Corrected entry: Why on Earth does the President have a British accent? This is an oddity that needed to be explained in the film, but never was. Are we supposed to assume that his parents moved to the U.S. before he was born? If that was the case, he would have lost his accent to a significant degree just from learning grammar/phonics in American schools, hanging around with American friends, etc. He couldn't have been a hermit who would've avoided these types of activities since apparently he was well-known enough to successfully run for President.
Corrected entry: In Snake's first attempt to rescue the President, he kills a guard with a thrown knife. However, the shots are out of order. First they show the guard reacting to getting knifed and the "thwip" sound of the knife going through the air is overdubbed. Then they cut to Snake actually making the motions to throw the knife. If you look closely you can see that he is making the entire throw in the second shot, his hand is not simply continuing to move after throwing the knife.
Correction: The initial sound effect is from the crossbow that the enemy is holding. Watch the arrow carefully.
Corrected entry: Snake is supposed to bring the president back in the glider, but where would he sit? The cockpit was barely big enough for Snake to climb in alone.
Correction: Since all we see are close up shots of Snake in the glider, there could have been enough room behind him for another passenger.
Corrected entry: On the cover of "Escape From New York", if you look at the gun Plissken is holding, the gun has no carbine in it.
Correction: Whatever this means, it is NOT a film mistake.
Corrected entry: Near the end of the film, Snake and his companions arrive at the top of the World Trade Center, having run upstairs for most of the way, and they're not even winded.
Correction: They simply took a few breaks near the end of the climb.
Corrected entry: The film presents the idea that by 1988 crime has gotten so bad in the U.S. that the entire city of New York has to become one big prison for all the law breakers in the country. If this is so then where are all the people at? We see scatterings of them here and there and there are a few hundred during the wrestling match but that's about it, certainly not enough to represent a 400% increase in the crime rate.
Correction: Not all of NYC became a prison, only the borough of Manhattan. NYC has four other boroughs.
Correction: Not to get too dark, but a prison the size of New York with no rules or guards inside would quickly result in mass deaths due to gang wars, etc. Many might be sent in, but a majority of them would not survive long.
Correction: Needed for the noir mood. Same problem in The Warriors - empty subway lines and streets.
Corrected entry: While trying to get a response from Washington about the code name, David 14, the aircraft, which moments later is revealed as Air Force One, finally communicates with them. The female voice says they are going to crash while spurting threats. As she is doing this, you can hear the engines of the plane getting louder and louder over the radio. It is obviously the sound of a propeller plane. Moments later, a shot reveals Air Force One as a jet engine airliner, not capable of making the sound heard over the radio. (00:10:25)
Correction: The sound is radio static, not propellers.
Corrected entry: At the end of the film, when the good guys are escaping with the president on the bridge -- at the command center one of the officers finds out where they are and says to the commanding officer, "they are on the 69th street bridge". They were on the 59th street bridge, which connects Manhattan and Queens.
Correction: The bridge in the movie is very different from the 59th St. Bridge in New York. It's a lot narrower and very tight at entrance even accounting for how long ago the movie was made, unlikely a main route in NY was ever that constricted. Looks to be a single deck truss type construction with close beams in the movie rather than a double-decked cantilever. At the end of the credits it lists the city of St. Louis in the special thanks section. The actual bridge used in filming was probably somewhere in Missouri and not in NY.
Correction: Throughout the movie the bridge is referred to as the 69th St bridge. Any NYer knows it doesn't really exist, but who says that in the movie world it wasn't built.
Correction: The actual bridge in the film was the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge over the Mississippi River in north St. Louis. It is used as bike/ped bridge connecting the Mississippi Greenway in Missouri to a series of trails in Illinois.
Corrected entry: Hauk puts on Snake's wrist clock and tells Snake he has 22hrs:59min:59seconds to return with the President's briefcase, because the summit the President was going to ends in 22 hours and Snake has to complete the mission in that time. If Snake must return within 22 hours, why would his timer be set for the extra hour? (00:22:00)
Correction: Because at exactly that time, the president would be useless for the summit if he was not somehow present with the tape in time to start the piece talks. If Snake would even been a few minutes later getting the President there with the tape, he was as good as dead anyways. Plus there's no evidence that Hauk really had any intention of honoring his agreement to free Snake anyways, but did at the end due to the President showing gratitude at least.
Corrected entry: The scenes of various helicopters flying around are very very fake looking. In one scene, toward the beginning, the main rotor blade isn't rotating fast enough to obtain flight. (00:06:00)
Correction: While this may be true as FX in the film goes, it can be explained. You know when you see helicopter rotors in a movie, get to a certain speed, then seem to slow, stop and reverse? It's due to the way our eyes 'see' motion in a limited-motion environment (24 or 30 frames of still images per second, fools our brains into seeing movement). Slow rotor blades could be a skewed perception of their real speed.
Corrected entry: In the scene where Snake locates the wreckage of Air Force One, you see the right-hand side of the tail section bearing the star-spangled banner. The flag is displayed with the field of stars to the rear of the aircraft, the opposite way round from the way it is on the right-hand side of the real Air Force One.
Correction: This is NOT the Air Force One as it looks today or in 1981. This is the Air Force One of an alternate timeline where World War III has taken place and New York has been turned into a prison island. In this timeline someone apparently decided to turn the flag on the right side the other way around (so as to have the stars facing toward the rear).
Corrected entry: In various scenes, you can see the seal of the President on the right side of the plane. But when snake is walking by the wreckage, the seal is now gone.
Correction: When Snake walks past the wreckage, the portion of the plane's nose that has the seal is not visible at any time, but there is the suggestion of a round blueish insignia below and left of the cockpit fire. We can presume this is the seal.
Corrected entry: Brain tells Snake about a map he obtained indicating where all the hidden mines were on the 69th street bridge and Maggie adds that they obtained the map from a guy who got all the way across before the police shot him. How did Brain obtain this map seeing as how the guy was shot on the other side?
Correction: They obviously got their copy of the map from him before he made the crossing. The fact that he made it across is simply brought up as evidence that the map can be trusted. Where the original information came from is an open question.
Correction: Something being unexplained is not a mistake, just an unanswered question. A detailed backstory on the President is unnecessary in the film and would only break up the narrative flow. Many films feature characters with accents either that do not match their supposed background (Kevin Costner as an American-sounding Robin Hood, Sean Connery as a Scottish-accented Russian submarine commander to name but two) or that bear little or no resemblance to an actual accent from the relevant country, to the extent that, as with many other common movie conventions, it is not considered to be a mistake.
Tailkinker ★