Just watched The Last Castle, a Robert Redford/James Gandolfini movie from 2001 and thought it interesting to compare the similarities and differences.

Both feature older guys who are natural leaders, but are determined to just see their sentence out, until they realise how rotten the system is. The inciting incident is the death of an inmate, with the prison doc unable to do anything due to a lack of supplies. Both feature a charged assault on guards who are picking them off from an elevated vantage point, until they eventually overcome them with improvised missiles. Both end a little ambiguously regarding the fate of the leader, who - it turns out - was mostly doing it for his fellow inmates.

Obviously there’s plenty of differences, and many of the similarities are just tropes of the genre. The big difference, I thought, is that there’s no Gandolfini character on Narkina 5 - no tyrannical warden making everyone’s life a misery. The sadistic-seeming dude who welcomes Cassian isn’t seen much of again, and when they finally reach the top, it’s just some guy (who I like to imagine died his hair grey to try to look older).