Review of Olympus Has Fallen (2013) by Alexproductions — 06 Sep 2013

Wow. After seeing both White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, I can confidently say that though the idea is the same of terrorists taking over the Whitehouse, both directors (Roland Emmerich and Antoine Fuqua) made the movies extremely different.

The movie starts by showing President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) and his family at Camp David. Within the first five minutes or so in the movie we can clearly tell that Benjamin and Mike Banning (Gerard Butler, Head of Secret Service) are great friends in and out of work. On the way back from the retreat it is snowing very badly in basically blizzard type weather. Out of nowhere we see a big tree hit the President's Escalade and the van starts to swerve off the road. As all of the Secret Service are trying to pull the car back onto the road, they are able to get the president out, but not his wife gruesomely passes away. Mike takes full credit of this and resigns from his job. Almost two years later he decides to reapply for a job in the Secret Service. He is sitting at his desk when he sees an unknown jet shoot down two American jets and begin open firing on civilians and soon, the White House. Meanwhile President Asher is meeting with Prime Minister Lee (Keong Sim) and aside him, Kang Yeonsak (Rick Yune) who are at the White House during the attack. Kindly Mr. Asher takes them to the bunker along with McMillan, Rodriguez, and others. From there on, a turn of rather predictable events occur such as Koreans turning on Americans and much more.

I thought that from there forward, Olympus Has Fallen was extremely gory which in my opinion was not necessary at all. Seeing the guts inside one of the hostage’s neck was not necessary to cause the same audience reaction of fear.

Overall I think that Faqua picked a great cast of actors and actresses and they played their roles at the best of their ability. I honestly do not think that White House Down was better than Olympus Has Fallen or vice versa. I do recommend you see this movie though just go into it with a little bit of caution because there are times where I cringed at the gory scenes.

The deciding factor of which movie the audience would rather see though basically is would you rather see a comedy action movie (White House Down) or an action thriller (Olympus Has Fallen).