Like his contemporary, Brian De Palma, John Carpenter is a master at borrowing, reinterpreting, and occasionally stealing things from the best filmmakers of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. It’s apparent in Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 both in his filmmaking (he edits the film under the pseudonym “John T. Chance,” the name of John Wayne’s character in Rio Bravo, a clear Western influence) and in his music (he describes the soundtrack as a fusion of the theme from Dirty Harry and Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”). The Halloween soundtrack draws on The Exorcist’s piano theme in the same way.
But there’s a difference between the hacks and the auteurs, and Carpenter establishes himself as the latter with the original flourishes in AOP13. It’s an implied Western that uses its character archetypes just as comfortably. Its actors are sympathetic and believable without significant back story. Its violence is arbitrary and occasionally shocking, but never gratuitous or even particularly exciting (the violence isn’t what the film is about). And then there’s the sound.
The 2005 remake of Assault on Precinct 13 predictably got everything wrong. It added a mess of unnecessary characters and extraneous twists and replaced random street violence with a ho-hum corrupt cops story. And it botched the sound.
The original film’s soundtrack is essentially just two pieces, repeated at different lengths throughout the movie. The first is little more than a reedy ticking noise, like a baseball card in a bicycle spoke. Whether it blends into the film by counting off precious seconds or just mimicking broken machinery varies from scene to scene. The second piece is a thick, hazy synthesizer riff that plugs lazily through the occasional relaxed sequences in the film. It’s as minimalist as anything, but the approach is less a matter of deliberate artistry and more a product of Carpenter’s short composing time (just a few days) and low budget (he was working with old vacuum tubes that produced an unusual tone).
Carpenter would arguably reach his peak as a composer with the unmistakable Escape from New York score, but nothing before or after was as simple or essential to the film as the soundtrack in AOP13. And it goes beyond the soundtrack. In the street gang’s first assault on the precinct, done exclusively from a distance with silenced rifles, glass breaks, papers scatter, and office supplies explode. It doesn’t look anything like a gunfight. It’s as if the room is just destroying itself. The ricochets are the only indication that it’s gunfire.
During such a sequence, most films (the AOP13 remake included) would not be able to resist cutting away to the shooters, panning in on the frightened characters, and, most of all, bombarding the audience with noise and movement. But Carpenter never lets it go beyond a maddeningly slow boil, always inside the station, always allowing just a gunshot or two at a time, always parsing the action out, methodically chipping away at the false calm, and moving forward through the film only when necessary with terse, jagged bits of dialogue.
