Sci-Fi Thriller Lockout Plagiarised Escape From New York, Court Rules

You may have noticed the recent news that a remake of John Carpenter’s 1981 cult classic ‘Escape From New York’ is in the works. However, one recent sci-fi action thriller felt suspiciously like an unofficial remake already - so much so that Carpenter took its makers to court over it.

Made in France, 2012′s ‘Lockout’ was directed by James Mather and Stephen Saint Ledger, and co-written and produced by French cinema icon Luc Besson (director of ‘Leon,’ ‘The Fifth Element’ and more recently ‘Lucy,’ and producer of the ‘Taken’ and ‘The Transporter’ movies).

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It starred Guy Pearce as a roguish ex-convict sent on a mission to rescue the President’s daughter (Maggie Grace of ‘Taken,’ who only ever seems to get kidnapped in Besson productions) from a maximum security prison in a space station.

Aside from the space setting, all of this seemed highly reminiscent of Carpenter’s film (and its 1996 follow-up ‘Escape From LA’), in which Kurt Russell portrayed a square-jawed antihero sent to rescue the President from a future New York City which has been repurposed as a maximum security prison.

Even though Carpenter’s movie has had no shortage of imitators over the years (the Italian ‘Bronx Warriors’ trilogy of the 1980s was a pretty bare-faced rip-off, and more recently the British action movie ‘Doomsday’ liberally borrowed from it), ‘Lockout’ would seem a particularly brazen facsimile.

As such, Carpenter himself took Besson, Mather, St. Ledger and film company EuropaCorp to court over the charge of plagiarism - and it turns out the French court ruled in Carpenter’s favour.

According to an excerpt of the ruling published by Observatoire européen de l'audiovisuel (via The Playlist), the court had “embarked on a detailed comparison of the plot and development of the films, their characters, and the sequences filmed, in order to determine the similarities between the works and determine whether these were sufficiently significant to be characteristic of infringement of copyright.

“A number of elements present in both ‘New York 1997’ [the French title for ’Escape From New York’] and ‘Lock-Out’ could in fact be considered as stock elements in the cinema…The court nevertheless noted many similarities between the two science-fiction films: both presented an athletic, rebellious and cynical hero, sentenced to a period of isolated incarceration - despite his heroic past - who is given the offer of setting out to free the President of the United States or his daughter held hostage in exchange for his freedom; he manages, undetected, to get inside the place where the hostage is being held, after a flight in a glider/space shuttle, and finds there a former associate who dies; he pulls off the mission in extremis, and at the end of the film keeps the secret documents recovered in the course of the mission.

“The court held that the combination of these elements, which gave the film ‘New York 1997’ its particular appearance and originality, had been reproduced in ‘Lock-Out’… The difference in the location of the action and the more modern character featured in ‘Lock-Out’ was not enough to differentiate the two films.“

While the amount EuropaCorp has been ordered to pay in damages - €10,000 (just over £7,300) to Carpenter, a further €20,000 to ‘Escape From New York’s writers (Carpenter and Nick Castle), and €50,000 to the film’s current rights holders - may not seem too big a sum for a major film company, this might well prove something of a landmark ruling.

It’s no secret that cinema likes to recycle the same essential set-ups time and again - might this ruling impact this? And where can the line be drawn between homage and rip-off?

Picture Credit: Avco Embassy Pictures, EuropaCorp