It's a fun movie, but I'm not sure what to make of the ideology. On one hand, the movie seems to kind of say it'd be bad if cops never used violence, but on the other hand, it portrays a world run by corporations where all culture has been commercialized to the extent that ad jingles play on TV and all restaurants are Taco Bells (or Pizza Hut in Europe, because they didn't seem to get that that product placement wasn't meant to be seen as a good thing).
And yeah, gentrification is a major theme there whether it's intentional or not. Anti-graffiti walls?
I think it might be a time capsule of gen-x slacker libertarianism. The anti-villain/decoy villain is Dennis Leary living in a sewer because he wanted to say gamer words and ear meat.
And then John Spartan is beating up Dennis Leary and is all "wtf these are poor people stealing food?" Which just goes to show how today is incomprehensible even by the standards of the distopian cop fiction of the past.
Definitely one of my fav Wesley Snipes characters. That man was born for the stage.
I think there was a certain elemnt of good humor to it that keeps it tolerable. The whole la crime hell sequence in the beginning seemed over the top enough that I think it was deliberate parody and stallone's character is a self-satire of the 80s super-murder-cop guy who turns out to actually have some emotional intelligence and isn't just a violent killer. The core message is something like California hippy-fascism is bad and utopia is boring, but not that utopia is outright bad. It does have an anti-igentrification thing going with all the clean hippy fascist places being dull and lifeless, excluding poor people to literally live underground for not being sanitized enough. The underground crime rebels are shown being almost as naive and gentle as the hippy fascists when confronted with Simon Phoenix, which to me at least suggests the authors weren't intending a completely reactionary reading of utopia as bad.
The resistance was Dennis Leary living in an abandoned sewer system because life on the surface was too... peaceful, clean, utopian, and free of suffering? It's so American. "Those fuckers solved all of society's problems and now no one goes hungry and everything is great! I'm so mad about it i'm going to go live in my own shit!
I don't remember tech bros really existing the way they do now. We were still over a decade out from the iPhone, from mass adoption of video games, from ubiquitous cell phones. The kind of wannabe playboy technofascist celebrity that's been a dominant cultural force since the Steve Jobs cult fired up really wasn't on the scene yet.
I think that's reflected in the portrayal of the hippy fascists being very sensitive to aggression - the running swearing gag, the guy getting shallow emotional counselling from the public phone/computer terminal, the use of pastels and kimonos as formal dress, the food not having salt. It's an early version of "soy" and reflects the same kind of anxiety about late 20th century masculinity that Fight Club tapped in to. But then it softens and subverts that somewhat when John actually finds he enjoys knitting, and there's a theme of John's authentic aggression meeting Bullock's character's nostalgia for violence, and how her desire for the violence of the past isn't good. The authors are saying that, soy or not, the la of the 90s often was violent, polluted, and difficult and the soy future isn't intended to be read as inherently bad, rather than some restrictions and regulations went beyond the point of benefit.
The end where the one cop defects to the rebels is, I think, supposed to show a thesis-antithesis synthesis thing implying that they're going to keep all the good aspects of the utopian society, but with the real villain gone they'll be able to relax the enforced social and cultural conformity and people will be able to live more authentically.
That's all part of what I like about it. It doesn't outright fall in to shouting homophobic slurs like a lot of contemporary macho movies, it toys with different conceptions of masculinity, it's very self-aware about it's genre, it critques utopia without going all in on libertarian brain worms.
The rich bazinga in charge of it all is also shown to be hypocritical in his society's condemnation of violence, yet he's willing to thaw out a murderer from the past to kill some poor people. I've always assumed it was implied that he'd done something similar before.
We're under attack by time-travelling cop movies from 1993.
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Sorry, but you need to call him by his proper name, John Spartan, not to be confused with the other Spartan John.
That and John Commando's name being John Matrix will never stop being amusing to me.
There's probably an alternate universe where Keanu plays a character called Johnny Matrix.
