Die Hard ~ Movies I Never Saw Coming

Die Hard ~ Movies I Never Saw Coming

The year was 1988 when I pushed Die Hard into the VHS machine and watched it swallowed whole and disappear into the movie making magic machine.

The experience of watching Die Hard without the benefit of internet & social media hype was a gift I wish I could give. I will often try to give that very gift to someone by asking them to watch a movie without looking it up or watching a preview.

Maybe we should start a community tag called nopeeking and get each other to watch movies that we loved without checking them out or watching a trailer or reading a review or checking a rotten tomato score.

There are a thousand things I could go on about with Die Hard, and the experience of watching it. Bruce Willis was just raw and great for the role, and the late Alan Rickman set a new bar for villain that makes a lasting impact to this day equalled only, in my opinion, by the incredible Javier Bardem of No Country For Old Men and Skyfall.

Javier’s voice is basically the Canary Islands, Spanish James Earl Jones for me, which @yidneth should be very happy to hear. Where Javier specializes in communicating with his eyes and deep voice, I always felt Alan Rickman’s strength was his verbal pronunciation and inflection in his voice as he said things like, ‘Nice suit, I have three myself.’ What a tremendous loss of talent for us all.

The one thing I remember from the experience of watching Die Hard that stood out above all else was feeling myself literally crawling backwards up the couch I was watching the movie from while John McClane was slowly being hauled out of an upper floor window. The fire hose reel that had saved his life moments before was now an anchor sucking him over the edge of nothingness and a fatal fall to his death.

He dove off of the roof of the building with the fire hose tied around his waist, then shot his way back in through a window and finally breathed his first sigh of relief in an hour and a half of fast paced hollywood blockbuster movie madness just before the fire hose’ winding reel was dislodged by the roof explosion he had just narrowly escaped and was now dangling down the building with John attached to the other end of it.

Was that even a sentence? His slow slide toward the shot out window felt like an inevitability of fate that nothing was going to come easy for John McClane in this nightmare he had happened upon.

Maybe you'll revisit this historic and ground breaking action film and let me know what stood out for you!

In case no one told you today,
You're beautiful
Love,
Bug