In their opening duke out, the cackling Phoenix - clad in the eminently early-’90s outfit of a black-and-yellow checkered jacket and black-and-white striped MC Hammer pants - prompts Spartan to blow up the building they’re in (some serious demolition, man). Spartan loves justice, Phoenix loves chaos, and ever the twain shall fight. The film wisely wastes no time establishing either character’s past or motivation. His is a world where the ’92 riots seem to have never ended, leaving the city engulfed in flame and chaos: “Remember when they used to let commercial airlines land in this town?” is the grim first line of the picture, spoken by a helicopter pilot as he escorts Spartan to a battle with a crime lord who has an even better name: Simon Phoenix, played by Wesley Snipes. (The title began its life not as part of the movie, but rather as the name of a song Sting wrote for Grace Jones in 1981 one assumes it was applied here largely because it just sounded cool.) He is the phallically named LAPD hero John Spartan, whom we meet in the then-future of 1996, patrolling a hellish Los Angeles. In it, Sylvester Stallone portrays the titular gent, who doesn’t work in demolition, yet manages to be present for a great deal of demolishing. That’s in no small part because it presents a bizarrely compelling philosophical argument, ultimately becoming a libertarian screed that’s as wackadoo as it is persuasive. Fantastic in its inventiveness and borderline insane in its execution, it’s an unsung masterwork of the ’90s action canon. It owes an explicit debt to Huxley’s tome, naming one of its leads Lenina Huxley (Lenina being the name of a central figure in Brave New World) and meticulously conjuring up a world where contentment and politeness are virtues held above all others - and subsequently arguing that it’s mostly a bunch of bullshit. That film is Marco Brambilla’s 1993 epic Demolition Man, which turns 25 years old this week. Though ambitiously conceived and beautifully composed, I’ve always found it to be a snob’s dystopia - would near-universal happiness really be all that bad, and is individuality really all that important?īut there’s a movie that makes me wonder whether my real problem with Brave New World was simply that it didn’t have enough car chases and zingy one-liners. It envisions a world where science and society have been engineered toward optimum happiness, creating citizens bereft of true freedom who prefer to spend their time doing drugs and lovelessly copulating rather than engaging in critical thought. Since its 1932 publication, Aldous Huxley’s titanic philosophical novel has been part of the fallen-world canon, inspiring countless English-class essays from adolescents and hair-pulling jeremiads from social commentators. I’m a lover of dystopias, but I’ve always found Brave New World irksome.
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