So this is one of those classic movies that everyone else my age saw back when we were all kids, but which I’ve never seen. The premise is that it’s a near-future (1997) dystopia; New York has been turned into a giant island prison[1], and oops, the President’s airplane crashed there. We need SOLID SNAKE to get him out.

Like The Warriors, this is mostly a movie of an episodic journey. Snake goes here, then here, then here. He meets these people, then these people, then these people. This happens, then that happens, then the other thing happens. It doesn’t really build in any way, it doesn’t have any deep structure, it’s just a series of incidents on his long journey.

And those incidents don’t all, strictly speaking, make a whole ton of sense. Motivations and character are all somewhat underdeveloped, to put it mildly. (A lot of things depend on some kind of hinted-at-but-never-explained past between Snake and the other characters, which is probably more effective than if the movie went into detail about why everyone recognized him.)

I don’t think I would have liked this movie at all when it came out; it’s aggressively dumb, and despite having a bunch of great character actors in it (Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, Adrienne Barbeau — a murderer’s row of That Guys) it’s not especially well-made.

But time has given the movie greater interest, as yesterday’s tomorrows can’t help but be fascinating. Even with that, though, it’s still a slight pleasure.

  1. (“When this movie was made, everyone assumed cities were dying and falling into ruined slums” is one of those things that’s almost impossible for a young person who lives with today’s real estate values to ever understand.) ↩︎