Escape From New
York – Special Edition
Picture:
B- Sound: B Extras: B Film: B
When it
comes to the great Science Fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s, one of the
ways the best ones are marginalized and trashed is to say that either their special
effects are poor or that “things did not land up that way” and go on to explain
that everything is good today. At worst,
it is for political reasons to keep you a vegetable, leaving others as either
outright ignorant or (in the fewest cases) just plain naïve. One film that was shot in the late 1970s and
continues to defy that illogic is John Carpenter’s Escape From New York (1981), issued for the second time on DVD by
MGM.
This
version is a double set and actually is an improvement over the sad, basic DVD
MGM first issued a few years ago. The
film takes place in a 1997 when crime and the United States has gone into such
decline, that it has become a semi-Fascist and militarized world and the Cold
War is still going on. Manhattan Island has been abandoned by the wealthy
and the corporations, and converted into a prison where once you go in, you are
there for life. The President (Donald
Pleasance) becomes the target of a kidnapping, which is complicated when Air
Force One wrecks into a building and the escape pod he enters (reminiscent of
Blofeld in the James Bond films) is intercepted by domestic terrorists who want
to bring down the government.
The Duke
of New York (Isaac Hayes) runs the prison town and it is a stronghold for the
worst kind of criminals the country has to offer. A top advisor (Lee Van Cleef) enters with his
force, but is soon repelled with convincing evidence of the capture and
still-alive probability of the President, so he decides to gamble. Instead of sending a paramilitary squad in
later outright, he decides to try to manipulate and deal with a fallen military
hero and lifetime Federal prisoner Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, in a
breakthrough performance), who has not been dumped in New York. Now when he goes in, it will be to save the
President in exchange for his bank robbery prison sentence being dropped. The uneasy deal has all kinds of catches, but
Snake soon finds himself in the rotten core of what was once The Big Apple and
the fun begins.
Adrienne
Barbeau, Ernest Borgnine, and Harry Dean Stanton join of very good cast of
lesser knows in a film that is very well cast.
Along with Assault On Precinct 13,
Halloween, the remake of The Thing, and the always underrated They Live, this is among Carpenter’s
strongest works. In its time, it did
decent business and though the connections with Spaghetti Westerns may be
sometimes problematic (at the time, they were not that long ago); it is a film that constantly moves and delivers
interesting moments to its audience.
Despite the age of the cars and some visual effects, the film holds up
very well and has actually appreciated in value. It has always been too short for me and some
missed opportunities here that will never be realized and some that did not
surface in the awful sequel, also hurt the film. It had a vision of the future, and sadly,
some of it came all too true, even if not exactly as the film had imagined.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 Panavision scope image is still on the soft
side, not always showing off cinematographer Dean Cundey’s camerawork to best
advantage. The visual effects were not
always as good as bigger films form the same year (Peter Hyams’ underrated Outland, the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, or the Indiana
Jones debut film Raiders Of The Lost Ark),
but they hold up well because much effort was made to push what they had and
this would not be the case if we were talking digital effects on a mega-budget
film from a few years ago. It is ironic
that the computer effects that were not done on any PC look solid. Color is consistent, but the larger your
screen, the more problematic the transfer.
This is supposed to be a new High-Definition transfer, but it does not
always look like it. The look of the
film is great, but I do miss the original Avco Embassy logo and the company
itself.
The Dolby
Digital 5.1 AC-3 remix fares better, so much so that it is better than the DVDs
for the other films noted form the same year.
The Outland DVD is a total
disaster, For Your Eyes Only a bit
harsher and lower sounding, and Raiders
Of The Lost Ark (reviewed elsewhere on this site under the Indiana Jones Collection) is remixed
awkwardly. The first DVD of Escape From New York offered a
recycling of the old LaserDisc PCM CD Stereo with Pro Logic surrounds. The new mix is smoother, has a better
soundstage, offers effective .1 LFE subwoofer sound for the first time ever,
and is one of the best remixes of an older early Dolby A-type analog theatrical
release we’ve encountered yet. That
makes the absence of DTS all the sadder, but this Dolby mix has a fullness and
balance many recent theatrical releases currently DVDs with Dolby 5.1 only
soundtracks lack. You can still tell the
age of the film’s sound and at times, the mix shows some monophonic origins of
certain sound effects and on-location recording. DTS would not have made that any better or
worse, though it would have definitely made the score by Carpenter (et al)
fuller.
The
extras include a mini-comic book where you would usually find a booklet
covering the film, which is in color and a nice twist. It plugs the new Snake Plissken Chronicles series of comics and plugs a new video
game as well in a paper slip inside the comic.
DVD 1 has two fine, previously recorded commentary tracks. One pairs Carpenter and Russell, while the
other has producer Debra Hill and production designer Joe Alves. There would have still been room for DTS, but
these are both non-stop and always informative commentary tracks, which is how
such tracks should always be. DVD 2 has a
theatrical trailer, 2 TV ads, a photo gallery, a montage of Plissken in action,
the deleted bank robbery sequence with (or without, you choose)
Carpenter/Russell commentary that should have stayed in the film, and a new
featurette (about a half-hour long) Return
To Escape From New York. It also luckily avoids discussing the
disastrous and very belated sequel Escape
From LA, the total opposite of this film in so many ways. This is a great batch of extras and you’ll
wish there were even more.
Of
course, The World Trade Center towers figure prominently throughout as one of
the only things that can be seen in the much darker and decayed New York, and they did survive past
1997. Their use in the plot is also
great and feels somehow triumphant post-9/11/01, an event that did not turn New York into this New York.
I never believed the scenario of this film could happen to the city,
though many also believed 9/11/01’s attack would never happen either. In both cases, the world became much darker,
but Escape From New York keeps in
mind that the real darkness is caused by evil people and its healthy distrust
of authority is timelier than ever; a time when authoritarian aspects of the
film imagined are happening before our eyes.
The timing of this double set could not be better and the film deserves
rediscovery for those who deserve to see such a great film. For fans, it is a must!
- Nicholas Sheffo
