Director: John Carpenter
Cast: Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Peter Fonda
Have I Seen it Before: Admittedly, no. As much as I will spend my time professing love for Carpenter, I’ve had more than a few blind spots when it came to his later work, a set of blind spots I’ve been spending all summer trying to shore up.
Did I Like It: Carpenter proclaims that this is better than <Escape from New York (1981)> , which always seemed like the kind of thing the guy who apparently just directed an entire TV series from his couch would say…
But God help me, he might have been right. It wouldn’t be hard to write this film off as a remake-bordering-on-rip-off of New York, but I can’t avoid thinking about it as a real attempt to make the movie that Carpenter, Russell, and crew wanted to make all along. The original film takes place in a dystopia for the sake of dystopia, whereas the world of President Adam (Cliff Robertson) is an insane Christian Theocracy* that now feels less like speculative fiction, and more like sober reporting on the issues of the day.
Things start off here great stylistically from the opening credits. The cast is pound-for-pound surprisingly great, and Carpenter’s score is back in fine form. Carpenter’s melodies quickly take a back seat to the larger portion of Shirley Walker’s score, but the balance here is certainly better than in <Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)>, and if you’ve got to move away from a Carpenter score, you could do a lot worse than the musical voice behind Batman: The Animated Series.
Sure, there are some flaws here. The special effects are nearly wall-to-wall early CGI, where the original adventures of Snake Plisskin (Russell) were a triumph of practical effects, even in the parts of the film you thought were early, experimental CGI. Also, your individual mileage with the movie will vary directly with the degree to which you might enjoy depictions of surfing in movies, which isn’t really me.
*You know, as opposed to the really reasonable Christian theocracies that are out there.