The Escape From New York remake is not dead in the water!

11 February 2010

Gerard Wood

After two long years without a word, there's finally some news about the troubled remake of Escape From New York, John Carpenter's 1981 SF classic. According to Vulture (The New York Magazine) New Line Cinema has finally got a script that it's happy with and is prepared to move forward quickly with production.

Given this project's history, I'm not holding my breath. When we last had anything to say about this remake we reported that Len Wiseman had been replaced by Brett Ratner as director and that Ratner had promptly pulled out (much to the relief of many); Gerard Butler had landed the role of the iconic Snake Plissken (immortalised by Kurt Russell) and then he too dropped out; and the screenplay by Ken Nolan was itself dropped and Jonathan Mostow (director of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) was brought on board to rewrite it, with an option to direct. Clearly that went nowhere and a new writer, Allan Loeb, was appointed.

It seems that Loeb was the man for the job and to New Line's satisfaction he has succeeded in the difficult task of capturing the humour in Plissken "without slipping into camp"; moreover, in order to up the "banter quotient" Snake will no longer rescue the president, as in the original movie, but a female senator (from which we can conclude that Loeb either can't imagine a female President or a female President with whom Plissken is likely to banter...).

The rush toward production has also been encouraged by an economic stimulus: someone came up with a much cheaper way to turn Manhattan into a giant prison. In Carpenter's dystopian vision of an American future (his futuristic film was set in 1997) crime has gone through the roof and Manhattan island has been converted into a maximum security prison. The Manhattan landscape is virtually unrecognisable due to the destruction visited on it from without and within.

Manhattan in the remake will be "geographically undesirable, but intact" in an effort to keep a lid on the costs. Sometime in the past, a crude radioactive dirty bomb was detonated on the outskirts of the city after which the evacuated island was turned into a privately run penal colony. According to a source close to the project, what this gives us "is an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most fucked-up, dangerous criminals on Earth." In line with the original, the prison authorities work out of the Statue of Liberty, but rather than government controlled, the prison is in the hands of a private security company.

As for Plissken, there's no word yet on who will don the famous eye-patch. Butler insisted that he had not actually dropped out of the project but was taking a cautious "wait and see position". Two years have passed since then, but I think Butler would still be a good choice. Vulture does add an interesting note that New Line is contractually bound to leave the character of Plissken alone however: apparently the studio had to sign a contract with John Carpenter requiring that Plissken must be called Snake, that he must wear an eye patch, and that he would "always be a bad-ass."

Thank you, John Carpenter. Some things are indeed sacred and untouchable.

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