ESCAPE ROOM (2017) vs ESCAPE ROOM (2019): Who Wins?

When you see the Google Trends graph showing how frequently people searched for the term "escape room" between 2010 and 2016, you probably think something to to the effect of, "huh. I guess people were getting excited about escape rooms."

But if you were a Hollywood producer, you would look at that same graph and think, "there's gotta be a movie in there somewhere." At least, that's what I assume when I search IMDb for "escape room" and find a list that looks like this:

Currently you can find the sequel to 2019's Escape Room in theaters, but most of these movies have largely been forgotten. To the general public, they're nothing more than the sort of garbage horror flicks destined to a lifetime in the bargain bin at your local big box store. Plenty of these movies saw no theatrical runs (one was even released via America's movie-lending service RedBox), so their impact is probably restricted to annoying people who unintentionally bought the wrong Escape Room.

However, for a community of writers, there's something instructive about holding up some of these movies side-by-side, so today we'll be comparing 2019's Escape Room (dir. Adam Robitel) to 2017's Escape Room (dir. Will Wernick). I'll admit up front: neither of them are entering the rotation of my favorite movies of all time, but their similarities and differences are illuminating. I do hate one of them a lot, while the other is broadly... fine. Think of this as me watching that movie so you don't have to.

Escape Room (2017)

After surrendering their phones (and any chance to call for help if things go wrong), six friends enter an escape room, but not everything is as it seems. They're largely restricted to three small rooms. Eventually things go wrong. The bodies pile up, and the characters divulge secrets from their pasts. Shocking, I know. Will anyone make it out alive? Can anyone actually escape the room?

Perhaps the weirdest part of this movie's structure is just how slow and plodding it feels. We see someone die in the first couple of minutes, sure, but after that the movie really drags its feet about making anything interesting happen. Sure, we know that the characters are in danger because this is a horror flick, but the characters don't realize that, so they just kind of fumble around their three rooms, looking for clues. After a full hour of screen-time, violent stuff starts to happen again, and you will be breathing a sigh of relief that the movie has finally started with thirty minutes left on the clock.

Escape Room (2019)

Would it surprise you to know that we're about to retread a lot of the same territory? Probably not. After all, we're talking about two movies with identical titles released only two years apart.

Here goes: six strangers get invited to an escape room with a huge cash prize. They surrender their phones so they can't contact the outside world. However, the first few puzzles seem pretty intense (including a fire that nearly roasts them alive), and the group argues about how much danger in the game is real until a member of the group dies. The group struggles to survive through increasingly elaborate games, revealing their own trauma (relating to secrets from their past) as they go.

We're Not So Different, You and I

Both movies start in basically the same place: someone trapped in an escape room, clearly in a perilous situation. After that resolves, we're introduced to the protagonists of our adventure, a group of characters who are going to be tested and tortured in the crucible of the escape room.

Both movies function as a sort of Saw-lite. 2019 is Saw-lite by merit of its PG-13 rating. 2017 is Saw-lite because, despite its R rating, it never really finds the creativity or brutality of a Saw flick. Are either movies the next Citizen Kane? No, they're not even the next It: Chapter 2, but at their most entertaining moments the puzzles are genuinely pleasurable to watch, especially when the puzzles are tinged with horror elements. After all, that's the appeal of the movie: an escape room where the stakes aren't just pretend.

Also both movies stumble when they forget that.

Spectacle

Back to the beginnings: in the 2019 movie, the opening moment shows a room that is shrinking in to crush the man trapped inside. He scrambles around the room, trying to solve an elaborate riddle. As he works, he explains his thought-process aloud. Is it a little phony? Sure, but it functions to bring the audience into the puzzle. Here are our two key ingredients blended together: we understand the life-and-death stakes because of the spectacle of splintering furniture, and he talks his way through the puzzle. It's a solid opening.

What about the 2017 movie? Here we have one dude muttering in a concrete chamber, fiddling with a box with three knobs. I couldn't decipher what the puzzle was, but that could be a personal failing. It finally unlocks, revealing a double-ended key. He puts one end of the key into a lock, something jabs his thumb, and he collapses on the floor, foaming at the mouth.

Frankly, this one is boring.

We don't care about the character in either case because we just met them. But the second movie screws it up even further: we have no opportunity to care about the puzzle. We're not drawn into it, and there's no spectacle. It's just some anonymous stranger having a seizure on the floor. In real life, that would be shocking, but we're watching this from the comfort of our sofa.

