A Cinematic History of Destroying America’s Monuments

To say nothing of the rest of the world, American audiences seem to love watching our national landmarks blown to smithereens. Movie after movie, national landmark after national landmark, there seems to be no great national symbol we won’t blow to pieces. In the decades since 1956’s Earth vs. The Flying Saucers treated the landmarks of Washington, D.C., like a demolition-derby checklist, we’ve sicced aliens, mutants, terrorists, and various acts of God on the nation’s capital, Mount Rushmore, and the Statue of Liberty. Consider this a comprehensive catastrophic catalogue.

Your average American-monument-obliterating actioner is not a tale of Goliath laid low. These are consistently, vehemently pro-America movies. With the exception of Jack Nicholson’s optics-obsessed blowhard in Mars Attacks!, Messrs. President are competent, well-spoken, and classically handsome. Sometimes he’s a wisened and self-sacrificing statesman played by Morgan Freeman or Danny Glover. Other times he’s an suave, idealistic, and agreeable man of the people, such as semi-retired fighter pilot Bill Pullman in Independence Day, Middle East peacemonger Jamie Foxx in White House Down, or amateur boxer Aaron Eckhart whose policy victories include weaning the country off foreign oil in Olympus Has Fallen. He usually gets to fire off at least a couple one-liners and, in Jamie Foxx’s case, a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.

These are disaster movies, so the stakes the nation faces are consistently apocalyptic: nuclear war, alien invasion, a new ice age, the cataclysmic pole-shift theory coming true, and so on. Bad weather aside, who or what is responsible for toppling the monuments changes with the times. Post-9/11, terrorists of often vaguely defined motives such as “globalization and fuckin’ Wall Street” and Korean reunification — and that’s just Olympus Has Fallen! — replace extraterrestrials as the bad guys of the moment. With its extended assault on D.C., Alex Garland’s Civil War marks the logical transition of the subgenre from the war-on-terror years to the domestic unease of the post-2016 political climate.

The death-to-American-monuments canon has its own set of tropes — a reference to the burning of the White House by the British during the War of 1812 and the presidential bunker as crucial setting — and occasionally some surface-level class critique (2012) or moralizing about global warming (The Day After Tomorrow) between set pieces. Roland Emmerich emerges as the undisputed master of the form here, as well as the proudest American ever produced by the German nation. In the tour scene of White House Down he posits the existence of an extended Emmerich-verse, with the guide referring to the Presidential Residence as the section of the White House “that got blown up in Independence Day.”

Even with the darker turn the subgenre has taken under Garland, nothing gets those patriotic juices flowing like taking a chunk out of our built mythology. It’s high drama! In other words, why blow up just any house when you can blow up the White House? And make the president fight his way out?!

Methods used: Alien death ray, tsunami, Magneto, bombs

The White House is a common enough target that it’s best to draw a distinction between total annihilation versus the times it technically survives somewhat intact. In Independence Day, nuking it wholesale and from above with an alien death ray gave us one of the most iconic set pieces in action cinema. Years after Emmerich’s UFO destructo-beams, Magneto cores it like a peach by pulling the steel-walled presidential bunker out of its center in X-Men: Days of Future Past. A tsunami carrying the USS John F. Kennedy scrapes it right off the lawn in 2012. And while Olympus Has Fallen technically keeps the building still standing, director Antoine Fuqua does make a valiant attempt by blowing the façade off with an RPG and ramming a helicopter right into the roof.

Methods used: Tough-guy behavior, alien lasers, Nightcrawler, Gerard Butler vs. gravity

Interior damage to the White House ranges from the targeted — the White House Down terrorist ramming the butt of his rifle into a “Ming-dynasty 16th-century vase that was a gift from Queen Elizabeth II!” — to the more generalized. Nightcrawler does a bit of cosmetic damage to the Oval Office in the opening set piece of X2. Gerard Butler falls through the ceiling of the Lincoln Bedroom to avoid being julienned by helicopter blades in Olympus Has Fallen. (This is after he ends a round of hand-to-hand combat in the Oval Office by pulverizing his opponent’s skull with a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln.) But the funniest instance of fatal décor-based violence happens in Mars Attacks!, in which First Lady Glenn Close is flattened by, and I quote, “the Nancy Reagan chandelier!”

