MovieChat Forums > Escape from L.A. (1996) Discussion > Who would you have sided with?

Who would you have sided with?

posted 13 years ago by averagejoeman2013
25 replies | jump to latest

It seems the movie presented three options Snake had at the end.

1. Side with the anarchists and you have total freedom....but total chaos and a collapse of society. Death was right around the corner and could come for no reason at all.

2. Side with the fascists. The degree of control would seem suffocating to most all of us. The penalties were still almost as harsh as well. However, you would still have a functioning society.

3. Reset the world. However (as another poster stated), you'd be killing thousand or millions in planes and vehicles across the world. Millions more would starve so this would (in a sense) make you worse than either despite the intentions being noble; funny how that often happens with choices made in the name of freedom.

Id hate any choice but Id pick the president's side if it came down to it. At least there was order, law, and a good standard of living. Id miss the red meat but could deal with chicken :)

"I drank what?!" Socrates

[–] madmanmike1995 11 years ago

Either way you look at it people would have died, snake made the only true choice to shut it all down.

[–] xanxei 11 years ago

Option one is wrongly presented as anarchy - more likely you'd just get a different totalitarian regime.

I think Snake makes the right choice. Yes, billions would die, but as cold as this sounds, that's a good thing. The Escape movies' are similar enough to the real world that I think we can assume their population growth and resource use mirrors ours, in which case resetting the world is the only thing that gives the human race a chance in the long run. Putting an end to evil regimes is really just icing.

(Seriously, look it up - that we can't sustain this kind of exponential population growth is not an opinion so much as fairly simple math. And what do you suppose happens when our resources just can't stretch far enough?)

[–] rosixva24 11 years ago

Yes I completely agree with you. Kurt Russell payed a great role in the movie. I like his style statement in the movie. I bought that replica costume from here:

http://www.angeljackets.com/products/Escape-From-LA-Snake-Plissken-Lea ther-Jacket.html

[–] christomacin 11 years ago

"Yes, (millions) billions would die, but as cold as this sounds, that's a good thing..."

said Hitler, said Stalin, said Mao, said Pol Pot...you've even managed to add a few 0's to their totals.

If someone did what Snake did, a few thousand years later we'd be right back where we started from. As the fundamental nature of humanity would not change, it would be essentially pointless, much like the Biblical Flood, which, incredibly, is taught in Sunday school as a "moral story". It would be far kinder to drop some nukes and exterminate the human race if things are as hopeless as that. Otherwise your just passing the buck on to future generations that won't be any better than us and will make the same mistakes. Better just to end the suffering now, right?

"Why have you lived? Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke?"

[–] xanxei 11 years ago

Bringing Hitler into it already? Jeez. I'm not looking to exterminate certain people and not others, just saying there need to be fewer of us, ASAP.

And we're not necessarily doomed to make the same mistakes over and over. What's happened since the industrial revolution is actually kind of unlikely, and we've pretty much spent the fossil fuels which made it possible. Things would have to progress more slowly this time around, and on a smaller scale, and hopefully technology (having an established basis in literature) would progress faster than industry this time around, giving our civilization a fighting chance.

[–] christomacin 11 years ago

Bringing Hitler into it already? Jeez. I'm not looking to exterminate certain people and not others, just saying there need to be fewer of us, ASAP.

The subject of this discussion is deliberate mass murder. If you're a major league baseball player, you're gonna be compared with players from the past such as Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams. If you're a painter you going to be compared with past painters like Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and Monet. If you commit mass murder...guess who you get compared to? If you deliberately commit an act which you know will cause the deaths of millions, you gonna be compared with other folks in history who killed millions for what they thought was the greater good. Seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me. The fact that those who live and die is left up to chance is a rationalization and an evasion of responsibility for those actions. The motivations, victims and methods in Escape From L.A. may be different than the "esteemed gentlemen" I mentioned, but in the end the result is the same. I agree that in many cases Hitler and the Holocaust are used inappropriately as analogies, but this isn't one of them. Besides, I deliberately made a point of mentioning Left-winger psychos as well, who, incidentally, killed far more people than Mr. Hitler did. So it's not a left-right issue for me. I'm not sure why you singled out the name of Hitler when I mentioned the others in the same sentence.

