(Credits: Alamy)
In 1993, a motion picture was released that was largely dismissed by critics as another boneheaded entry in the Sylvester Stallone action canon. While some appreciated that it had higher aspirations than most shoot ’em ups, it was generally believed that the film missed its mark by quite a distance. Audiences, on the other hand, lapped the movie up, and over the ensuing decades, it gained a significant cult following. In fact, it’s now considered much more prophetic in its satirical depiction of a future society than anyone gave it credit for at the time. Stallone himself insists that’s because the movie was wildly ahead of its time upon initial release.
In the late ’80s, screenwriter Peter M Lenkov was fresh out of college and trying desperately to break into Hollywood. He wrote several screenplays with no success in getting them optioned before he finally managed to sell one to Warner Brothers. It was the story of a policeman being cryogenically frozen in the present day before being defrosted in a futuristic Los Angeles to fight the world’s deadliest criminal. At this point, the script was a straightforward action yarn, but over the next six years, it was picked apart and reshaped by a handful of different writers, emerging as a hybrid of action, comedy, and satire.
Daniel Waters, who also wrote Heathers and Batman Returns, was credited with adding most of the satirical elements to the script, including Stallone’s supercop John Spartan finding himself in a future obsessed with political correctness. In this world, swearing has been outlawed, corporate conglomerates have ensured only one restaurant remains, Arnold Schwarzenegger was once the President of the United States, and people pay for things with a “virtual wallet”.
Any one of these amusing future predictions coming true would have been enough to have Demolition Man labelled as a predictor of the future. However, when the world was seized in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, several other aspects of the movie’s sanitised, pristine future began to seem alarmingly prescient.
You see, in Demolition Man’s future, people practice social distancing. Physical contact has been all but banned between human beings, sex only takes place through virtual reality headsets, no one shakes hands, and meetings are largely attended remotely via video screens. In addition, people don’t use toilet rolls anymore, with Sandra Bullock’s Lenina Huxley making a disgusted face as she says, “They used handfuls of wadded-up paper” when talking about the primitive people of the past. Instead, they employ an intentionally nonsensical “three seashells” system that utterly baffles Spartan.
Huxley’s explanation of why humans became so fastidious about cleanliness and sterility is also unsettling, given what happened in the real world. She explains that the decision was made to ban physical contact and “fluid transfer” because humans kept spreading disease to each other. In the real world, which was dealing with a global pandemic, Demolition Man suddenly began to seem less and less like a dumb action movie and more like a predictive text.
Stallone certainly thought so. In 2022, he posted to Instagram, “I always enjoyed this movie. It was a great action film wonderfully directed by Marco Brambilla, and the writers were way ahead of their time.”
However, while Waters admitted in an interview with Vulture that some of the parallels with real-life history make him seem like some kind of Hollywood Nostradamus, he wasn’t trying to predict the future in any way. Instead, he was simply trying to add some humour to an action flick, and he didn’t like the idea that anyone would ascribe an anti-PC outlook to him because of a few jokes in a movie from 30 years ago.
“Somebody linked me to this die-hard—I’ll put it charitably—libertarian guy who wrote ‘Actually, Demolition Man is the great thesis statement of the ’90s,’” he scoffed. “It’s like, ‘Whoa, whoa. What, am I going to be Mr Anti-Politically-Correct now?’ No, just having a little fun.”
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