While we’re on the topic of 2012 – not everyone’s subscribing to Darren Daulton’s astral-ascension end-times scenario. Paul W.S. Anderson picked that same year as a setting for his new take on Paul Bartel’s 1975 cult classic Death Race 2000, and he picked modestly. Originally slated as Death Race 3000, it’s a good bet that the ‘3000‘ angle was scrapped due to its promise of futurism; the new Death Race offers nothing in the way of speculation, nor any of the original film’s entertaining, snarky angle on things to come.
Anderson’s 2012 is roughly 2008, with the very minor addition of some sort of death race. The flick opens with a title card on the broken-down U.S. economy and a scene set at a manufacturing plant in the process of shutdown. That’s it. By now it doesn’t require extensive imagination to visualize a world in which bloodsport is available on Pay-Per-View, but Anderson has no interest in developing it any further.
Death Race is tire-slashed the same way Stephen King’s Running Man novella was hobbled in its transition to film: by translating a countrywide scenario (of a police state supplying gory entertainment to satiate the public and offer sublimation for any potential revolutionary impulses) to a local soundstage production. With it, both films surrender any interest the previous iterations had in examining the country, preferring instead the easiest possible surface assertion of viewer bloodthirst (In 2012, the U.S. economy has collapsed, and now people like to watch violence!) and leaving it at that. Death Race goes even farther than The Running Man in removing the action from the up-close and personal connection it needs to make its point. The Running Man at least chooses for its gaming grounds a cordoned-off part of post-earthquake Los Angeles, but Death Race sets its action on Terminal Island, a minor nowhere-in-particular land mass having nothing to offer but a prison, an industrially tricked-out racetrack, and a bridge (and really, why a bridge? You couldn’t have taken a cue from Alcatraz? Château d’If? People have known it’s a dumb idea to build a bridge to your prison island for quite a few centuries now).
Presumably Anderson thought this was a clever reference to Terminal Island, Stephanie Rothman’s influential 1973 women-in-prison flick and alternative plan for convict dispersal – but it’s a backfire. All the new placement does is drag the action to a more remote, vague spot, and remove the action that much more from relevance. Minus ten points.
Tags: death race, death race 2000, paul w.s. anderson, running man
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