August 9, 1996
John Carpenter’s ESCAPE FROM L.A. is a movie that I still like, but (kind of like THE FRIGHTENERS) not as much as I did at the time. Come to think of it maybe part of that was that Carpenter had been, up to that point, almost entirely a video experience for me. When I saw BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA in the theater I was too young to be aware of who the director was. ESCAPE FROM L.A. was the first time I was purposely watching a John Carpenter film on the big screen, excited to see Kurt Russell play Snake Plissken again, his theme music blasting through the then-state-of-the-art THX sound system.
But I remember people trashing it at the time. Carpenter hadn’t done a sequel before, they didn’t like seeing him rehash a previous story, they didn’t like seeing c.g. in one of his movies, at least not like this. In many cases, I have to say, they really didn’t get the joke. I was, and still am, a person that finds it funny to move the anti-hero from a classic ‘80s urban dystopia over to the west coast and make him surf with Peter Fonda. Not everyone feels that way. They’re missing out on some of life’s beauty, in my opinion.
Okay, the c.g. complaint, I still get that. There are shots that look bad for the time, and that was 30 years ago. On the other hand, I’d guess it’s around 30 seconds of screen time, and lit murkily enough that it doesn’t look as shiny and ridiculous as most of the similarly budgeted stuff from the same era. One of those shots is underwater at night. What I found interesting on this viewing was that as the movie ages it looks and feels much more like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK than it seemed to at the time, when it felt too current. The arc of time is starting to merge them. (read the rest of this shit…)
