Movie Review: Escape from New York (1981)

I really had no expectations going into this one. Being early in my John Carpenter journey I just knew it was going to be a lot of darkness of night and creative special effects to set the mood.

But what stuck with me most wasn’t the action or the ambiance, it was watching a bunch of people who have no business trusting each other end up working together anyway. Snake is a criminal, though we never actually find out what he did. He ends up helping the prison population and the country at large, teaming up with people inside Manhattan who all have their own backstories and motivations. Cops and criminals, men and women, black and white, all of it. Not everyone survives, which caught me off guard a little, but I’ve noticed I actually prefer that over the modern happy ending default.

I laughed a little the first time someone said his name. Snake Plissken. It’s such an action movie name, which I think is the point, and this was back when you could just name your badass lead “Snake” and nobody blinked. I’d never heard the name Plissken before either, so it felt random, even though I guess it wasn’t, Carpenter apparently named him after someone from his own childhood. I liked how little we get about who Snake actually is. Everyone in the movie seems to know him on sight, like he’s either a fallen hero or some kind of kingpin every criminal and cop is aware of, and the movie never bothers explaining which. Another case of less being more.

The whole concept of walling off Manhattan and turning it into a prison messed with my head in a good way. Just the logistics of shutting down one of the biggest, busiest cities on earth and leaving people to survive in it however they can, that’s a wild thought experiment on its own. The movie doesn’t spend much time explaining any of it, so I filled in the gaps myself, picturing what all the landmarks and buildings would look like abandoned and gone to rot.

I kept trying to figure out what Carpenter was actually saying with it. Knowing how he feels about social commentary stuff, I was looking for a message about crime, police, for profit prisons, or people being overpunished and left to rot by a system that doesn’t care. But the cops aren’t painted as all good or all bad, and the criminals aren’t either, so I think that ambiguity was actually the point, that there wasn’t a clean message being made about who’s right and who’s wrong. I think the point was closer to what stuck with me most, that people from every background can end up on the same side when it counts.

One thing that threw me was how the president’s plane crash gets handled. One second the plan is going down, next second there’s just wreckage and an empty pod where he’d already been taken. No sound, no chaos, nothing to sell the moment. I get the budget wasn’t there for a real crash, but I was surprised there wasn’t more effort to fake the scale of it. Another example of letting the mind write the story for you, but I do think it would have helped to convey some of the chaos.

Originally posted on Letterboxd.