Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Strategic Command (1997) is the most ridiculous rip off ever. The Imdb comment states it's a rip off of Air Force One and Executive Decision, which I haven't seen. What I have seen, one of the most watchable movies ever (you can watch it once a month, it doesn't get old), is The Rock (1996). Let's see if I can remember all the matching plot points:

  • renegade soldiers break into a facility and steal chemical weapons
  • one soldier drops one and is sealed in the chamber to his doom
  • a chemical expert is dispached with U.S. soldiers to neutralize the threat
  • the soldiers resent being accompanied by an amateur and the one assaigned to watch him gives him a talking to about it
  • his fiance/wife, who has just become pregnant, is in harm's way
  • a city in California is being held hostage in return for exactly $100,000,000
  • only two good guys, the chemical expert and one soldier, make it to the final battle
  • the chemical expert defeats the bad guy by smearing him with the chemical, which eats his lungs from the inside
  • the expert then has to inject himself in the spine with the anditode (i guess in the rock it's in the heart, so that's actually a big difference)

5 comments:

Trashcan said...

I'm guessing that if strategic command came out 1 year before the Rock, then it was already in production before the Rock came out. And airforce one came out the same year in 97, with executive decision also coming out in 96. I think this is more of the case where armeggedon and deep impact came out in the same year. or elizebeth and shakespeare in love came out in the same year, etc. i don't know exactly why that happens, but i would guess someone goes around trying to sell an idea eventually someone buys it, but in the mean time a bunch of other people have heard about it and done their own versions. Still a rip of in some sense, but not the same as seeing a movie and then writing a movie that's basically the same.

Anonymous said...

ok, so it's not letting my sign in on this computer, perhaps i forgot my name or password. but yeah, i hate that, like when twister and that other tornado movie came out the same summer, and the storm and that other movie about a hurricane. notice i don't even remember the names of the sucky version. that's why i only go to artsy movies. and i really wanna see the new bob dylan movie. but i bet it won't be in lietuva till enxt summer, when it will be gone in the states. arai, do you ahve a really big flash drive>?!>? that i can store lots of movies on???

Aras said...

who the deuce are you? no i don't have a really big flash drive: where would i keep it, in my diaper?!

Jim Gust said...

Here's another one for you. "Men in Black" was totally ripped off from John Sayles' "The Brother from Another Planet."

Aras said...

Seems like everything's a copy of something: the fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached!

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