Air Force One

Air Force One is a riveting film that portrays the Presidency in the typical action movie of the 1990's. The film does not do very well on the Representation Test, scoring a 4 our of a potential 24 points. For a movie that features the President of the United States, who is supposed to not discriminate against anybody under any circumstances, has an extremely low presence of other races throughout. The women featured in the film aren't very significant characters, with the most significant being the First Lady, who has a very watered down role since the film is an action movie. The film revolves around Harrison Ford's character simply because he's the most powerful man in the free world. And, being the 1990's where action movies had a male protagonist who fought the male antagonist and saved the female in distress to ride off in the sunset. This film almost exactly follows this template, with Harrison Ford and the crew on the plane defeating the terrorists that took over the plane, all while saving his wife and daughter and making it back safely. Also, there were two African-American actors in the entire film, neither of which played a remotely significant role.

The film didn't exactly align with any racial stereotypes, but rather the director and producers had more or less a discriminatory policy of who was going to act in the film. The lack of African-American presence is simply more of a casting decision more than any message the film itself was trying to send. I believe that there weren't many roles for women or for African-Americans to play in this film to begin with. The only stereotype that the film followed was that the President has always been white and most politicians are white, wealthy individuals with families.

Overall, I don't believe that the Representation Test is a good way to judge movies of how they include everyone simply because movies have their own respective plot line, and if it's a historical movie or one that follows pop culture, than that film will follow certain stereotypes that get people to the theaters. The Representation Test only works for movies that have a specific agenda to send a message about a social or racial problem within our society, and any movie that doesn't have this sort of agenda almost automatically receives a poor score, which is why this test is very flawed. In conclusion, Air Force One was a film that lined up with the pop culture of the 1990's, and didn't have an agenda of highlighting a certain social issue, and therefore received a poor score on the Representation test.