John Carpenter makes suspense from patient widescreen framing and insistent electronic music. We value his economy and dry humour, though in Big Trouble in Little China the comedy has to compensate for some cumbersome action.
Fi1m perspective
Kurt Russell's Jack Burton talks as though everyone has been waiting for him to arrive and take charge. In Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Carpenter lets this American truck driver demonstrate why the decisions might be better left to somebody else. We laughed at Jack's confidence, because Russell makes his lack of qualifications so plain. Carpenter finds comedy in that gap without asking us to despise the man.
That comic streak was there in the science-fiction of Dark Star (1974), before Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978) brought his breakthrough. His patient widescreen framing gives us time to study a space and worry about what might enter it. The repeating phrases in his electronic scores keep that worry going without requiring another shock. We rate him most highly when he allows those simple methods to do the work.
The 1980s brought the anti-hero of Escape from New York (1981) and the isolation and creature horror of The Thing (1982). In Big Trouble in Little China, Russell is willing to make the supposed hero look foolish. The screenplay by David Z. Weinstein and Gary Goldman keeps puncturing Jack's self-importance, and Carpenter handles the shifts between comedy, martial arts and supernatural adventure with an agreeable lightness. That joke also stops the American's swagger becoming the film's own, though it does not remove the Chinatown clichés.
The limits are visible in the fights, which can grow cumbersome, and in effects that become tiresome. Borrowing from the Hong Kong sword-and-sorcery tradition gives Carpenter plenty to play with, but he cannot always make the fighting nimble enough. His music with Alan Howarth keeps the adventure moving and avoids insisting that Jack deserves our awe. It helps preserve the fun through some rather laboured action.
After The Ward (2010), he worked chiefly as a composer and executive producer. The move fits a director for whom music has long done so much of the work of making us uneasy. Start with Halloween for suspense; choose Big Trouble in Little China when a hero making a fool of himself sounds more inviting.
Biography
John Carpenter is an American filmmaker, screenwriter and composer. Born on 16 January 1948 in Carthage, New York, he studied at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
He is known for directing and often scoring Halloween (1978), Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and They Live (1988). Many of his films later gained cult status. Carpenter has also composed scores for several of his own productions and released original music albums.
