That film, chums, is Lockout, and it is a hoot. Before European production house EuropaCorp bet the house and lost on Luc Besson’s pretty decent Valerian movie, it was making mid-budget action thrillers, and had the common sense to set one of them on a prison in space. It’s a bit too low tech for my personal prison fetish, but it earns points for being cold, stark and fiery when required.īut let’s get to the real meat. 1992’s Alien 3 ended up a watered down version of what had been originally planned (the idea of it being a wooden planet, a floating monastery in space), but I maintain even David Fincher’s theatrical cut has merits. Honestly.įurthermore, they get a bad rap.The turning point of the Alien saga was when they decided to set a film on a Fiorina-161. I’ve got right back through the history of the Academy Awards, and not a single one has ever won Best Picture. The truth is that futuristic prison flicks though don’t tend to scale the heights of acclaim. Go with me here, but without futuristic prison films, Daniel Craig may not have been the successful James Bond he became. The latter, pub trivia fans, is one of the reasons that Campbell got the nod to reboot James Bond with 1995’s GoldenEye, and the knock-on from that was rebooting 007 again with 2006’s Casino Royale. There’s the late, great Rutger Hauer in Wedlock (a TV movie at heart, but with more fun than a lot of cinema movies), and the underrated Martin Campbell flick No Escape, starring Ray Liotta. I confess, as much as I acknowledge the film is terrific, when I need my prison fix I tend to veer towards more interior-driven movies than outdoors ones, but who wouldn’t make an exception for Snake? Likewise, if I applied the aforementioned rule that rigidly, there’d be no place in this article for a couple of other entries. The starting point for doing this properly though, as it was for many, was John Carpenter’s iconic Escape From New York, where Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken is sent to Manhattan Island, a prison within itself. Also, let us pause to remember the moment in Kevin Costner’s The Postman where a large crowd of captives jeer a screening of Universal Soldier, and demand The Sound Of Music is played instead. Still, it’d be remiss of me not to acknowledge Simon Phoenix and John Spartan’s chilly prison freezer in Demolition Man, Magneto’s plastic palace in the early X-Men films, and Minority Report has a room full of placid convicts too. I appreciate that, but it’s not quite what I’m talking about. There are several blockbusters that make a futuristic prison part of their story. And I struggle to see it mistreated.Ī quick point of order. Budgets were cut, the prisons got smaller, and in truth I’d checked out by the third one.īut still, heart on sleeve, the futuristic prison film is a source of real glee to me. In this case, follow-ups that avoided the inconvenience of a cinema release. Not a great example, but damned if I didn’t enjoy it.Įscape Plan, off the back of its two leads primarily, did enough business to get follow-ups going. Just to see this much cherished sub-genre on the big screen again was a treat. The parameters weren’t actually a million miles away from an earlier Stallone vehicle, Lock Up, but I found it warts and all enjoyable anyway. We were given a futuristic prison that it’s impossible to escape from – this is pretty much the standard drill, if you’re new to this particular subgenre – and in this case we had Arnie and Sly trying to escape from it. The first Escape Plan made a solid attempt at this. Try three issues of Film Stories magazine – for just £4.99: right here!
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