(Editor’s note: Please welcome Richard as guest writer.) 

(Additional note: Not actually being an editor, I simply included all three of Richard’s pieces on this film, without making him incorporate them. He is busy with a ‘job’ or ‘family’ or something.)

Everything you need to know about Olympus Has Fallen is contained in the first paragraph of a review I accidentally read about it in a serious newspaper. The critic referred to it as a return to the simplistic nineties action thriller tropes. Only get this; he was acting as if that was bad thing.

This is not the place for a detailed treatise on the golden age of action cinema (actually it is, but I’ll refrain) so let me say in summary only this: an enormous number of highly watchable films were produced in the years 1990 – 2000. I wouldn’t make high-falluting claims for their art, any more than I would propose a cheeseburger joint for a Michelin star.

They’ve started selling tickets at the popcorn counter. What do all the commercials pay for anyway?

But here’s the thing: I like cheeseburgers. And they don’t make enough of them any more. At some point – let’s say between Matrix and Matrix 2 – they forgot how to do it simple and good. Blame CGI, TV, the internets, whatever, the fire went out and the snappy, quality junk stopped getting made. There were and are exceptions of course, but they seem to these jaded eyes to be precious few and far between. And that’s why I am crying out for a piece of shit like this one: a stupid, brilliant waste of time.

There is only one other observation about Olympus that I would bother to make (like writing about cheeseburger, there is not much to be gained or imparted beyond ‘mmmmmm cheeseburger’) and it is this: for years, video games have had a deleterious effect on films, and vice versae, as each slavishly ape the other and forget the virtues of their own mediums.

OHF is a post C of D product, and all the better for it. It borrows from the language of gaming to create tension and suspense in modes familiar from First Person Shooters, sniping levels, stealth attacks, and more. How it does this without coming on like a shitty cutscene I don’t know, but I can report that the overall effect was to make me reach for the crouch button (). That’s a good thing.

To give the reader the full experience, Richard gives us the story from both perspectives. No one ever said we weren’t Rashomon.

Well, that one guy did.

From the archives of one of our henchmen:

And, since movies are simply depictions of actual events, let’s go behind the scenes at the security planning meeting that led to the events of the film. Sorry. Of the reality.