Escape From New York (Special Edition Collector's Set)

The film looks and sounds great. Dean Cundey's photography is given justice here; the nighttime shooting, the greens and blues, all look much cleaner and clearer than previous releases. The sound is given nice treatment as well; Escape is one of Carpenter's best scores, more fully realize than previous work, and ahead of its time. There's a 2.0 mono mix, a 5.0 surround mix, which doesn't provide a big boost, and a commentary track as well.

John Carpenter generally gives good commentaries. Once again he teams up with Kurt Russell to revisit the film, as they did with The Thing. Carpenter is very frank about his films and often explains how particular shots were done, what locations were used, and what was done to get around the low budget. Russell sounds like he's having a good time as well; he clearly loves the film and its cult status. (This is the film that helped him break his Disney type casting mold.)

There's a much welcome documentary, return to New York, featuring Carpenter, Russell, producer Debra Hill, Carpenter's ex-wife Adrienne Barbeau, and others. We also get to finally see the deleted opening of the film.

On the whole, this is a very nice DVD set. There's a slipcase for the digipak, and there's a little Snake Plisskin comic book inside. This is a nice job for a cult classic and highly recommended. It is way beyond the previous bare-bones DVD that was out.

SOUND QUALITY (4/5 STARS)
The NEW Dolby Digital 5.1 remix is great: clearer voices and extraordinary surround effects, but without a good surround system you might overhear some dialogue which was specially isolated to a define channel. In some scenes (i.e. broadway scene) the effects are significantly louder than the music on the previous release. Although this release lacks an original mono-track in English, it features a Frensh mono track.

EXTRAS (4/5 STARS)
THE CUT BANK ROBBERY SCENE (only on the second special features disc, without an an option to view the whole film with this several minutes long scene), featurettes (with commentaries), photo galleries, traisers, teasers.

SPECIAL/UNIQUE ON THIS DVD RELEASE:
- anamorphic Widescreen
- NEW Dolby Digital 5.1 remix
- deleted bank robbery scene

COMMENT:

This is a great movie and deserves this new great treatment! Isaac Hayes is great in the role of the Duke of New York and Kurt Russel is even more superb in the role of Snake Plissken! The cut bank robbery scene is very cool (with commentary!) and the quality is typically pretty descent but introduces some new great music in these scenes that never appears again in the movie! For fans of the great Carpenter score there is another good bite: the menues feature also some new music (I figure it is specially recorded for this release). For all Plissken fans there is a little comic book included and a note for an upcoming computer game?! Let's see what is comming next... "Escape From Washington"? CHEERS

Strangely enough, despite the fact that I am a child of the 80s (I was 12 when this movie first came out), I never saw Escape from New York until 6 weeks ago.

Then I was hooked.

Most people know the story. In the "future," (1988, haha) the US crime rate rises 400%. To combat this crime wave, drastic measures are taken. The United States becomes a fascist-like police state, and in 1992 New York City becomes the country's one maximum-security prison to house the worst society has to offer. Sealed off from the outside world by a 50-foot containment wall on all sides, Manhattan Island becomes a modern (or postmodern) Botany Bay. All bridges, tunnels and waterways surrounding the island are mined, and the US Police Force constantly patrols by helicopter, to ensure that no prisoners escape. Criminals unlucky enough to receive a maximum-security sentence are given a choice: be executed or be airdropped into the New York for life to fend for themselves. As the chilling opening narration observes, "There are no guards, only prisoners and the worlds they have made. The rules are simple. Once you go in, you don't come out."

Into this black pit of despair comes one S.V. "Snake" Plissken, played by Kurt Russell. A war hero (he won 2 purple hearts, one in Leningrad and one in Siberia - remember, the Soviet Union still existed when this film was made), Snake for unspecified reasons has turned to a life of crime. And at the film's beginning, the Law has finally caught up with Snake, and he is being transported to New York to serve a life sentence for bank robbery when Fate steps in.

On the same evening that Snake is brought to Manhattan Island to begin serving his sentence, the President of the United States (played by Donald Pleasance) is on his way to a peace summit when his plane (Airforce One) is hijacked by a terrorist posing as a pilot, and is crashed into the prison. (In today's post-9/11 environment, the hijacking scene, at least to me, is particularly chilling and I have a hard time watching it).

Miraculously, the President exits the plane via his special "escape pod" and he survives the plane crash...only to be taken captive by the "Duke of New York," played with beautiful understated menace by Isaac Hayes.

Police Commissioner Bob Hauk (played by Lee Van Cleef), has an idea: send Snake Plissken, trained combat veteran and specialist at "getting in quiet," into the prison to find the President and rescue him. If he succeeds, Snake will be pardoned for every crime he's ever committed in the United States. And just to make sure that Snake fulfills his end of the bargain, Hauk has the prison's chief doctor implant 2 explosives in Snake's neck. If Snake does not return with the President in 22 hours, the explosives will go off, and, as Hauk wryly notes, "No more Snake Plissken."

So the die is cast. Snake goes in...but will he find the President alive? Even if he finds the President alive, will he get out in time to have the charges in his neck neutralized? Watch it and see.

This film is entertaining on many levels. It's an excellently crafted story, complete with social commentary and irony. It's a dystopic vision of what can happen when we trade too much of our liberty in exchange for what we think is security - definitely another resonant theme in our post-9/11 reality. We clamp down on individual rights/freedoms, supposedly in the name of protecting the collective - and leave society's undesirables to prey on each other in an asphalt jungle hell. But then what are we? According to this film, we're only slightly less inhuman than the criminals.

And the DVD contains various extras and bonuses which are sure to round out one's Escape from New York knowledge. This includes the documentary film "Return to Escape from New York," which details the making of the film. There are also commentary tracks by John Carpenter and Kurt Russell, as well as by producer Debra Hill.

Another real treat is the deleted bank robbery scene (the original first 10 minutes of the movie). This scene was cut from the final film because, in Carpenter's words on the commentary track, premiere audiences thought it diminished Snake's character by "humanizing" him too much. I actually found that humanization to be a good thing, and thought that the Bank Robbery sequence helped to set context for the story.

Along the lines of the deleted bank robbery sequence, another potential flaw of this movie, at least in my opinion, is that we never really know much about the characters or why they are the way they are. In other words, there's not much in the way of character development or backstory. For example, we know that Snake is sullen, embittered and in general concerned for nothing but his own self-preservation (though occasionally flashes of humanity do show and when it comes down to it, he does the right thing). But why?

I've read that Mike McQuay's novelization of the movie sketches out some history for Snake's character (and for the characters of Hauk, Brain, Maggie, Cabbie and the President as well). It would have been nice to see some of that in the film, with subplots, flashbacks, etc. It would've made the story richer.

But, regardless, what is there is great stuff. The cynicism and one-liners will bring a wry smile to your face, especially when they come from good old snarling Snake. Check it out.