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Things have been kind of quiet concerning the remake of John Carpenter's 1981 classic Escape from New York starring Kurt Russell as the one-eyed bad ass, Snake Plissken, who is sent into a post-disaster New York city to rescue the President from an island full of criminals and Isaac Hayes. While once rumored to star Gerard Butler with Len Wiseman at the helm, the project has been stuck in development hell for quite a while now. Well it looks like things are starting to heat back up for the remake, with new details on how the New York penal colony will be realized and how Snake's character will be handled. Hit the jump to read on.

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New York Magazine has scored a series of details on the film, mostly concerning the new concept behind the city-turned prison in the new film. According to the studio, instead of New York having a post-apocalyptic look in the new movie, the back story will address a "dirty bomb" going off near the city limits being the cause for the city being evacuated and turned into a penal colony. Obviously this concept is designed to both save the studio money as well as contemporize the story in the context of the country's current fears and threats. If nothing else, the idea of an abandoned, yet pristine-looking New York sounds like a very eerie visual.

A more exciting piece of info was the assurance that the character of Snake will remain authentic to the original version realized by Carpenter and Russell. As a matter of fact, fidelity to the main character's original concept was one of the points in the contract signed by Carpenter to allow a remake to be made, which goes to show just how awesome John Carpenter really is.

While it's popular to whine and moan about why most remakes aren't necessary, I'm going to hold back on this one. Provided it's given the right tone and reasonable effects, it's entirely possible that this new Escape from New York can be a balls to the wall sci-fi action flick to remember. Just so long as it's better than Carpenter's sequel, Escape from L.A.

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