The storytelling shortcut in ‘Escape From New York’ you may not have noticed

Forty-four years ago today, people who were already afraid of cities were afraid of their lives with the liberation of Escape New YorkCarpenter’s prison fantasy featuring a Kurt Russell wearing eyes fighting anarchic hordes in a chaotic urban environment.

The premise is spectacular: in the future (1997!), An increase of 400% of violent crimes led to a daring correctional solution-sealing the island of Manhattan (13.4 miles from point to tip, and only 2.3 miles at its widest)-then when the criminals are captured, you throw them from there and leave them. (There is a last minute option to be a machine gun to death before sending if you choose – who means that the state cannot be forgiving?)

The problem comes when, one day, Air Force One is diverted by a radical paramilitary group (the National Liberation Front of America), which symbolically flies the plane directly in the center of what they nicknamed the police state, a skyscraper in the Lower Manhattan. (It does not crash in the twin towers of the World Trade Center, but nearby.)

However! Before the vehicle encounters his destiny, the President of the United States, played by British actor Donald Pleasence (a former carpenter of Halloween), enters the escape pod and survives. That said, this pod won him in the center of chaos in the most dangerous prison in the world, New York, requiring the Kurt Russell snake, Plissken, to do so. (Plissken’s motivation to do so is complicated, but do not get there now.)

The opening scenes of Escape New York Have so many high concepts that fly on you that you may have never noticed two big big freedoms that the screenwriter-director Carpenter has taken with reality. The first: why does the president have an English accent? Does the second: Air Force One really has an escape pod?

The answer to the second is a big fat no. Of course, the 1981 film took place in the future – in which the United States was at war with an Allied Soviet Union and China – the script therefore obtains a pass to try to slip this past us.

However, this small point “seems legitimate” has passed the rally enough so that when Wolfgang Petersen carried out the script of Andrew Marlowe de Air Force One 16 years later, no one flashes an eye when “the pod” was introduced.

This film also saw the president of the president diverted by Dirty Rotten Commies (Gary Oldman this time instead of Nancy Stephens) and, as with pleasure, the President of the United States is inaugurated in an escape pod. But because Air Force OneThe president is a sacred God hero Played by the star of the real Red star, White and Blue Hollywood, Harrison Ford, he only pretends to get into the pod. He remains secretly on board, saves his family, saves freedom and can say one of the biggest / stupid lines in the history of the film: “Get out of my plane !!”

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An escape pod on Air Force One has now become such a thing that most people (no shame here: we hear us) a little outing thought it was real up to about 20 minutes. Curiously, the film Nouveau-Amazon Heads of state Featuring John Cena and Idris Elba presents a large sequence of Grasse action aboard the presidential jet.

In an interview The envelopeDirector Ilya Naïsherler said that originally, his film had a pod ejection, but then decided to cut it. His reasoning was that he wanted each sequence of action of the film to be built, and as it was the first chronologically, working in an escape pod in tears would make it “too large”. (Having seen Heads of stateWe are ready to say that it is already very big!)

With this, the details of what is on board the Air Force One remains somewhat on the basis of the need. Although it is extremely unlikely that there is an escape pod, who knows what the future can bring? Indeed, a new model for the Flying White House is in development at the moment.

And another thing about Donald’s pleasures and emergencies in the sky. The actor served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, piloted around 60 successful raids and was shot in 1944 by speaking a mission above France. He was captured and spent time in a German war prison camp.