YMMV / Escape from New York

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Are we meant to feel a bit sorry for the Duke? This may be hinted at by the camera lingering on his face for a few seconds after he is killed, and the fact that he's unceremoniously gunned down by the President, who is shown to be a selfish, cowardly asshole (though this could be seen as a triumphant moment for the President if you see him as a Jerkass Woobie). Also, there is no word on exactly why the Duke is in prison. He could have been put there for being a political dissident. He also demands amnesty for all prisoners on Manhattan Island in exchange for the President, and not just himself and his cronies.
  • Did Snake really have explosives implanted in him? In Escape from L.A., Plutoxin was non-lethal, and in the original script the explosives were revealed to be a bluff.
• Awesome Music: The opening theme, also an ear worm and (typically for Carpenter) a "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune.
  • In addition, "The Duke Arrives / Barricade". Some fans joke about hearing this tune in their heads when their in-laws show up.
  • Another piece, "Snake Shake", ended up being cut from the ending, but it's still catchy as hell.
  • The track "Over the Wall" is an awesome and suspense building piece, even including a slowly developing wail towards the end of the track to indicate how close to death Snake is approaching and how it changes to a tone of relief after Snake gets the treatment he needs to live.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Romero. He only has about five minutes of screen time but absolutely owns every scene he's in. It’s even very disappointing when Brain kills him and he isn't in the final showdown.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The famous deleted bank robbery opening where we see just how Snake was caught. It sets up his character perfectly - a criminal with a code of honor and ethics.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The plot is kicked off by terrorists hijacking a jet airliner and then suicidally crashing it into a New York skyscraper in order to protest U.S. foreign policies. Ouch. The part when the plane flies over the harbor and the guard watches it go by is eerily reminiscent of the only known video of Flight 11 hitting the North Tower.
  • Worthy of note that this is Air Force One being crashed into New York. In 2009, an unannounced aerial photo op of Air Force One was carried out over New York City with the plane trailed by an F-16 fighter jet at a low altitude, causing a public panic that another 9/11-style attack was imminent.
  • A militarised and heavily armed police force at the time of filming was, in the US at least, a dystopian sci-fi trope. In the decades since, it's become the norm, with assault rifles becoming more commonplace among police departments.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Meta example, but the dilapidated train station for the gladiator battle was filmed in St. Louis’ then abandoned Union Station. Just four years after the release of the film the station was renovated and is now one of the highlights of the city.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Snake's response to Hauk telling him they only have 24 hours to save the president is to snark back with "24 hours, huh?", predicting the infamous Parrot Exposition in the Metal Gear series that took a lot of inspiration from this movie.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • The President. He's far from admirable, but it's hard not to feel bad for him when he's being tortured and brutalized by the Duke and his thugs, and it's hard not to cheer for him when he finally gets his revenge on the Duke at the end.
  • Snake is not really someone who you would call a Knight in Shining Armor. But let's take a look at his background: he gets betrayed by the same governments he believed in during the "Leningrad Ruse" (where he lost the use of his left eye) and then all his country is turned into a totalitarian police state, with his parents being murdered by the police in the process. Wouldn't you be a bit sociopathic after that? He does, however, hold a loose code of honor and humanity and he can also occasionally step into Jerk with a Heart of Gold territory.
• Magnificent Bastard: Snake Plissken is a special forces soldier with a dark past, sent in to rescue the President from Manhattan after its conversion to a violent maximum security prison. Performing his mission, Snake is so disgusted at the President's ambivalence towards those who died saving him that he sets him up to be humiliated on the world stage and destroys the tape he would have used at a peace summit. Recruited in the sequel, Escape from L.A. to retrieve a Doomsday Device's key, Snake again performs his mission and prepares for betrayal by fooling the corrupt President's men, using a hologram to disguise his true location and shutting down the world to cripple the President and the revolutionaries. Though extreme, Snake's action gives humanity a chance to start over while he himself plans to simply disappear.
• Memetic Badass: Snake Plissken. In the original Snake was more of an opportunistic Anti-Hero with hints of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold; dangerous and resourceful, but not so ridiculously badass as the sequel made him. That said, everybody inside New York has heard of him and heard rumours of his death. Considering that nobody ever comes out of there and that the only news updates that anybody would get is from new prisoners, Snake must have been involved in something major (possibly the Noodle Incident in Kansas City where Brain abandoned him) to have people know who he is.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Snake Plissken? Heard you were dead."
  • "You are the Duke of New York, you are A-number-1!"
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The fate of the girl in the Chock Full O'Nuts coffee shop - it's implied that the Crazies eat her after catching and dragging her down to her doom out of camera range. Snake quickly tries to grab her hand, but she's pulled under and disappears in a matter of seconds. The fear from Snake is palpable, as he immediately flees, despite being the only person in the entire city carrying a gun. The music during this chase sequence sets the tone perfectly as well.
  • The exact nature of Snake's Explosive Leash, as described in Lee Van Cleef's typical menacing glee.
    "Not a large explosion, about the size of a pinhead. Just big enough to open up both your arteries. I'd say you'd be dead in ten to fifteen seconds."
  • When Cabbie tells Snake that "you don't want to walk around down there, Snake" regarding the theatre basement, he means it. In the space of less than two minutes, Snake comes across three people passing around and stripping the clothes off an unconscious (or possibly dead) person with a gang rape scenario implied, a group of people who attempt to mug him, and a badly beaten man who has been fitted with the President's tracker.
• One-Scene Wonder: Nancy Stephens, better known as Nurse Marion from the Halloween franchise, appears in one scene leading the hijackers. And since that's what kicks off the plot, it also counts as a Small Role, Big Impact.
• Questionable Casting: Pretty much everyone's reaction when Kurt Russell was cast as Snake, due to his prior work with Disney. Fortunately, Russell managed to prove them all wrong - to the point that this kind of role came to be perceived as standard for him.
• Retroactive Recognition: Behind the scenes example: The Visual Effects Supervisor was a young James Cameron.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The movie depicts a 1990s New York that was so overrun with crime, it was converted into one giant penal colony. In the early 80s, New York had only recently escaped a fiscal crisis, but it was still entrenched in urban decay and poverty, so this vision of the city seemed plausible. By the 1990s, crime rates dropped rapidly and the economy recovered, rendering a bleak depiction of the Big Apple obsolete.
  • With Kurt Russell's success in reinventing himself as a genuine badass action hero, it's hard to remember that at the time, casting a former Disney child star as a post-apocalyptic anti-hero was supposed to be something of a joke, and a sign that people shouldn't take the film very seriously.
  • The Duke being the most prominent African-American in the story and the gang leader comes right from the influence of both the Black Power Movement and the War on Drugs, in which the Nixon Administration had scapegoated both the hippie subculture and the African-American community in attempts to destabilise the movements. Duke being gunned down by the president in the end is extremely symbolic.
• Vindicated by History: The film was a modest success when it came out, mostly thanks to its low budget, but wasn't considered a classic by any stretch of the imagination. It has gained much more recognition over the years, mainly due, no doubt, to its influence on other media, with Metal Gear Solid, ReBoot, and The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy being only a few examples.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The visual effects hold up, even though it's a 1981 film. It's hard not to get chills when a dark, nearly lightless Manhattan is revealed. (Even more impressive, the skyline shots of New York are all matte paintings done by James Cameron). Particularly notable is the computer image of New York, which is actually a practical effect. What you're seeing is a model of the city with a grid pattern of reflective tape.

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