When my youngest son and I catch the occasional movie it has more to do with the proximity of the theatre and time of the screening than the perceived quality of the film. We haven’t seen a Rob Zombie film we didn’t like, so we are not exactly movie critics.

Last Sunday night the movie that came up on our proximity entertainment calendar in the 8:00 PM slot was Olympus Has Fallen, with Gerald Butler, as Bruce Willis, as Charlton Heston, as Judah Ben Hur saving Jesus from the godless North Koreans, instead of just helping him with that Roman cross. And this Jesus has a high and tight hair cut and wears a three-piece suit. However—and please excuse my objection, I’m a crackpot you know—I have a hard time envisioning a New Age Jesus as the head of the most fearsome military machine ever to wage war under heaven. Excuse me then, if I equate the President of the American Theocracy depicted in this film, as our Ayatollah, rather than our sweet bearded carpenter’s son from Nazareth.

Honestly, I do not want to waste time on this site reviewing current movies, particularly bad ones. But this thing has been bothering me for days now. I will not review this movie, cannot even begin to consider how I would rate it. I will discuss it for what it is, a propaganda film. I was thinking it the entire time, and was relieved when we left the theatre and my son compared it to the World War Two propaganda newsreels he recently studied in school…

Basically Olympus Has Fallen is a patchwork of plot holes, so thick that the casual viewer sees a seamless whole rather than the feckless hole. The cast was stellar; good actors playing bad parts in a worse movie. The production values were excellent. The combat was all entirely phony in a gruesome way. I think this film has set a record for female head shots in a single film. I did have fun watching the Hollywood version of my master’s big house being shredded with minigun fire.

Like the Die Hard franchise, this movie is a series of writing excuses to facilitate a ‘lone good guy versus army of bad guys’ scenario. It was not too painful until the last twenty minutes when the screenwriters finally gave up on making excuses for the U.S. military sitting on the White House lawn and jerking off while one rogue Secret Service agent takes out a platoon of commandos. To me the most telling aspect of the movie was that the only combatant who demonstrated human behavior—as opposed to marching into certain death like a video game automaton—was the Gerald Butler character. This was the most video game influenced combat I have seen, a good choice if you intend to influence the young adult viewer.

On a technical note, the knife fighting was really bad, and for some bizarre reason a significant aspect of the paramilitary combat, waged largely with assault rifles. As in any good action movie we get to see mortal foes surrounded by assault weaponry kickboxing to decide the battle. On a positive note, The President is not depicted as a proficient boxer. If he had gotten to be Martin Luther King and Evander Holyfield I would have walked out.

Olympus Has Fallen is Air Force One on crack! Indeed key scenes are lifted directly from that movie; another macho depiction of a president marketed while a slick-talking president was in office. While Harrison Ford played the American President as Badass, heroizing the office; this depiction of the president falls somewhere between Theodore Roosevelt and Gandhi. The sound track shifts back and forth between corny military tracks, with snare drums figuring prominently, and ‘divine’ music.

When I watched movies as a kid, I could always tell when God or Moses or Jesus was about to bless, serve, or sacrifice for mankind based on the soundtrack. This movie was replete with ‘god music’ for want of a better term. I am not musically inclined and just don’t know how to label or describe these tracks. Taken together with the title I could not imagine a more ham-fisted attempt to deify the office of the presidency.

Head of state as living god has appealed to the ruling classes since the very dawn of history. Let us keep in mind that our ruling class holds power on a monetary basis, and therefore includes the Hollywood elite. The main reason that Christians got in trouble with the Roman state early on was their refusal to acknowledge the divinity of Caesar. If Augustus or Commodus were alive to view this film, and sitting in the White House, they would certainly be pleased at their obvious deification.

Rather than offering a one-through-five star score, let me permit you, the reader, to judge the propaganda value of this release based on the implicit lessons in the film. Keep in mind that the film borrows liberally from 911 imagery and interpretations.

The United States of America is a sacred land, from whence good will and good works is dispensed worldwide, in order to benefit the less fortunate inhabitants of the backwards corners of the globe, particularly those savage Asian corners…

The American Presidency is a sacred institution.

The once mortal everyman currently ruling us from his state of temporary grace is tougher than Andrew Jackson, Wiser than George Washington, better looking than Brad Pitt [almost ladies], as domesticated as Fred McMurray in a 1960s family comedy, and as soulfully possessed of an unerring moral compass as Martin Luther King. This man is God on Earth.

The cabinet level officials who serve the deified president are fearless and self-sacrificing, capable of sustaining brutal torture like some Iroquois warrior of old, spitting in the face of the devil as they gladly suffer for their perfect lord; kind of like Hillary Clinton as a garrison commander in a Last of The Mohicans remake, snarling like a gut-stabbed Viking as she spits up blood...

The U. S. Navy is incapable of protecting the Chesapeake and Potomac approaches to Washington D.C.

The U.S. Air Force is incapable of defending the airspace above Maryland and Virginia, even against propeller powered aircraft, and scrambled fighter jets can be expected to fair no better against a C-130 gunship than against a Klingon Battle Cruiser.

The White House cannot be held against a platoon strength commando force.

The U.S. Military has zero capacity to inflict casualties on invading light infantry forces.

Torture is necessary to combat terrorism.

Protectors of the U.S. Government: police, Secret Service, military are all utterly fearless meat-shields more than willing to walk into machinegun fire if it will buy the American demigod another second.

The U.S. military cannot be trusted to protect Heaven on Earth [Olympus, or its modern version, The White House] from the unstoppable might of terrorist nations such as North Korea, who hold the world in a death-grip, but one step from unleashing a Soviet-worthy nuclear holocaust.

The American Ayatollah can only be preserved to guide us through this endless political night by smartly dressed men with James Bond haircuts, ear-pieces, smallish semi-automatic handguns with distressingly small magazine capacity, and…and…designer sunglasses!

I don’t know about you, but I feel safer and better led already.

James LaFond, 4/12/2013