And we're not necessarily doomed to make the same mistakes over and over. What's happened since the industrial revolution is actually kind of unlikely, and we've pretty much spent the fossil fuels which made it possible. Things would have to progress more slowly this time around, and on a smaller scale, and hopefully technology (having an established basis in literature) would progress faster than industry this time around, giving our civilization a fighting chance.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. I guess I'm a lot more cynical about the human race than you are. I think if you look at human history, you'll see that humans have been squandering resources and ruining the planet since the beginning of time. Even pre-industrial civilizations have been extremely destructive. The mammoths and mastodons were hunted to extinction by Native Americans in North America. The Mayans depleted their food supply, while Easter Island was deforested, causing the crash of those civilizations. They managed to do this without our modern technology. Even if what transpired in the film did actually happen, you can't "put the genie back in the bottle". You do realize the plot of this film - a magic box that shuts of technology "forever - is pure escapist fantasy, don't you? We'd find a way to get the system back online. Since the knowledge already exists, it wouldn't take that long to get back up to speed. Yet even if we did abandon fossil fuels, there's still nuclear power, or we could go back to coal, which would be even worse. Solar, turbine and thermal power could be made more efficient, as well. Then we'd have the problem of nuclear waste to contend with. There is every reason to believe that the human race would eventually find itself back in the same old jam. True, in a 500,000 hundred thousand year, or 1 million years, or 5 millions years, we might eventually evolve into a less rapacious species, but I doubt we're going to be given that much time. Unless we colonize other planets, a nature will get us eventually get us if we don't do it ourselves first. The Yosemite super volcano isn't going to politely sit back and wait for us acquire the technology to do something about it - it'll blow it's top on it's own schedule.

[–] averagejoeman2013 11 years ago

That was incredibly thought provoking and detailed, christomacin.

I often do wonder how mankind will end up within a century or two. Even if the population maintains a proper balance in that time, the rate of energy consumption continues to increase (with supplies falling). With nations such as China and India now outpacing the US with the consumption of fossil fuels (and still growing), I find it unlikely the trend will be reversed. Therefore, are we not setting ourselves up for a major collapse when the fuels supplies run low? Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but do you think we are heading towards a likely collapse unless a plentiful and practical alternative is found?

"Mankind cannot solve the world's problems. Mankind is the problem."

[–] the_departed94 10 years ago

You're wrong about the black box being pure fantasy. EMP's are a real thing and if we had the technology to set one off without a nuclear blast. It could technically fry every electrical hardware out there. Alright we've still have the information on how to rebuild this stuff but it would take a long time

[–] boo_themighty 11 years ago

[–] christomacin 11 years ago

People like you are evil. I know exactly what you are with your Brave New World agenda and false New Age retoric, but listen here:

The exponential population growth myth is a horrible lie. And this is why: peak child was reached in 2000, since the year 2000 the number of children in the world has remained constant at 2 billion. Do you know what that means? That means that the current population growth will stop at 12 billion, maximum, without interference. The growth we seen since 2000 is simply the result of people growing older. And here is a professor explaining it in more detail:
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/

You're right. Anyway, the problem with humanity isn't "overpopulation" or "technology", but the inherent characteristics of the human race which have gotten us into problems throughout our existence. If we made better choices as a species there is no reason why we couldn't sustain the population at it's present level, which by all accounts is declining in any case. I can't stand it when people use "over-population" as an excuse for their own moral and intellectual poverty, ready and willing to justify almost anything.

"Why have you lived? Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke?"

[–] MarvelFanGirl 10 years ago

Lol. At all the self righteous morons sidings with snakes choice

Saying the world is overpopulated
then you should be the first ones to blow your brains...why should you live

And other billions die

You die first a holes lol

[–] 10 years ago

[deleted]

[–] IvyTempleton 10 years ago

Saying the world is overpopulated
then you should be the first ones to blow your brains...why should you live

And other billions die

You die first a holes lol

Easy there Leslie Chow.

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