Air Force One, the plane of the American president, crashes on Manhattan Island, which has become an open-air prison. In one line, director and screenwriter John Carpenter creates an unstoppable plot to which he adds a character destined to become cult, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), a repentant bandit tasked with bringing back the statesman and the nuclear suitcase he transported.
Feature film almost entirely shot at night, “New York 1997” succeeds, thanks to a host of sharp second knives (Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau …), credible sets and hypnotic music (a again superbly composed by Carpenter himself), to give substance to this apocalyptic universe. Better, we find here with great pleasure one of the most delicious madeleines of genre films of the 1980s.
With, hoisted to the top of the cinema, bis or not, a credits in synthetic images that Daft Punk would not deny today and the spectral appearance of the singer Isaac Hayes, now The Duke, the monarch of this place, at the wheel of ‘a Cadillac covered in chandeliers. So many reasons to forget the pitiful sequel produced fifteen years later in Los Angeles.Wednesday December 9 at 8:50 p.m. on Ciné + Frisson. American science fiction film by John Carpenter (1981). With Kurt Russell. 1h35. (In multicast and On demand).
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