Demolition Man

The last movie I watched was Demolition Man. Demolition Man is a 1993 action movie starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock. The movie came out when I was a child, but this was the first time I had ever seen it.

The film starts with an almost post-apocalyptic future LA where crime is rampant, and criminals control the city. It is a bit funny since the future is only 2032, though. Stallone plays a tough cop named John Spartin who is trying to rescue some people from a criminal played by Snipes. He manages to arrest Snipes, but all of the people die. People blame both Snipes’s character Simon Phoenix and John Spartan. Their punishment is to be cryogenically frozen, which is a science fiction concept where people are put to sleep and frozen, but they can be woken up in the future.

The view of LA in this movie is very interesting. During the 1970s and 80s there was a big increase in crime in America, especially in big cities like New York, LA and Chicago. There were a lot of science fiction movies that came out in this period that showed the future as filled with crime, such as Escape from New York and Robocop. In the case of LA, the LA Riots happened in 1992 and may have influenced Demolition Man.

In 2032, the world has become a utopia where there is no violence, and everybody lives peacefully. The police only have to deal with small crimes and there are no major crimes. Someone helps Simon Phoenix escape from prison, and he begins to kill people and find some weapons. The police aren’t used to dealing with murders and killings so they decide to wake up John Spartan so he can fight and arrest Simon Phoenix again. Spartan is given a partner, Lenina Huxley.

The person who freed Simon is actually the leader of LA and the man who created the utopia, Dr. Raymond Cocteau, who is played by Nigel Hawthorn. Dr. Cocteau is angry that his utopia is not perfect. There is a group call the Scraps, led by a man named Edgar Friendly, who don’t like how strict the rules in the utopian society are. People are not even allowed to say bad words. Dr. Cocteau woke up Simon so that he can kill Edgar Friendly and the Scraps so that he can finally have a perfect utopian society. Spartan and Huxley have to fight Simon to protect Friendly.

I find movies like this interesting because they show what people at the time thought the future would be like. Although crime rose during the 70s and 80s, it started dropping during the 90s and 2000s. Honestly, there have not been any huge changes in America like what was shown in the movie. Although society is certainly more peaceful, it has not become a perfect violence-free society like that shown in the movie. Overall, the movie was a fairly entertaining action film with some good jokes. It was an interesting look into what people in the late 80s and early 90s thought about crime.

Nathaniel

Vocabulary

post-apocalyptic (adjective) – a period in time after very serious damage and destruction in past or future events

rampant (adjective) – proliferating or getting worse quickly and in an uncontrolled way

riot (noun) – ​ an occasion when a large number of people behave in a noisy, violent, and uncontrolled way in public, often as a protest

utopia (noun) – ​ a perfect society in which people work well with each other and are happy