Books, Arts & Manners: Flying High, and Higher

WOLFGANG Petersen, best remembered for Das Boot, has come up with another thriller that takes place largely in an enclosed space. What he did with a submarine before, he does with an airplane now. Confinement is good for suspense: it concentrates the excitement in a claustrophobia-inducing situation, making it that much more explosive.

Air Force One begins with a Russo-American night raid on the Kazakhstan headquarters of General Radek, a renegade officer who wants to set himself up as an old-style dictator. (Radek being the standard Eastern European villain’s name in Cold War movies, but never that of a Russian general, I felt forewarned about the screenplay.) The surprise attack is thrillingly staged and shot, especially because you don’t quite know who is doing what to whom. This is followed by a victory banquet in Moscow, where the U.S. President, James Marshall, and the Russian President, Petrov, celebrate their capture of Radek, achieved, I must say, in a violent and bloody manner for which I know of no recent historical precedent.

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John Simon

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WOLFGANG Petersen, best remembered for Das Boot, has come up with another thriller that takes place largely in an enclosed space. What he did with a submarine before, he does with an airplane now. Confinement is good for suspense: it concentrates the excitement in a claustrophobia-inducing situation, making it that much more explosive.

Air Force One begins with a Russo-American night raid on the Kazakhstan headquarters of General Radek, a renegade officer who wants to set himself up as an old-style dictator. (Radek being the standard Eastern European villain’s name in Cold War movies, but never that of a Russian general, I felt forewarned about the screenplay.) The surprise attack is thrillingly staged and shot, especially because you don’t quite know who is doing what to whom. This is followed by a victory banquet in Moscow, where the U.S. President, James Marshall, and the Russian President, Petrov, celebrate their capture of Radek, achieved, I must say, in a violent and bloody manner for which I know of no recent historical precedent.