The storytelling shortcut in ‘Escape From New York’ you may not have noticed

Forty-four years ago today, people who were already afraid of cities got the scare of their lives with the release of Escape From New York, John Carpenter‘s carceral fantasy starring an eyepatch-wearing Kurt Russell doing battle against anarchic hordes in a chaotic urban environment.

The premise is spectacular: in the future (1997!), a 400 percent increase in violent crime has led to a bold correctional solution — seal off the island of Manhattan (13.4 miles from tip to tip, and only 2.3 miles at its widest point) — then when criminals are caught, you dump ’em in there and let ’em fend for themselves. (There is a last-minute option to be machine gunned to death prior to dispatch if you choose — who is to say the state can’t be lenient?)

The problem comes when, one day, Air Force One is hijacked by a radical paramilitary group (the National Liberation Front of America), who symbolically flies the plane directly into the center of what they dub the police state, a skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. (It does not crash into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, but close by.)

However! Before the vehicle meets its doom, the President of the United States, played by British actor Donald Pleasence (a Carpenter alum from Halloween), gets into the escape pod and survives. That said, this pod lands him in the center of the mayhem of the world’s most dangerous prison, New York City, thus necessitating Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken to go in and get him. (Plissken’s motivation to do so is complicated, but let’s not get into that now.)

The opening scenes of Escape From New York have so many high concepts flying at you that you may never have noticed two great big liberties that writer-director Carpenter took with reality. The first: why does the president have an English accent? The second: does Air Force One really have an escape pod?

The answer to the second is a big fat no. Sure, sure, the 1981 movie was set in the future — one in which the United States was at war with an allied Soviet Union and China — so the script gets a pass for trying to slip this past us.

However, this little “seems legit” plot point passed muster enough that when Wolfgang Petersen directed Andrew Marlowe’s script of Air Force One 16 years later, no one blinked an eye when “the pod” was introduced.

That film also saw the president’s plane hijacked by dirty rotten commies (Gary Oldman this time instead of Nancy Stephens) and, just like with Pleasence, the President of the United States is ushered into an escape pod. But because Air Force One‘s president is a gosh darn hero played by the true red, white, and blue Hollywood star Harrison Fordhe only pretends to get in the pod. He secretly stays aboard, saves his family, saves freedom, and gets to say one of the greatest/stupidest lines in action movie history: “Get off my plane!!”

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An escape pod on Air Force One has now become such a thing that most people (no shame here: we mean us) kinda-sorta figured it was real until about, oh, 20 minutes ago. Funnily enough, the new-to-Amazon film Heads of State starring John Cena and Idris Elba features a big, fat action sequence aboard the presidential jet.

In an interview with The Wrapdirector Ilya Naishuller said that originally his film featured a pod ejection, but then decided to cut it. His reasoning was that he wanted each action sequence in the movie to build, and as this was the first one chronologically, working in a jettisoned escape pod would make it “too big.” (Having seen Heads of Statewe’re ready to say that it’s already plenty big!)

With that, the specifics of what’s on board Air Force One does remain somewhat on a need-to-know basis. While it is extremely unlikely there is an escape pod, who knows what the future may bring? Indeed, a new model for the flying White House is in development right now.

And one more thing concerning Donald Pleasence and emergencies in the sky. The actor served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, flew an estimated 60 successful raids, and was shot down in 1944 flying a mission over France. He was captured and spent time in a German prisoner of war camp.