I've just watched Escape from New York for the first time, and it was... frustrating.
I was introduced to Carpenter a couple of months ago, when a friend made me watch The Thing from 1982. I thought it was utterly fantastic, and I loved it unreservedly. It was tight, without wasted moments, tense the whole way through, and best of all, it started and ended at exactly the right places.
And that was the thing that Escape utterly failed at. None of the scenes outside of New York work. At all. Any of them. (With the possible exception of Snake and the Warden's last couple of lines.) Everything that happened before the glider sails over the barrier wall is a boring, soggy mess. We don't need scenes of Snake being helicoptered in, or guards patrolling walls, or a vector graphics map of New York with labels like "Statue of Liberty Island". We especially don't need scenes of some crazy woman crashing Air Force One, or unconvincing military air traffic controllers explaining story at radar screens. The worst are the scenes of Snake being given a dissolving pill injection (?) that will poison him in exactly 24 hours (??) that can be neutralized with X-rays (???).
But I'm not just here to gripe -- I'd like to propose a solution.
Open the movie with the glider sailing over the wall at night. Intercut with opening credits. Show Snake's face lit by the glow of his instrumentation, but omit any scenes of people outside of the prison walls. This entire film should take place inside New York Penitentiary. The audience doesn't know yet what the deal is with this place, or what Snake is doing there. He flies in past Liberty Island, and crash-lands on top of the Twin Towers.
When he finds the plane, you can tell that this was his objective. When the camera pans up to the markings on the side -- Air Force One -- the audience can start to piece together the plot for themselves. I don't think anybody would be confused about what was going on. We don't need the Warden talking to some military guy saying "The President's plane crashed inside our inexplicable Manhattan Island Prison, on the other side of that crazy ridiculous wall we built." The reasoning behind the New York Penitentiary really is inexplicable... so don't explicate it.
When Snake arights the old chair and sits down to think, he rubs his neck and then glances down at the watch-timer. The sharper audience members will clue in to the fact that they've done something to him, and something will happen when that timer runs down. Cyanide? Pacemaker gives out? Doesn't really matter -- we get the point.
All of these subtle scenes are already in the movie, they're just gutted of tension by having them explained over and over again by the people outside the prison, treating the audience like they're too slow to understand.
From there, the movie proceeds as usual, only with all scenes from outside the prison cut.
It's possible that you could leave the ending couple of scenes. By that point, we've followed Snake through this tense nightmare, and we're due a little breathing room and relief at the end. And like I said, I do love Snake's "I'm tired. Maybe later."
I am aware that this would make the movie about 52 minutes long. But hey, if the story only merits 52 minutes, then damnit, it should only be 52 minutes. Maybe you could have Carpenter make a short horror film, and pair the movie to that, the way that Disney did, and still does (see Winnie the Pooh's opening short, Nessie). Those 52 minutes would be intense.
Thoughts?
