up to the fatal shot.
32	* OneSceneWonder: The American Special Forces operators seen in the film's opening scene. They are only in the movie for a few minutes (to capture Radek), but they are absolute ''badasses'' during their limited screen time.
33	* RetroactiveRecognition:
34	** [[Series/{{Lost}} Mikhail Bakunin]] is one of the hijackers.
35	** Another hijacker is [[Film/SpiderManTrilogy Mr. Ditkovich]].
36	* SignatureScene: '''''GET OFF MY PLANE!!!'''''
37	* SpecialEffectsFailure:
38	** From certain angles, it's clear that the F-15 cockpit mock-up only extends back to around the actors' shoulders as the sky is visible where the plane should be.
39	** [[spoiler:The crash of the eponymous aircraft.]] The marriage between the model plane elements and the CGI looks really bad even by 1997 standards. Which is too bad because the rest of the effects had been fine against the night and sunrise backgrounds, and only become obvious during this scene. Even even more ironic because most of the plane effects were almost exclusively done with physical model miniatures instead of using a real plane, and even one of the model makers commented on how fake it looked in comparison to everything else. To say nothing about the compositing of the human actors into the scene.
40	** When [[spoiler:Gibbs]] kills the Secret Service agents guarding the armory, the curtain behind the second agent is already splattered with his blood before the squib goes off.
41	* StrawmanHasAPoint:
42	** Although the movie makes it crystal clear who we should be rooting for, not everything Korshunov says is easy to argue with. In particular, the President's job involves ordering the deaths of others, and he only keeps his hands relatively clean (compared to Korshunov) by delegating the act itself to others. Of course, the whole plot of the film centers on the President getting hands-on with this against Korshunov's men, in order to save his family and his staffers.
43	** The Secretary of Defense. His willingness to invoke the 25th Amendment as damage control (with no apparent personal gain in it for himself) is actually perfectly reasonable, as setting the precedent that "yes, the US does negotiate with terrorists after all" would have had disastrous consequences. Not to mention that ''a majority of the cabinet'' agreed with him on this. Of course, they get lucky and everything works out in the end so the scope of this SadisticChoice is never realized.
44	* TearJerker:
45	** Most notably when [[spoiler: the President]] is given a SadisticChoice between [[spoiler: the life of an innocent woman and his chance of saving everyone else]]. [[DragonInChief Korshunov]] turns on the intercom so everyone on the plane can hear [[spoiler: her plead for her life, right up until he shoots her]], and we see the other hostages either close to breaking down or openly sobbing.
46	** A minor one, but Korshunov mourning the death of Karsin could be seen as this. EvenEvilHasLovedOnes, after all.
47	--->'''Korshunov:''' He was in Afghanistan with me for five years. Find out who did this or you lie down next to him.
48	* UnintentionalPeriodPiece:
49	** The premise of the movie is heavily tied to the geopolitics of the mid to late '90s. At the time, the US had no major foreign enemies, so the idea of Kazakh radicals hijacking Air Force One could be played for harmless spectacle rather than realistic horror. Additionally, dialogue makes reference to UsefulNotes/SaddamHussein being the President of Iraq (the only reference to a real-life head of state in the movie, oddly enough), instantly dating it to before the United States' invasion of the country in 2003 that resulted in him being overthrown that same year.
50	** The movie was also made during the presidency of UsefulNotes/BorisYeltsin, who presided over Russia after the fall of Soviet Union. Back then, it was a source of "hope" that with the fall of the Soviet Union and the introduction of capitalism and democracy to Russia, Russia and the United States would become partners in a new global age. The first act of the movie heavily leans on how the fictional presidents of Russia and America have such a good friendship, with a joint Russia-US operation to arrest a fictional Kazakh dictator being what kicks the plot. Yeltsin's successor was UsefulNotes/VladimirPutin, and to keep things quick and simple, Russian and American relations took a sharp nosedive for the worst with Russia's annexations and war in UsefulNotes/{{Ukraine}} (Crimea and Donbas in 2014, then a large-scale invasion in 2022).
51	* UnintentionallySympathetic: Some viewers feel at least a little sympathy for Radek [[spoiler:being released from prison only to end up desperately fleeing for his life while being machine-gunned by faceless guards]]. The fact that we don't actually see what his crimes are helps it (though it is mentioned at the beginning that the President had been to the Red Cross camps and seen the thousands hurt under his rule).
52	* ValuesDissonance: Not to the point of rooting for the villains, but in Europe the retorts Korshunov gives about the US President - being a killer in a tuxedo; making war and killing thousands to save a nickel on the price of a gallon of gas - were considered to be not far off from truth and Korshunov himself was considered way more sympathetically.
53	* ValuesResonance: Kathryn Bennett is Vice President as played by Glenn Close, and no one in the film ever makes any remarks on her being a woman in this position, nor do they even question her capability if she ''were'' to become President. Fast forward to 2021, UsefulNotes/KamalaHarris finally claimed the honor of being the first woman to become Vice President of the United States.

Context YMMV / AirForceOne