Cause of death: Downed helicopters, high-speed car chase, Channing Tatum avoiding designated walkways

Despite being essentially the same divorced-dad movie with different cool-guy Obama stand-in presidents, White House Down tears up the pristinely landscaped White House lawn with far more conviction than Olympus Has Fallen. Whereas Olympus Has Fallen downs a couple military helicopters into its shrubbery, White House Down pulls off a full-throttle car chase ’round the South Lawn fountain. (Neither the tennis court nor the basketball court survive.) A few scenes later, Channing Tatum traipses right through the Rose Garden on his way to prevent James Woods from bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. Good news for global order, bad news for the gardeners.

Methods used: Alien death ray, regular bombs

The centerpiece of the U.S. Capitol is its 287-foot cast-iron dome, designed by architect Thomas U. Walter in 1854 to replace the much shorter copper original, which, to be honest, looked kind of stupid. This dome is so stately, so iconic, and so enormous that it just demands to get popped like a balloon whenever it appears in a disaster movie. It’s also a popular companion to a White House assault, swallowed by the D.C. blast in Independence Day and bombed as a prelude in White House Down. It also fake-implodes in Live Free or Die Hard to the tune of “America the Beautiful,” which is such a baffling and unsatisfying choice that someone uploaded a fan edit to YouTube called “Capitol Building Scene from Die Hard 4, but it actually Explodes.” Now we’re talking.

Methods used: Tim Burton’s naked hubris, Megatron, Mother Earth

I know we all agreed to memory hole Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake forever, but is there any more hilariously egregious defacement of the Lincoln Memorial than that movie’s grand finale? In an admittedly well-intentioned gesture to the original’s climactic Statue of Liberty reveal, Mark Wahlberg crash lands his spaceship into the Lincoln Memorial’s steps and climbs the stairs to discover that the statue of the 16th (human) president has been replaced by — wait for it — Ape Lincoln! Nothing else compares, not Megatron sitting on top of the statue after blasting it in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, nor Logan and Jessica finding the memorial reclaimed by nature after escaping their underground pleasure dome in Logan’s Run. Civil War also keeps it simple, taking a rocket launcher to those Doric columns and letting physics do the rest.

Methods used: Cataclysmic pole shift, plane wing, regular aliens, aliens masquerading as video-game characters

There’s something rather satisfying about watching the 555-foot-tall obelisk of the Washington Memorial get folded like a deck chair by an earthquake (2012), clotheslined by a crashing plane (Olympus Has Fallen), or slashed at the ankles by a UFO laser and then tipped onto a Boy Scout troop (Mars Attacks!). During the attack on Washington in Pixels, a fleet of video-gamified aliens gnaw at it like it’s corn on the cob. Just like the Capitol dome simply must ex- or implode by virtue of its shape, so too must the Washington Monument get snapped like a glow stick or tipped on its side. Really a missed opportunity by Spider-Man: Homecoming, I’d say, which limits the climactic damage to one of the windows and the elevator inside.

Methods used: Tsunami, ice storm, melted ice caps, alien decapitation, Two Face’s subpar piloting skills, nuclear bomb

Although the most iconic cinematic destruction of Lady Liberty happens off-camera in the original Planet of the Apes, she has perhaps more catastrophic cameos than any other monument wrapped up in national mythology. Surrounded by water on all sides, she’s drowned by no fewer than three tsunamis: the first in 1933’s Deluge, then by one set off by meteor blast in 1987’s Deep Impact, then by malignantly melted ice caps in 2001’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Roland Emmerich, to his credit, switches it up by flash freezing her like one of those microwavable Green Giant cheddar-broccoli packs in The Day After Tomorrow. In Cloverfield, she becomes the Marie Antoinette of American monuments, with the monster lopping her head off and yeeting it into Lower Manhattan. She takes a helicopter to the dome in Batman Forever, and an inexplicably white model of her appears in the 1961 Japanese tokusatsu film The Last War, nuked alongside the rest of New York City. Poor girl.

Causes of death: Missiles, Martian lasers, Krypton lasers, cream pies

The line between destruction and creative remodeling is thin when it comes to Mount Rushmore. The Mars Attacks! aliens remake it in their own image using lasers, as does General Zod in Superman II. (Only Zod does indeed torpedo Lincoln, as there are four presidents but only three Krypton villains.) For the 1997 direct-to-video and not-not-kick-ass actioner The Peacekeeper, Dolph Lundgren fails to stop terrorists from torpedoing the monument, or at least the kind of model you make of Mount Rushmore when you’re visibly stretching the very last cent of the budget. And then there’s Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which has the funniest and foulest for-the-parents joke of all: Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Washington take direct hits from gigantic cream pies, whereas Lincoln takes his to the historically accurate back of the head.