Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


When the Cold War melted, the Pentagon wasn’t the only one scrambling to find a credible threat. Hollywood, which had long gorged itself on Red-fear films, also needed a new cash cow. The terrorist peril may have been hatched by our military brass, but — as this survey of ’90s blockbusters attests — DreamWorks, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox were only too eager to handle the propaganda. —Tim Dickinson

True Lies
James Cameron. 144 minutes. 20th Century Fox, 1994.
The threat: Arab terrorists of the “Crimson Jihad” nab four Kazakhstani warheads and promise to nuke Miami unless the U.S. withdraws from the Persian Gulf.
The foil: Secret agent Schwarzenegger
The good stuff: “We’re going to catch some terrorists. We’re going to beat the crap out of them. You’re going to feel a lot better.”
Box office: $146 million

The Rock
Michael Bay. 135 minutes. Buena Vista, 1996.
The threat: Traitorous Marines capture Alcatraz and threaten to shower San Francisco with implausibly deadly VX gas.
The hype: “One teaspoon of this shit … will kill every living organism within an eight-block radius!”
The foil: FBI agent Nicholas Cage teams with former jailbird Sean Connery to break into the Rock, neutralize the rockets, and force-feed VX to the last of the mercenary turncoats.
Box office: $134 million

Face/Off
John Woo. 138 minutes. Paramount, 1997.
The threat: Terrorist Nicholas Cage hides a nerve-gas bomb somewhere in Los Angeles and rasps: “I’m about to unleash the biblical plague that ‘HELL’-A deserves!”
The twist: Cage gets offed during an FBI sting, and special agent John Travolta must steal his face — literally — to go undercover and locate the bomb. But Cage miraculously recovers and dons Travolta’s mug. The two-faced terrorist then disarms his own bomb and infiltrates the highest ranks of the FBI.
The foil: Cage-faced Travolta returns from the underworld to unleash his own brand of terror on Travolta-faced Cage.
Box office: $112 million

Die Hard With a Vengeance
John McTiernan. 131 minutes. 20th Century Fox, 1995.
The threat: Riddling mastermind Jeremy Irons plants a bomb in a Manhattan elementary school.
The twist: The bomb is only a ruse. Irons — not unlike the Pentagon — exploits the terrorist canard to steal the nation’s gold reserves.
The foil: Detective Bruce Willis and Good Samaritan Samuel L. Jackson blow up Irons and save the world economy.
Box office: $100 million

The Peacemaker
Mimi Leder. 123 minutes. DreamWorks, 1998.
The threat: A “Muslim-Croat-Serb,” toting a stolen Russian warhead in his backpack, wants to blow up the United Nations.
The foil: Acting chair of the Nuclear Smuggling Group, Nicole Kidman, teams with Lt. Colonel George Clooney to hunt down the psychopathic Yugoslav on the streets of New York.
The good stuff:“God, I miss the Cold War.”
Box office: $41 million

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate