Whereas it is laborious to think about anybody aside from Harrison Ford enjoying an icon like Indiana Jones, the plot and characters of “Air Pressure One” have a extra paint-by-numbers high quality to them. It is simpler to see how Kevin Costner might have stepped in and made that film his personal. With movies like “Area of Desires” and “Dances with Wolves” — the latter of which received him two Academy Awards for Greatest Director and Greatest Image — Costner had already cultivated an all-American picture, and although he wasn’t fairly as well-known as Ford for being an motion hero, producers may need leveraged each these sides of him to make President James Marshall a extra unassuming but no much less flag-waving protagonist.
As an alternative of the German terrorist Hans Gruber, performed by Alan Rickman in “Die Onerous,” it is Gary Oldman’s Russian baddie, Egor Korshunov, who serves as the primary antagonist for President Marshall in “Air Pressure One.” Whereas pitting Costner in opposition to a inventory villain like this might have labored, by the mid-to-late Nineties, he was getting into a little bit of a profession hunch. On the time of its launch in 1995, Costner’s “Waterworld” was the costliest film ever made, and it didn’t recoup its full manufacturing and advertising and marketing price range on the field workplace, solely later changing into worthwhile on residence media.
What’s attention-grabbing is that Costner seems to have handed up “Air Pressure One” in order that he might make “The Postman,” which outright bombed on the field workplace. Ford, in the meantime, had gotten his pilot’s license in actual life in 1996, so he was prepared for the air, each on and offscreen. A long time later, each Costner and Ford would have a spot within the TV identical lineage as members of the Dutton household in “Yellowstone” and “1923.”
