In other words, the “meta-genre” film, which rose from the ashes of the genuine article after it was destroyed by the increasingly reductive economic structure of the business. When we speak of genre films today, we are basically talking about a precedent set in Europe by Melville and Leone, standardized by Hill with THE DRIVER, banalized by Kasdan with BODY HEAT, and made into an artform by Tarantino a little over a decade later. There is no one else left who does what he does – not Hill, not Cronenberg, not De Palma, not Ferrara, not Dahl, not even Craven, all of whom pass through their respective genres with ulterior motives or as specialty acts, treating those genres as netherworlds to be escaped to, museums ready to be plundered. In 1997, Film Comment critic and head programmer of the New York International Film Festival Kent Jones said the following of Carpenter’s films, which in a way applies to the video game industry elements that Carpenter influenced at large:Ĭarpenter stands completely and utterly alone as the last genre filmmaker in America. And of course, the obvious tribute of naming his protagonist Solid Snake. There are a number of stylistic influences that Kojima admits to having lovingly borrowed from Escape, including Snake’s array of gadgets, the frequency of an on-screen timer which shows the audience how much time he has to complete his mission, as well as providing the setting of New York for Metal Gear Solid 2. Instead, he was a new type of hero with “justice not bound by others.” Although confined as a criminal, he was not truly evil. ![]() Although he gets used, he ultimately lives by his own ideology. Noire novels and stories and movies with evil heroes are common now, but this was quite rare back then. Being in the midst of my rebellious period, the antihero “Snake” resonated harmoniously! He was a dark hero that separated himself from the orthodox hero who was either part of some organization, enslaved by the system, or was justice personified. I was especially electrified by the hero, Snake Plissken. Hideo Kojima-san, the creator of the Metal Gear, said the following about Plissken: Snake, and Escape as a whole, strips genre down to its bare bones, much like punk music was doing at the same time in the early 1980’s. Although he’s sexualized in style, he’s presented as devoid of fleshy urges. He snarls in the face of authority, but doesn’t abide by a moral or political code of his own. There is something at once punk and post-punk about Snake. As a huge fan of classic Hollywood westerns by Howard Hawks, as well as the revisionist westerns of radical filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, Carpenter crafted in Snake a hybrid John Wayne for 1997 – 40’s in Western style, 80’s in punk rock attitude. In drafting the anti-hero Snake Plissken, portrayed masterfully by former Disney child-star Kurt Russell, Carpenter was looking less to the science-fiction tradition in cinema and more to the Western. is kidnapped by a terrorist group operating within the prison, and the Army dispatches the biggest badass it’s got to hunt him down and bring him to safety. ![]() ![]() government exports “undesirables” of all kinds – criminals, devients, perverts, and everything in-between. The concept was simple: in the near-future, New York will become a maximum security prison where a dystopian U.S. Written and directed by John Carpenter and released in 1981, Escape was Carpenter’s fourth proper feature, and it stands today as one of his greatest films, alongside Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Thing (the latter being his masterpiece). For without Escape From New York, and it’s protagonist Snake Plissken, Metal Gear as a franchise would be a wholly different experience. Now, I know you’ve all been anticipating this essay.
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