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"They called him the Demolition Man" is an "I'm so tired of all these Star Wars" tier title drop too, I just have to respect that.
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It's a fun movie, but I'm not sure what to make of the ideology. On one hand, the movie seems to kind of say it'd be bad if cops never used violence, but on the other hand, it portrays a world run by corporations where all culture has been commercialized to the extent that ad jingles play on TV and all restaurants are Taco Bells (or Pizza Hut in Europe, because they didn't seem to get that that product placement wasn't meant to be seen as a good thing).
And yeah, gentrification is a major theme there whether it's intentional or not. Anti-graffiti walls?
I think it might be a time capsule of gen-x slacker libertarianism. The anti-villain/decoy villain is Dennis Leary living in a sewer because he wanted to say gamer words and ear meat.
And then John Spartan is beating up Dennis Leary and is all "wtf these are poor people stealing food?" Which just goes to show how today is incomprehensible even by the standards of the distopian cop fiction of the past.
Definitely one of my fav Wesley Snipes characters. That man was born for the stage.
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Lol.
I think there was a certain elemnt of good humor to it that keeps it tolerable. The whole la crime hell sequence in the beginning seemed over the top enough that I think it was deliberate parody and stallone's character is a self-satire of the 80s super-murder-cop guy who turns out to actually have some emotional intelligence and isn't just a violent killer. The core message is something like California hippy-fascism is bad and utopia is boring, but not that utopia is outright bad. It does have an anti-igentrification thing going with all the clean hippy fascist places being dull and lifeless, excluding poor people to literally live underground for not being sanitized enough. The underground crime rebels are shown being almost as naive and gentle as the hippy fascists when confronted with Simon Phoenix, which to me at least suggests the authors weren't intending a completely reactionary reading of utopia as bad.
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I love Demolition man so much.
The resistance was Dennis Leary living in an abandoned sewer system because life on the surface was too... peaceful, clean, utopian, and free of suffering? It's so American. "Those fuckers solved all of society's problems and now no one goes hungry and everything is great! I'm so mad about it i'm going to go live in my own shit!
10/10 one of the better 90s sci fi films.
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I don't remember tech bros really existing the way they do now. We were still over a decade out from the iPhone, from mass adoption of video games, from ubiquitous cell phones. The kind of wannabe playboy technofascist celebrity that's been a dominant cultural force since the Steve Jobs cult fired up really wasn't on the scene yet.
I think that's reflected in the portrayal of the hippy fascists being very sensitive to aggression - the running swearing gag, the guy getting shallow emotional counselling from the public phone/computer terminal, the use of pastels and kimonos as formal dress, the food not having salt. It's an early version of "soy" and reflects the same kind of anxiety about late 20th century masculinity that Fight Club tapped in to. But then it softens and subverts that somewhat when John actually finds he enjoys knitting, and there's a theme of John's authentic aggression meeting Bullock's character's nostalgia for violence, and how her desire for the violence of the past isn't good. The authors are saying that, soy or not, the la of the 90s often was violent, polluted, and difficult and the soy future isn't intended to be read as inherently bad, rather than some restrictions and regulations went beyond the point of benefit.
The end where the one cop defects to the rebels is, I think, supposed to show a thesis-antithesis synthesis thing implying that they're going to keep all the good aspects of the utopian society, but with the real villain gone they'll be able to relax the enforced social and cultural conformity and people will be able to live more authentically.
That's all part of what I like about it. It doesn't outright fall in to shouting homophobic slurs like a lot of contemporary macho movies, it toys with different conceptions of masculinity, it's very self-aware about it's genre, it critques utopia without going all in on libertarian brain worms.
The rich bazinga in charge of it all is also shown to be hypocritical in his society's condemnation of violence, yet he's willing to thaw out a murderer from the past to kill some poor people. I've always assumed it was implied that he'd done something similar before.
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: