Escape from New York (1981)

Official trailer

Escape from New York is John Carpenter’s dystopian action film and one of the foundational works of 1980s post-apocalyptic cinema. Carpenter directed and co-wrote with Nick Castle. The film is set in 1997, by which point the crime rate has risen so dramatically that the United States has converted the entire island of Manhattan into a maximum security prison.

The bridges are mined. The walls are fifty feet high. The government drops the prisoners in and never releases them.

Kurt Russell plays Snake Plissken, a former Special Forces operative and current convicted bank robber who’s offered his freedom in exchange for retrieving the President of the United States, whose Air Force One has crashed inside the prison. Lee Van Cleef plays Hauk, the police commissioner running the operation. Donald Pleasence plays the President. Isaac Hayes plays the Duke of New York, the prison’s de facto ruler. Ernest Borgnine plays Cabbie. Harry Dean Stanton plays Brain. Adrienne Barbeau plays Maggie.

Few movies are this much fun while being this nasty about the country that made them, and I adore it for that. Snake is my favorite antihero of the decade, Carpenter’s score crawls under my skin, and the only thing standing between it and a 10 is the odd stretch where the tiny budget shows through the dark.

The film made approximately twenty-five million dollars on a six million dollar budget. The cult following developed across the later decade. Snake Plissken ranks among the most-referenced characters in 1980s genre cinema. The 1996 sequel Escape from L.A. is a different matter discussed elsewhere. The 1981 original is the canonical Carpenter dystopia.

Kurt Russell as Snake

Russell was thirty during filming. He had been a Disney child actor through the 1960s and 1970s and was working through how to transition into adult roles. Escape from New York was the transition. Russell’s Snake Plissken is the role that established him as an action lead. The eye patch. The growl. The cigarette. The matter-of-fact competence. The complete absence of patriotic feeling. All of these became Russell’s signature elements. He’s played variations of Snake across his later career, including in films that nominally have nothing to do with the character.

The performance is structurally important. Snake is an unwilling protagonist who doesn’t want to save the President and doesn’t believe in the country that imprisoned him. He’s been given a deadline because explosives have been planted in his arteries that will detonate if the mission takes longer than twenty-two hours. Under duress, he performs the job and his contempt for the people who hired him is visible in every interaction. The film argues that this is the only kind of hero the post-Vietnam-Watergate America deserves.

Russell never asks me to like Snake, and the film is sharper for it. He sneers at everybody, and I grinned at every sneer. Hauk picked the wrong man for a patriotic errand, and I enjoyed every minute of Hauk finding that out.

The Manhattan Setting

The film was largely shot in St. Louis, Missouri. It had considerable urban decay in 1981 that could pass for a destroyed New York. The production used specific neighborhoods of St. Louis for the daytime exteriors. It used Manhattan itself for selected establishing shots.

The combination produces a credible vision of a New York that’s been abandoned to lawlessness. The audience can’t tell which shots are which city. The geographic compositing is one of the great unsung achievements of low-budget 1980s genre cinema.

The set design and lighting commit to the prison aesthetic. The streets are dark. The buildings have been graffiti-covered or burnt out. The lighting comes from fires and emergency lamps instead of streetlights. The decision to film at night for most of the exteriors was both budgetary and aesthetic. The result is a New York that feels abandoned. Dozens of later post-apocalyptic productions have borrowed the film’s specific visual identity.

The night photography is what sells it for me. That burnt-out city looks dangerous in a way far bigger dystopias rarely manage, and I’d take its fires and graffiti over a hundred digital skylines.

The Score

John Carpenter composed the film’s score with Alan Howarth, and he scored most of his own films. The Escape from New York theme ranks among the most-recognized pieces of 1980s genre music. The synthesizer-driven main theme. The slow throbbing tension in the prison sequences. The propulsive momentum of the climactic chase. Carpenter’s specific approach to scoring his own films has been among the most influential individual contributions to the visual culture of the 1980s.

The combination of low-fidelity 1981 synthesizers with the post-apocalyptic visual material produces an atmosphere that no other 1980s composer-director combination matched. Carpenter’s scores are now studied in their own right.

The Escape from New York theme has been sampled, covered, and referenced by later musicians for over four decades. The film and the score are inseparable parts of the same artwork.

That theme is the first thing I think of when this film comes up. The throbbing synth line tells me everything I need to know about Snake before he says a word, and I think a conventional orchestra would have drained a third of the menace out of it.

Does Escape from New York still hold up?

9/10. It’s the foundational 1980s post-apocalyptic film and sits near the top of Carpenter’s work for me. Russell’s Snake set the template for the cynical action hero, the St. Louis-for-New-York compositing is a low-budget miracle, and the score is pure menace. The only thing keeping it off a 10 is the odd stretch where the money visibly runs out. Escape from L.A. (1996) is the campier follow-up. Watch the original first.

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