Entering New York and 22 hours before the bomb kills him, Snake sets out to rescue the President who is being held hostage by a ruthless warlord known as The Duke of New York.
Can Snake rescue the President and retrieve the cassette before the 22 hours are up? Sign In. Edit Escape from New York Jump to: Summaries 6 Synopsis 1. The synopsis below may give away important plot points.
Getting Started Contributor Zone ». Edit page. Top Gap. See more gaps ». Create a list ». Sci-fi Classics. Top - See all related lists ». Share this page:. The contents of the tape are never explicitly revealed in the movie, but we can make certain assumptions. Hauk states that the United States is at war, and that the President was on his way to a meeting called the Hartford Summit.
China and the Soviet Union are waiting at the summit, so the implication is that in the movie's alternate future the U. Hauk says that the President's arrival is "critical to the fate of the human race," so the summit is most likely a last-ditch effort to put an end to World War III, an all-out nuclear war.
Without the President and the tape, Hauk says, the representatives of China and the Soviet Union will go back to their countries, presumably to continue fighting the war.
One possibility is that the tape contains the speech that the President was going to deliver at the Summit. That seems unlikely, since there's no reason the President couldn't have improvised a new speech containing the basic theme of the old one.
Besides, the President could have written the speech down instead of recording it on a tape, and his staff would have had a copy of the speech. When Snake asks what is on the tape, Hauk replies by asking Snake what he knows about cold fusion. Cold fusion was, at the time of the movie's production, a theoretical process to create unlimited energy.
At one point in the cab, a brief portion of the tape is played. The voice on the tape describes radioactive elements before it's shut off. So we know the contents of the tape are related to nuclear technology. This leaves two possibilities. One is that the tape's recording contains a description of some revolutionary form of nuclear power which the President is sharing with the Communist nations.
Giving the technology to the enemy might be a goodwill gesture or revealing the technology might have been a condition of Russia and China's appearance at the summit. Another possibility might be that the tape describes all of the nuclear secrets of the United States.
Revealing these secrets might be again a goodwill gesture to the enemy or part of the terms of the summit. No one escapes. Snake is headed to Manhattan Island for robbing the Federal Reserve Depository, but in his fall from one-time decorated Special Forces war hero to common criminal, he also embodies a broader degeneration in the American values around him, as the free country for which he once fought has transformed into a fascist police state agains which he rebels.
On the eve of a potentially world-saving summit, Air Force One is hijacked and the President of the United States Donald Pleasance is sent crashing into the centre of the prison complex. Snake is half-recruited, half-tricked by Commissioner Bob Hauk Lee Van Cleef into an against-the-clock rescue mission, with a full pardon the reward for success, and death the punishment for failure.
From the moment we watch terrorists deliberately crash a plane into the New York skyline, a different kind of future, a little beyond , is being envisaged here. Carpenter flags his other cinematic influences by naming one character Romero Frank Doubleday and another Cronenberg John Strobel.
Yet, for all the superficial differences of race and class between the Duke and the President, the similarities are just as striking, with POTUS utterly unconcerned by the considerable collateral damage wrought to return him to power.
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