Oh man I thought in the opening minutes a plane was going to crash into the twin towers and I was so excited. Not because I like that a plane crashed into the twin towers in real life, but because I would like discovering 22 years after it happened, that it happened in a film 20 years before real life. Anti-imperialist ideologue hijacks plane and crashes it in New York. It’s spot on.

It’s often an assumption of art that people, deprived of leadership, coalesce around strong or charismatic leaders who rarely have any but their own interest in mind. Admittedly the Duke seemed to have some interest in the people he led, or at least he stated that he planned to lead them across the bridge together. But something that confused me about the social stratification that develops in a carcel Manhattan, is the subway people. I expected to encounter some sort of Duke-enforced order keeping them down there, causing their madness, and never received such an explanation. Were they merely walkaways, rejecters of the Duke’s rule who left peacefully? Or just a reason to … I don’t know. They didn’t really play a role in the story. Their only purpose seemed to be to force Snake into a room so someone could explain to him, to us, what they were.

Probably my favorite thing about the movie was Romero, who looked like a cross between Peter Pan, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Ryuk from Death Note. Or the jazz tape. You know the one. It was an entertaining flick but I probably saw it forty years too late: its DNA is now a part of the action genre, of video games, TV and film. Everything it did seems so banal. When the doctor gives Snake the injection and says “Now tell him”, my expectation that Snake was going to receive extra encouragement to complete his task was fulfilled.

There’s one thing I kept laughing at: Snake’s cobra tattoo, except in close up, always looked like a question mark. Also the editing. I tried to see if it was just an audio/video stream desynch, but saw no evidence that the terribly-timed punch cuts were an issue of consumption venue rather than production quality.