Fuqua: Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Olympus Has Fallen belongs to the same moment as Roland Emmerich’s White House Down. Both are big-budget blockbusters about an attack on the White House – and for a short while, Olympus Has Fallen could be mistaken for an Emmerich vehicle in its peculiar flair for choreographing catastrophe. In particular, the opening set piece, in which a group of North Korean terrorists takes over the White House, is operatically plausible, capturing the full horror that ensues when “the most protected house on Earth has fallen,” and “a self-contained, total isolation system is infiltrated.” The thing is, the film doesn’t seem to bounce back from that horror with quite the same aplomb as, say, a classic 80s or 90s action thriller, meaning that the exquisite spatial cognition that Fuqua brings to bear on his treatment of the exterior of the White House doesn’t really translate into the interior, even or especially as FBI agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) sets out to traverse every space between the walls and the bunker where the President (Aaron Eckhart) is being held by the terrorists. This would seem to cry out for a sharp, intricate gradation of space and time, but Fuqua conspicuously fails to take that cue, dissolving the White House to a series of dark rooms – just another house, really – and scaling the action down to a home invasion drama. Even the two most interesting reticulations of the White House – its drains and tunnels – are dealt with in a fairly peremptory manner (earlier action films would have positively relished them), and repeatedly dismissed as outdated fixtures, largely irrelevant to what’s taking place now. That makes for quite a disarming, disorienting experience, in which the White House becomes positively anamorphic – as soon as you walk inside, the walls dissolve, like a castle built on sand. And in the absence of any tight, hierarchical spatial discrimination, the final victory feels quite unconvincing – after all, what else defines the President, in most action films, other than his spatial priority, his identification with the most sequestered or privileged spaces in a world of set pieces? 

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