In the decades since Marco Brambilla’s Demolition Man leveled the American box office, the movie’s loyal fans remain plagued by one unanswered question: just how do those three seashells work, anyway?
Pop culture owes a debt it cannot pay to this deceptively lunkheaded Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes vehicle; it’s at least a partial blueprint for media ranging from Ben Stiller’s Zoolander—the proof is in the “kill the Malaysian prime minister!” sequence—to Matt Groening’s Futurama, whose criminally insane automaton Roberto feels like steel-bodied kin to Snipes’ cackling Simon Phoenix. Much less flattering is the film’s political prescience; anything that can be microchipped legally, will be, sex is only for procreation, and too many developed nations are dealing with dictator problems—which wouldn’t sit well with Stallone’s beefcake supercop.
“This fascist crap makes me want to puke,” rumbles Stallone’s John Spartan, the Demolition Man himself, awakened in a future world after a 36-year nap in cryogenic stasis—his punishment for failing to rescue a busload of hostages. That was the past. Spartan has to live with it. He has to live with Demolition Man’s present, too. And much as he dislikes the constant surveillance, suffocating morality policing, and absence of toilet paper, he despises Phoenix. Fascism’s one thing. Phoenix, a cartoonish sadist whose hobbies include murder, arson, grand theft auto, and more murder, is another.
Warner Bros. / Arrow Video
Future Imperfect
Those of you reading this who haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Demolition Man may think this sounds thunderously stupid. At face value, you’re correct: Brambilla’s film embraces musclebound, might-makes-right foolishness and proudly wears surface-level inanity on its sleeves. A classic of “blow ‘em up” American action cinema, Demolition Man embraces the genre’s most central, and subsequently mocked, tropes. It even bakes them into the title: demolition, man! You get what you pay for, and what you’re paying for is two hours of buildings reduced to ash in billowing fireballs.
Dig through the rubble on the recent 4K release from Arrow Video, though, for a thoughtfully farcical expression of the civilized dystopia that ensues when ultra right- and left-wing heterodoxies run into one another, like Stooges in a pie fight. Demolition Man has amusingly clever ideas about what that world might look like, and makes a joke of it while taking its perils seriously. San Angeles, the film’s main setting, is a toothpaste commercial in Hell; the megalopolis spans 4,000 square miles comprising Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. (For as much of pop culture as Demolition Man seems to inspire, it borrows plenty on its own, notably from Carlos Ezquerra’s Judge Dredd comics.) Granted, everybody’s nice, the streets are immaculately clean, cars quietly drive themselves, and, best of all, there are no guns in sight—the biggest reason for us in 2025 to envy the future.
Warner Bros. / Arrow Video
Ahead of Its Time
On the other hand, swearing in public is a fineable offense, the fashion is chichi, and if someone in this future pitched a movie like Demolition Man, they’d get put in the fridge. A Stallone project seems an unlikely source for smart ideas about revolution in a state that stifles freedom of thought and action. (It deserves mention that Rambo: First Blood, his most famous role, is wholly anti-authoritarian.) But Demolition Man understands what political activists mean when they say “burn it all down,” whether from the safety of keyboards or the frontlines of protests. Phoenix’s approach—kill any schmuck in his path, wreak havoc in places unequipped to handle it, defrost more madmen even worse than him, like Jeffrey Dahmer—is extreme in one direction. But Spartan’s reaction is destructive in its own way, and while he is a preferable extreme to Phoenix, violence actually isn’t his preference.
“Hurting people’s not a good thing!” Spartan snaps at his squad partner-cum-custodian, Lieutenant Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), after fending off an attack at a dinner with San Andreas’ social engineer and leader, Raymond Cocteau (a fabulously unctuous Nigel Cawthorne). The attackers are members of the Scraps–a literal underground resistance movement of starving dissidents, reluctantly led by Edgar Friendly (Dennis Leary), who Phoenix was mentally conditioned to seek out and assassinate during his cryo-sentence.
After his outburst, Spartan pauses. “Well, sometimes it is, but not when it’s a bunch of people looking for something to eat!” The script’s political criticisms and profession of nonviolent intervention are unexpected in this style of production, where the spectacle traditionally comes first and intellectual subtext a very distant second. Demolition Man winds them both together so tightly that there’s never a need to separate them. It’s one of the American action canon’s greatest examples of having one’s cake and eating it. Just don’t stress about the seashells while you do.