Let's mark this as a point for 2019.

Friends or Strangers?

Ask me to go to an escape room with five strangers, and I'll inevitably "have plans." Five friends? I'm there. But which works better for the movie?

Well, if these two movies are anything to go by, strangers. Definitely strangers. One of the key things that stands out about 2017's Escape Room is just how awkward the dialogue is at the start of the movie. Characters greet each other with phrases like, "How are you doing, big brother?" just so we can all be clear on the relationships. The dialogue in 2019's Escape Room might not be Oscar worthy, but at least it sounds natural-ish. 2017 bends over backwards to make it clear oh, this character thinks that character is cheating on her with that other character and...

And those relationships don't make the puzzles any more interesting. For instance, one couple in the escape room is horny. That's it. That's their entire characterization. Does this make the puzzles any more interesting? Does it add to the stakes? Not really. They start by taking off a chastity belt in one of the lamest puzzles in the game, and that's basically it. Why bother?

The 2019 film reveals that all of the characters were chosen for the escape room because they were lone survivors, and each of them deals with the guilt in a different way. Some blame themselves, some retreat into a shell, and so on. The puzzles serve as a way to reveal parts of their characters and to add genuine conflict to the movie: who is going to win? The survivor who survived by luck? Or the survivor who survived by selfishness? How are they going to work together as a team?

That's genuine conflict. The 2017 film, in comparison, just has bickering. Does that add to the story? I don't know. Are you the kind of person who would go to an IKEA to watch newlyweds buy furniture together for the first time? If that's your idea of fun, sure, the bickering here will be a blast for you. If not? You'll probably just be eager to see them die horrible deaths, and that's the only way this interfaces with the puzzles. But since the characters don't realize that they're in danger until the last half-hour of the movie? You'll be waiting more than you'd like.

Ultimately, this is the lesson that every writer can take from Escape Room and Escape Room:

Sometimes the Premise is a Promise

According to IMDb, 2017 released with the tagline: "Will you survive?" Isn't that kind of the question in the majority of horror movies? As is so often the case, 2019 does marginally better: "Solve the Puzzle. Escape the Room. Find the clues or die." Again we have the threat of death, but at least this time the threat of death is specific to the premise of the movie: puzzles, locked rooms, and clues.

Funnily enough, it is 2019 that puts a greater emphasis on death, and 2017 that plays out more like a real escape room. However, neither of them manage to actually nail all the points of their premise.

Remember: by its very premise, the movie has promised us a horror story in an escape room setting.

While it is genuinely better and more fun, at points the 2019 film forgets to be an escape room at all, especially towards the middle. One puzzle is just melting a block of ice. It is not exciting, and it feels like it has wandered too far away from that escape room premise.

On the other end, they could have filmed 90 percent of the 2017 film in an actual escape room, and a lot of the puzzles feel natural for that setting. However, its clear that the creative team didn't really know what they were doing, so the movie is always really sloppy. For instance, in one of the movie's first scenes, a houseless person throws a drink at the car the leads are driving. The characters scream, and then go to dinner. And for the rest of the movie, I was wondering when this houseless person would return. Why include that scene in the movie otherwise? But he never comes back. It's just a thing that happened on their date-night, apparently. Another main character is introduced at a dinner scene. She is one of the first named characters to be mentioned, her role is hyped up, but then she walks off, and that's the end of it.

The best real-life escape rooms are precisely crafted for entertainment and pleasure. Neither movie captures that precision, but one gets a hell of a lot closer. The characters in the 2017 movie don't even realize that they're in a horror movie until the last half hour. The premise promised the audience something, but it failed to deliver.

So What?

To sum up, these movies are examples of something of which every writer should be aware: when you start to tell a story, you start to make promises. Even a premise can be a promise. Are you keeping your promises? Neither of these movies are brilliant, but there's nothing stopping you from being brilliant. So why not take a few minutes to look at your most recent piece and ask yourself, just what am I promising here? And am I actually following through on that?

Remember that poster for 2017? I remembered the detail of the blue dress long after I first saw the poster. And honestly I can't think of a more emblematic image for why that movie sucks so much: it advertised something it knew it couldn't deliver.

This is part one of a three-part series. In part two, I compare two different haunted house movies from 2021, and in part three, I tackle the horror movie remake. If you enjoyed this entry, please check them out.