It won’t be hard to dismiss Fortress as a comic book, trying to disguise itself as a serious action movie. But sadly, Fortress may be a more accurate prediction of the prison system than people want.
Worse, it may be a prediction of what people do want. If you had the time to watch the recent Escape at Dannemora, you may feel some disturbing similarities between that and Fortress.
I worry how many MAGA people feel that prisoners have no right to talk about rehabilitation. Or any kind of harsh conditions. That prisons exist to punish criminals, period. Fortress never mentions rehabilitation. But it shows you a system where punishment is everything, the only thing. For me, it also shows you some ominous signs of where our country is heading.
One ominous warning near the beginning of Fortress. An announcement to the new prisoners that this place is deep in a barren desert. Even if you got out, the desert would kill you—fast. The upstate New York location of the real Dannemora is less deadly.
True, but tough enough. Frigid temperatures, wind, snow, isolation. People prepared for this location…in summer months anyway, stand a fighting chance. Most escapees don’t.
More subtle but ominous too. The movie starts with a highly decorated war veteran and his wife arrested for conceiving a second child. Never mind that their first child died as an infant. No laws to protect couples whose baby died that young. That’s their bad luck, the law is the law. Crime does not pay, as they hear over and over and over again. Law and order. No talk about what is fair. Don’t whine about fairness. Don’t do the crime, blah blah you know the rest.
Another similarity between Fortress and Escape at Dannemora; prisons run by corporations. I understand; some of the technology in Fortress is still in the future. John Brennack, the hero in Fortress gets a warning his first night in the prison. “Don’t dream.” What could that mean?
He dreams of better times, he and his wife making love. Cut to a guy in a control room with multiple screens watching the action. Brennack wakes in excruciating pain.
People can say, c’mon… that stuff’s way in the future. But I suspect many felt the same way about AI, not too many years ago. Or tasers or electronic ankle bracelets years before that. Another obvious question, who monitors the corporations running the prisons? In Fortress, the corporations’ emphasis is heavy on threats and pain. Prisoners are intestinated—an internal device inserted in their bodies (you’ll never guess where) to keep them in line. A quick, easy way to subdue them—with devices to cause intense pain…even kill them when security feels it is necessary.
Another movie to use as comparison, Clint Eastwood, Escape from Alcatraz, released 1979, set in 1963. So many themes in common: A cruel muscle man {the Wolf} intent on raping anyone weaker than him, a vicious warden intent on breaking your spirit, an escape through the guts of the prison infra-structure.
Okay but what are the main differences? Frank Morris {Eastwood} is serving a long sentence—for armed robbery. In Fortress, Brennack and his wife Karen are serving long sentences too. But their crime; wanting another child; that they will love unconditionally. Even with the brutality and sick blackmail they face, Brennnack and Karen never lose their compassion in this hell on earth. it is society that has lost any sense of justice, fairness; and empathy. Is this where the MAGA people are steering our country? Ii’s looking that way.
Brennack comes in contact with a cross-section of the standard maximum-security prison characters. Clearly he is a survivor but much more sympathetically sketched out than Frank Morris or Manny (Jon Voigt} in Runaway Train. Does it matter?
Yes, and I think this is why. The prison system shown in Fortress aims to grind everyone, not just the hard-asses, into ground concrete. Those who raped, killed and tortured twenty five years ago and still enjoy remembering those days; need to stay locked up…of course. But these are not the only prison inmates,
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