Escape from New York Remastered (Dir John Carpenter, 1h 33 m)

 
In essence, Escape from New York is the story of a rescue mission-the President's plane has crashed in a prisonified New York, he's carrying a tape vital to a global meetings in the middle of a World War, and convict Snake is the only person brave,crazy, or good enough to rescue him from the forces that war inside the wall. But, peel back the simple premise, and one is able to regard the first outing of the now iconic Snake Pliskin (Kurt Russell, in the film that would cement his move from teen idol to action star), as not just the first work in the nascent cyberpunk genre-it would go on to have a huge impact upon the godfather of the genre, William Gibson, not to mention the aping of Pilskin in Hideo Kojima's wildly popular Metal Gear series, which even features its protagonist use the name Pliskin as an alter-ego-but also a film that defies genre expeditions, nimbly walking the line between science fiction, horror, and action, in a way only John Carpenter can. Even among his varied oeuvre, Escape from New York is among the highlights.

It is fair to say, that, despite excellent turns from the rest of the supporting cast, Escape is Kurt Russell's film. From his first appearance, marched off a bus and into the processing zone of the maximum security prison that now comprises all of the Island of Manhattan, to his slow, limping, but triumphant exit at the end of the film, Russell owns this movie. It seems surprising, even in early scenes where his anti-authoritarian world view and healthy disrespect for authority shine through against the Comissioner-an excellent turn by eternal villain, Lee van Cleef, that there were fears that his previous roles in Disney comedies would undermine the film. He oozes cool, from the eyepatch and mullet look complete with leather jacket that countless films and serial have tried to copy to mixed effects, to the way he carries himself through the film, answering truly to no-one but himself.

There is, however, a menace to Russell's performance-a gun is rarely out of his hand, and his self preservation at the cost of others is shown early on when escaping from some of New York's "crazies" who claim, and presumably eat, a young woman who initially seems set up to be Snake's love interest, whilst later in the film, his ruthlessness and dangerousness can be seen in satisfyingly brutal scenes where he works through much of the gang of villain The Duke (Isaac Hayes), and in his decisive action at the very end of the film, destroying a vital item as he walks away into freedom.

Throughout the film, thus, Snake is a mixture of truly menacing, and effortlessly cool, dispatching people at will, but at points once he meets up with former colleague Brain (Harry Dean Stanton, whose crumbled, tired look epitomises the look of the shattered New York around him), there is a threatening atmosphere to him, forcing others to divulge things that put them in danger, and cooly threatening Brain and his "squeeze", Maggie with a gun at multiple points.

Snake, as a character, is undoubtedly cut from the same cloth as Eastwood's Man with No Name, but it is a man made desperate, tricked by his government to rescuing the President, after his jet crashes in New York, and given, via exploding pellets that will kill him, a very real and very deadly deadline to complete the job by. As Russell himself notes about the character, all that snake cares about is "the next 60 seconds. Living for exactly that next minute is all there is."

And it is Snake's brevity, his pared to the bone backstory, and the sharp humour that runs through his dialogue that appear throughout the film. The hijacking and plane crash that land the President of the United States (Donald Pleasence) as a prisoner of the Duke are in media res when the film cuts to them, Pliskin's bank raid, and his relationship with Brain are only briefly touched on enough for the audience to understand what is going on, and how it relates immediately to Snake getting the president and getting out. There is a clear, undeniable, lineage between this film and the lean Roadrunner-ish efficiency of George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road-what is shown is what needs to be shown-anything else is left on the cutting room floor, or not filmed at all.

This efficiency of story and character is seen in the supporting cast, from Hayes' mixture of ghetto and 18th century class, and his see-sawing between sadistic figure who tortures the president with a gun, and tragic figure, gunned down by a vengeful President, to the brilliantly bizarre performance of Frank Doubleday as the Duke's righthand man, Romero, a Puck-ish figure with a mohawk, and a crazed, off-kilter worldview. Yet, against, this, Carpenter places Cabbie, the New Yorker writ large, and from him, a sense of humour, pathos, and something resembling the continuing humanity of New York, despite what its government has done to it, and it is notable that this, of the small gaggle of followers that are slowly picked off by the Duke, Cabbie is the one that Snake appears to mourn most.

But as important as the characters is the look and feel, and sound of New York, from the jawdropping opening shots of a darkened Manhattan-a matte painting by one James Cameron-emerging over a truly colossal wall, to Carpenter-as typical, performing dual roles as the film's composer-'s synth heavy score, to the dilapidated feel of New York, created by shooting in rough areas of a real, crime-ridden city, cutting the power across it, and filming almost entirely at night, thus creating something that is searingly real. With its mix of futuristic graphics and landscapes-including 3D computer graphics created by shooting a glow-in-the-dark taped model of Manhattan in the dark-and quasi-feudal iconography, most notably in the medieval court of the Duke, even 40 years on there is something stunningly fresh about it, even if 1997 lies further in the past than it did for Carpenter in the future.

Escape from New York is, in fact, still a film that seems remarkably fresh for its age, from Pliskin's pure damn coolness to Carpenter's score that echoes, in places, in film scores today, to his perfect blend of past and future, in feudal and totalitarian, in the figures of the Duke and the Presidents, power used in much the same way in different places. It is no surprise that the impact of Escape from New York continues to this day when it is a film whose very tone and subject remains startlingly relevant.

Rating: Must See.