• A masterful thriller—a remake of course- superior to the 1951 Howard Hawks film of the same name
  • #296 at this time on the all-time TSPDT list—the top-rated Carpenter film- above Halloween– I have them neck and neck
  • The gorgeous title sequence duplicates the original Hawks film—the smoke coming through the lettering
  • Morricone does the score- the first score not done by Carpenter himself on one of his films—the baseline is great but there’s not a lot too it- not on the Mount Rushmore of Morricone scores nor is it the Halloween score
  • It’s no surprise the screengrabs here of are night shots with flames– clearly an ongoing visual motif
  • What a day in 1982- this opened the same day as Blade Runner from Ridley Scott- both didn’t do well but now are widely considered sci-fi and cinema classics
  • A meditation on masculinity—barricaded brotherhood and time of crisis—obviously this is big in Hawks’ oeuvre specifically Rio Bravo (also The Thing of course)—Carpenter also explored this in Assault on Precinct 13– does it again in Ghost of Mars
  • Hawks and John Ford classicism— but you could also write about this being connected to Cronenberg’s body horror- Videodrome, The Fly is probably the closest (also a 50’s sci-fi remake) which comes out in 86’—there’s the HIV-reading of both films—can’t tell who has it, drawing blood—subtext layer adds to the film for sure
  • 80’s paranoia—haha we have Steve Wonder’s “Superstitious” song
  • It’s 108 minutes- tight- we hop right into it with the helicopter shooting the dog and the eerie shootout with the foreigners
  • It could also be connected to Ridley Scott’s Alien– we’re investigating the unknown—both brilliant films
  • The comradery of Hawks’ work- again, best displayed in Rio Bravo isn’t victorious here. This is that film turned on its head- a nightmare- maybe closer to Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) in which it’s a nightmare with everyone turning on each other—Hawks’ film was really a retaliation to that western so it’s ironic that in tone Carpenter skews that
  • Kurt Russell is awesome here- he steers the ship—courageous, anti-hero that exists in every decade of film history
  • The support is just as good- Wilford Brimley—Keith David
  • There’s a bit of trouble with how much of this film is built on special effects and not cinema aesthetics—
  • The blood-drawing scene is magnificent- so intense
  • There’s some choppy editing when Keith David asks to be cut loose
  • The ending is glorious—the shot of the camp at night with Russell and David
  • Must-See film