A Blast from the Past: Demolition Man (1993), Political Correctness, and Predicting the Future

“Things don’t happen anymore; we’ve taken care of all that.”

“In 1993, most critics dismissed a one-of-a-kind movie as just a stupid action flick with ‘excessive explosions.’ Except that it smartly predicted and joked about political correctness, toxic masculinity, racial bias, the hysteria around cancel culture, and even more. By now, it’s obvious that the movie was brilliant. But it still doesn’t get enough credit.”

So says the text on an image from Demolition Man that was shared by Sylvester Stallone on Instagram in 2022, with Stallone himself claiming that the “writers were way ahead of their time.”

In some ways, he’s not wrong, even though a simple glance at Stallone’s modern politics will show that the writers themselves may not agree with him about why. As a relatively big-budget Hollywood movie, Demolition Man had a phalanx of screenwriters, though the one most credited with defining the film’s utopian/dystopian future is Daniel Waters, of Heathers fame.

“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,’” Waters said, in an interview with Vulture in 2020. “It’s like, whoa, whoa. What, am I going to be Mr. Anti-Politically-Correct now? No, just having a little fun.”

The juxtaposition of his reaction and Stallone’s underscores the somewhat troubled history of Demolition Man’s legacy, as numerous people on the anti-woke political right have seized upon it as a chillingly prescient dystopia of political correctness run amok – which is a lot to lay on the shoulders of a movie this ultimately hollow and silly.

Is Demolition Man brilliant? No, absolutely not. Of course not. It is the sort of big, dumb action spectacle that was only being made at this time, by these people. The kind of movie where the key art is just the two leads staring at each other, never mind that the lead roles went through a number of possibilities before landing on Stallone and Snipes – Steven Seagal was originally going to play John Spartan, with Jean-Claude Van Damme offered the villain role. Even once Stallone was attached, he wanted Jackie Chan to play his antagonist, Simon Phoenix.

Looking back at it now, it’s wild to realize that this was essentially a breakout role for Sandra Bullock the year before she would achieve mainstream stardom with Speed – Lori Petty was originally cast to play her part – and equally wild to see Denis Leary, still in his standup comic heyday, basically just playing himself.

A modest success at the box office – it performed similarly to Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero the same year, despite the latter being considered something of a disappointment, a dichotomy confusing enough that it was posed to Roger Ebert in one of his Movie Answer Man columns – Demolition Man enjoys an outsized reputation as a cultural touchstone, thanks in no small part to its satirical near-future setting, which helps it to stand out from a crowd of similar fare. I personally think that it and Stallone’s Judge Dredd from just a couple of years later would make an instructive double-feature about what mainstream action movies in the ‘90s were like… and what they thought the future might look like.

As a satire, it is anodyne. As an action movie, largely inert. As science fiction, nonsensical. Studios apparently rejected the idea of setting the film farther in the future, which would have made the social changes depicted more credible, because they wanted to keep in a subplot about Stallone’s daughter that was ultimately cut for pacing anyway.

(And no, ignore the Oldboy-esque online speculation about the idea that Sandra Bullock’s character might have secretly been the daughter. Stallone’s character had been on ice for 36 years. Bullock was 29 years old at the time. Unless John Spartan’s daughter was literally an infant when he went away, she would have been about the same age as Stallone himself – and, in fact, she was in the cut scene, where she was played by Elizabeth Ruscio and revealed to be among the “scraps” living underground, beneath the beatific San Angeles.)

Neither its setting nor its basic premise make any sense beyond an excuse to juxtapose action movie cliches onto a ‘90s version of Woody Allen’s Sleeper. And yet, as dumb as it is, Demolition Man does manage flashes of eerie prescience, especially if you’re watching it on a fancy new 4K disc from Arrow.

“When that movie came out,” Waters recalls, “there was still smoking in bars.” It isn’t just (or even mostly) the things that are banned that feel plucked from the headlines, however. The film’s best running gag may come from the little machines on the wall that fine you every time you say a curse word, but the most oracular moments are reserved for things like social distancing as a way to avoid transmitting disease, a perhaps rather on-the-nose prediction of a future where our only culture is commercials, or an Arnold Schwarzenegger presidency – Schwarzenegger would become governor of California a decade later.

“I thought, well, why not? If we can do Reagan, we can do Schwarzenegger,” Waters told Vulture, “and if we can do Schwarzenegger, I guess we can do the host of The Apprentice. But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. If I only knew I helped enable that…”

Despite Waters’ stated centrism (“Remember,” he tells Vulture, “Stallone says that Denis Leary’s going to have to clean up again, and they’re both going to have to mess up. I am in the middle.”), it is undeniable that Demolition Man’s depiction of political correctness run amok is everything that right wingers tend to paint it as – effete, ineffectual, puritanical, and hypocritical.

Then again, though, maybe not too ineffectual, as there apparently hasn’t been so much as a single murder in twenty-two years, so it seems like they might be doing something right.

(The film’s last-reel embrace of centrism could, itself, be seen as an unintended critique that centrism is really just conservativism after all, just as Denis Leary’s character provides a probably inadvertent deconstruction of libertarian ideals – a guy whose entire ethos is ostensibly about personal freedom and yet who immediately starts telling people how to dress and act when they differ from him.)

Even as pop culture websites make hay over the things the movie “got right” about the future and right-wingers point to its depiction of a society based on consent and mutual respect as a chilling evocation of things to come – Matthew Yglesias called it “the only plausible dystopian vision for our time” – it’s telling that the worst, most repressive thing that they can imagine is a world in which people (most of them straight, white guys) have lost the “right to be assholes.”

“That was one of my favorite lines to write,” Waters recalled, “but now it’s like, ‘Less assholes isn’t that bad.’”

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.