The Peacemaker

 

A Gamer’s View of the Movies

by Donald J. Bingle

The Peacemaker

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. People make bad spies. That observation, learned from many years of watching player characters doing absolutely inexplicable—no, make that outright stupid—things during Top Secret and other spy RPG rounds, is unfortunately applicable to The Peacemaker, the film I am reviewing this month.

The Peacemaker is Dreamwork SKG’s first movie after raising more than a billion dollars in an all out assault on Disney and the major motion picture studios. You would think that with all that cash they would have bothered to spend some on scriptwriting, but, if they did, it sure doesn’t show. The movie features George Clooney as a military man who does what needs to be done to keep the world safe and Nicole Kidman as a naïve academic thrust into leading the U.S. response to nuclear terrorism. George is fine, if predictable. Nicole is forgettable. What makes the movie bad—and it is bad (okay, not so bad as the absolutely atrocious Mission Impossible, but then few things are)—from a gamer’s point of view is its utter disrespect for the hard science of how things work and its elastic concept of time.

The hard science problems relate both to military technology of a conventional sort and to nuclear science. In this movie we are treated to: military satellites that are apparently geosynchronous enough to give a steady shot live video feed which pans and zooms in for close-ups, but which moves enough that it will be out of range "in an hour and forty-five minutes"; attack helicopters without any rocketry capable of taking out a truck; and a hovering helicopter that can manage to go from no load on a dangling cable to several thousand pounds without revving its motors or dipping. On the nuclear side, we are treated to: nuclear weaponry which leaks radiation so badly as to be detectable from a distance by DOE helicopters, but which nobody worries is irradiating anyone; someone attempting to pry a piece of the plutonium outer shell (your basic "Fat Boy" nuclear bomb design) off by pounding on a pen knife blade with the butt of a gun (a bullet would give more force, but how about just cutting the detonating wires?); terrorists who insist on carrying the nuke through heavy security to the precise location they want to nuke when they could vaporize the place from their hotel room blocks away; and a supposed nuclear scientist who insists on moving the several kiloton bomb from one room to another when it is less than 3 minutes from exploding because the other (outside, windowed) room will "contain the radiation better". Of course, all of this is in the same movie where a ramp is dropped between the cars of two trains moving on parallel tracks without a smidgen of sway or shift as the trains trundle along and where the military raids the hotel room of the suspected terrorist without bothering to leave anyone in the lobby to see if he leaves or tries to escape.

Time management? Hardly. Russian aircraft batteries apparently can only track slow-moving helicopters (even ones which are broadcasting to them by radio) for a few seconds. E-mailing secret documents to someone’s AOL account takes significantly less time than merely signing on to AOL really does. More importantly, the final countdown starts at ten minutes and reappears with almost 3 minutes still left after a twenty minute series of scenes in which the bad guy leaves his hotel, catches a cab, gets stuck in traffic, walks eight blocks, engages in a fire-fight, says goodbye to his wounded comrade, goes to church, prays, hides, gets found, and gives the story of his life and his reasons for doing what he is about to do. Although George Clooney’s character spent most of the prior twenty minutes screaming at snipers (who appear and position themselves on the rooftops of half of the lower east side in the amount of time East Berlin police take to show up in a poorly run Top Secret module (i.e., instantaneously)) to "take the shot" as the bad guys moves in and out of crowds of innocent families, he stands and listens forever as the bad guy rambles on and on about his motives, his wife, his daughter, the nature of war and peace, etc. and never does shoot the guy (he doesn’t even bother to call in the bomb squad ‘til the speechifying is over, which means the squad doesn’t have time to get there). I never wanted a "save from boxed text" so much in all my life. Besides, any gamer worth his salt playing the bad guy would have rigged the timing device so that the nuke was triggered with six minutes to go—thwarting last minute disarming by would-be heroes. (By the way, Sledge Hammer did this whole nuclear bomb disarming bit better in its last episode years ago—the hero attempts to disarm, you hear an "Ooops", and a mushroom cloud appears.)

And what about these bad guys? Who commits suicide when they have less than 3 minutes to go before their backpack vaporizes half of New York? Who gets all weepy when their accomplice is shot when he was about to be vaporized in their suicide run anyway? I spent most of the movie just shaking my head in sad amazement.

Not to say there aren’t a few good points. There are a few nice action scenes—the soldiers with night vision scopes and laser sights taking over the second train is cool visually, although I kept wondering why these tall Jawas wanted nuclear weapons. George Clooney’s character also does a good job of ad- libbing when an attempt to buy information about Russian trucking goes awry (who says good guys don’t use violence and torture?), but why he had Nicole Kidman’s character along is not immediately obvious. Of course, just a bit later, this same George Clooney character rolls down a bullet-proof window during a car chase, then fails to roll up the window when another car pulls alongside and starts shooting at him. On the other hand, Nicole Kidman’s character spends the entire chase putting on her seatbelt, apparently repeatedly and mostly when the car is in reverse.

Bad movie. Don’t bother.