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Why are Children Going to the Island?
- In many scenes of Escape from L.A., there are very clearly and visibly children and families already on and being deported to the Island of Los Angeles. One has to wonder what families with children have done to be deported to such a terrible place, even in such a harsh environment. The families can be argued for having broken some of the pre-established laws, such as having practiced other non-Christian religions or having eaten red meat, but with the kids, particularly orphans (Snake passes them in the hallway), one could not imagine that they were put there on account of smoking or drinking or premarital sex. Which leaves many questions on why they are being deported. Are there no programs in this "Moral America" that would want to Rehabilitate them Its never stated or even acknowledged the reasons for children and normal families going to the Island. Aside for the set of Laws and Violations, all we hear is The Police Officer that escorts Snake state "prostitutes, atheists, runaways... we're throwing out the trash Plissken", yet no one states, explains or even mentions reasons for them being deported to the Island.
- Illegal immigrants perhaps.
- What, in either movie of the series, makes you think that the government is at all interested in anything even remotely approaching fairness and justice to anyone, children or otherwise? It's a corrupt system by corrupt politicians to enforce corrupt laws. They're deported there because someone in that government thought it was easier to just get rid of them than to spend any effort trying to make them good citizens because the setting is the definition of a Crapsack World that just plain does not give half a crap about its people.
- Some of the children on the island were probably born there.
The President's Orders Regarding Religion
- How does the President get away with just unilaterally ordering millions of people sent to what's basically an open-air concentration camp just because they did things he disapproved of or followed the "wrong" religion? Obviously, just the religion part violates the Constitution and the First Amendment. Is it just a case of Artistic License – Law? Or did he bribe or intimidate all the courts and legislators to let him do all this stuff?
- It's mentioned that the Constitution was amended to give him a lifetime term. It's certainly possible it was amended more to legalize the things seen in the movie.
- Cuervo Jones leads the Shining Path, which has apparently united the entirety of South America and is preparing to invade the United States. So, why is he in LA? And why has he been there long enough to take control of it?
- Malloy choosing to take Utopia's control unit instead of Snake's was a Genre Savvy move. Thing is, why not just take both? It would have revealed Snake's hologram ploy a few minutes earlier, but Malloy didn't know that.
- Most government buildings have Faraday Cages and are completely protected from EMPs, at best you would turn the lights off for a few minutes and then the generators would kick in. Second, why was their no failsafe for this doomsday device nor a secondary controller in-case the first one gets damaged? Lastly, why didn't they just invade L.A? In Escape from New York they try, but the gangs threaten to kill the president, displaying a severed finger as proof. In Escape from LA the president makes it clear that he doesn't care if Utopia lives or dies and would actually prefer her killed; he's even disappointed when she survives, remarking that Snake "didn't finish the mission."
- The President didn't care about Utopia. However, Cuervo Jones had the Sword of Damocles and could have shut down all of America if angered and even threatens to do so during his broadcast if he sees any US military forces approach LA.
- The government could have easily sent a bomber (let's say a B-2) to nuke the place from 40000+ feet, well out of Cuervo or anyone else's sight.
- Not important, but where are movies produced now that LA is out of the picture?
- Banning premarital sex is one thing, but smoking or red meat? Are those the kind of things a die-hard Southern conservative, steeped in proud traditions of tobacco-growing and barbecue, is likely to prohibit?
- I always figured the President didn't really care about any of that and just wanted to control people.
- Whoever said he had to follow his own rules? Dictators often indulge in the things their subjects are prohibited.
- Double Standard mixed with My Rules Are Not Your Rules (and a dash of Hypocrisy). In fact they possibly allude to this with the "no foul language" rule as cited by Malloy. Malloy breaks this rule himself and even the president breaks it by taking the Lord's name in vain!"
- If the "virus" Snake was infected with was just a bluff, why did Mission Control keep monitoring the timer so carefully all through the movie? Even if they were only interested in when the time ran out because that's when Snake would quit working for them, all that would've meant was that it was time to shove another Boxed Crook into the same scenario, not that they were beaten outright.
- For that matter, the whole fast acting flu thing is pretty stupid. Yeah, let's send in this badass black-ops/infiltration specialists to do our job for us while we make sure that he's far from his best physically and mentally. Just for that, they deserved the shut-down at the end.
- The virus aspect makes no sense because Kurt Russell (who was helping with script ideas) changed the ending before it was filmed. I get the sense that had things gone off as originally planned, it would have ended similarly to EFNY (Snake actually gets the cure and causes the President to screw himself over in some way). The fact that Snake dramatically looks at his watch counting down to zero before they tell him it was a ruse means he either knew they were bluffing all along (which is why he doesn't show up in-person, just via hologram) or just thought he was dead anyway.
- At the end of the film, Snake uses the Sword of Damocles to shut down the entire world's supply of electricity, killing at least millions of people. The code to do so is "666." Even operating on logic along the lines of "We assume no one with malicious intent will get their hands on the device," how much sense does it make for the code to be such an easy-to-remember number? Not only is it an extremely well-known biblical reference (which means that many people in the now-theocratic America probably know of it— is that Fridge Brilliance or Logic?), but it's only three digits. Currently, nations across the world have stricter verification systems for nuclear codes whose use wouldn't end the world like in the movie (or at least aren't designed to).
- It actually makes sense that the code for the Sword of Damocles is the Number of the Beast. At the end, it's shown that the President's ego is so overinflated that he twists one of the most famous verses in the Bible to put himself in God's place. If he's so egomaniacal to consider himself close to God, it can be assumed that he would believe that he has the power to end the world, just like a god. Setting the code to 666 is a show of how insanely megalomaniacal he is. Security? He doesn't care about security.
- Bangkok is mentioned in the movie as being US territory. This kind of flies in the face of Real Life: during the colonial land-grab of the nineteenth century, both the world's acknowledged superpowers (Britain and France) carefully refrained from attacking the country, even though it would have been a logical bridge between India/Burma and Malaya (both British possessions) and the French had annexed virtually everything to the East. Even the Japanese trod with care here during World War II, despite having grabbed everything to all sides. The reason is that any superpower contemplating Thailand would immediately concede (a) that it would take more trouble and resources than it was worth to conquer; and (b) once you'd conquered it, were you going to be able to hold on to it? Thailand remains the only state in the region to have stayed independent in the face of colonial land-grabbing and Japanese expansionism. If the Americans couldn't hold Vietnam with all the resources they poured into it - they're never going to get Thailand...
- Maybe Thailand joined the U.S. voluntarily? We know very little about the state of that part of the world in this Verse; perhaps one of the nearby nations went even more batshit insane and militant than the U.S., and were going to nuke Thailand unless they found a superpower to join for protection.
- We know nothing anywhere else in the world in the context of the two movies. The three big facts are 1) the US is a dictatorship, 2) the South American nations have been conquered/united under a terrorist banner, and 3) the latter is about to attempt an invasion of the former in a war that is treated with the same anticipation as World War III. The rest of Asia, Europe, the UK, Australia and Africa all go unmentioned.
