Are You a Bad Enough Dude to Escape from New York?

The other night I watched John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, starring Kurt Russell as the appropriately named Snake Plissken.  With John Carpenter you can’t really go wrong for an entertaining movie, and this is no exception.  In the future, New York is one giant prison (social commentary? Nope) and Air Force One has the misfortune of crashing right into the middle of it.  Enter Snake: he is tasked by the warden to retrieve the President so he can make a meeting to prevent a war, and if he rescues him he goes free.  That’s really all there is to it, but what more do you need?

This movie was an awesome action film, being very basic and not requiring any major affects to get the story across and still keep you on the edge of your seat.  While I was watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder, why doesn’t Hollywood produce movies like this anymore?  Relatively low budget, fun to watch, don’t even have to be remotely believable, and would likely make a profit unless something was done catastrophically poorly.  Then I thought some more, and realized this type of movie would put them in direct competition with another major industry: video games.  Back in 1981, there were no 3D HD gaming consoles with ultra-realistic graphics and Hollywood stories, there were games like Pong.  Therefore, a simple action movie could make money without worrying about doing the same old thing.  Nowadays?  You could be killing zombies on the moon and it wouldn’t be original (seriously, look it up).

Movies today have to do something over and above what we get in our homes through television and video games, which is why Michael Bay makes action movies now.  They need huge explosion, ridiculous special effects, and actors spouting lines they should be ashamed to be paid to utter.  These movies are still entertaining, but their budgets don’t allow for a lot of up and coming directors to get a chance in the system, because studios can’t take the risk.  Therefore we are more and more seeing “new” directors coming over from totally different mediums like commercials or online shorts.  And in the future, we might see some of these directors go back to the internet for movies like Escape from New York, because online is where this would be appreciated, not in the theater for $15.

Escape from New York is a great action romp and definitely worthwhile as a Netflix instant streaming choice some night.  Sometimes you just need to decompress, and a plot that can fit on a post-it tends to be great for relaxing.  The action movies of the 80s were a great time, and there were so many that it always seemed fresh, even if they all followed the same formula with interchangeable leads.  Hopefully, if everything truly is cyclical, we will see this time of film be produced again in the future.

John Hackert is a columnist and forgot to send in his byline. [Editor's note: Idiot.]