Greetings, and welcome to Earthling Cinema.
I’m your host, Garyx Wormuloid.
This week’s artifact is Demolition Man, starring white collar criminal Wellesley Snipes
and the Italian Stallion himself, Sylvester Stallion.
The film takes place in a bizarre alternate universe where people always address each
other by their full names.
Our protagonist is John Spartan, a cop who is beloved for his ability to destroy things.
That is, until he crosses paths with a blonde bombshell named Joaquin Phoenix, whose one
lie is enough to make everyone suddenly hate John Spartan and throw him in ice jail for
fifty years.
Cut to the future: where everything is all kumbaya because Emperor Palpatine over here
outlawed swear words.
Reminds me of my ex-wife!
The first one.
Well, and the third one.
But especially the second one.
Joaquin Phoenix escapes from ice jail and goes on a homicidal laughing spree.
Guess blondes really do have more fun.
Since the police in the future have lost their flair for beating civilians, they decide to
bring back the one guy who can get the job done: Rambo.
I mean Rocky.
I mean Judge Dredd.
I mean The Expendables 3.
Look, whoever he is, he immediately gets back to his old hobby of letting Phoenix get away
for the millionth time.
In a shocking twist, we learn Palpatine is a bad guy, and freed Phoenix in order to scare
people into giving him more power, even though he is already extremely powerful and everyone
treats him like a god.
That night, Spartan tries to play Nintendo Wii with his new co-worker Huxley, but she
Switches it up and puts an X over her Box.
Instead, they journey down into the sewers to gab with some mole people.
While they're talking with their defenses completely down, Phoenix has a wide open shot
at them from a higher vantage point with the element of surprise.
Somehow he ruins all that by just spraying gunfire aimlessly, and things quickly devolve
into a car chase along the 10 freeway, although at that hour they probably should have taken
the 101.
Realizing there's only 20 minutes left in the movie, Phoenix hurries things along by
killing Palpatine and adopting a new plan: defrost some more dudes and then sort of see
what happens.
What happens is that John Spartan shows up just in time to get caught in a claw machine.
Phoenix fires about a thousand rounds at him from point blank range, but none of the bullets
make contact, despite the fact that Spartan is STUCK IN A CLAW MACHINE.
Spartan escapes and the drops some sort of infinity stone on the ground, which instantly
freezes everything except himself, because they're just making up the rules as they go
along.
Then he blindsides Huxley with some workplace harassment and calls it a day.
Demolition Man is a parody of ‘80s sci fi action films, many of which were already parodies
of themselves.
The film pokes fun at all the tropes that make the genre nervously tick from the non-stop
cussing, to the necessity of having sex after action sequences, to the hero’s insistence
on driving, when everyone knows a Lyft will get you there in half the time with twice
the mints.
This parody is especially effective since it’s performed by a prototypical action
star whose star blew up in the 70s.
Unlike the other star that blew up in the 3000s and made everything all melty.
Where many future dystopian films take place in a tattered husk of a world or show a society
oppressed under a totalitarian regime, Demolition Man portrays an apparent Bachelor in Paradise,
where the grass is green and the seashells are...crappy.
There’s no violence and everyone’s feelings are treated with the utmost importance by
robots.
But underneath this utopian veneer lies a warning about attempting to arts and craft a perfect
society: Rob Schneider will still be there.
The film hints at its ominous message by totally plagiarising names from Brave New World.
Lenina Huxley takes her first name from the book’s character Lenina Crowne, and her
last name from its author General Huxley.
John is an homage to John the Savage.
And Alfredo Garcia probably means something too.
Right?
Isn’t that a kind of pasta?
The film imagines the effects on society when politeness becomes law, just like the five
second rule.
In Palpatine’s world, anything deemed unhealthy or unpleasant has been exorcism-ed.
While the intention is presumably to prevent people from getting butthurt, the film suggests
a dehumanizing effect.
The Verbal Morality Statute, enacted to encourage civilized conversation, has become an oppressive
moderator that wastes an extraordinary amount of paper.
That stuff doesn’t grow on trees.
Technology, ostensibly created to empower people, has come to inhibit their natural
urges.
Science has made it possible to simulate sex, but in doing so, has made it suck, and not
in the fun way.
And when people can't get their release in the traditional way, they're inevitably gonna
start sticking shells up their butts.
While crime has become virtually non-existent, the film suggests that the lack of conflict
has rendered society ill-equipped to deal with adversity, a disease that humans like
to talk about at graduations.
The contrast to this squeaky-clean, hyper-rationalized version of government is the sweaty, hot dirty
anarchy below.
The film, however, suggests that this is not a good option either, because the lack of
any system at all leads to starvation...and worse: a surplus of gluten.
The film’s conclusion is to strike a balance between the two.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go strike a balance between sobriety and a handful of
'ludes.
For Earthling Cinema, I’m Garyx Wormuloid.