Saturday, April 19, 2008
This is a great movie for a lot of reasons. It's fun, atmospheric, exciting, contains a lot of creative low-budget filmmaking, it's ridiculous but with a straight face, it's got some political and social undertones, etc etc. But the main reason to love it is Snake Plissken, who has perhaps the worst attitude out of any action hero in film history. Which is exactly what makes him one of the best. He's bitter and flippant, and is only being "heroic" as a means of saving his own ass. The subtext of most of his dialogue is "fuck you." And then, in the end, he completely screws the government over.
Leave it to Carpenter to make this guy the hero of an action flick. Few directors are this good at making genre films with weird subversive touches, and not many would have had the balls to make their hero this antisocial. Definitely one of Carpenter's masterpieces.
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