My favorite part was when he said “IT’S DEMOLITION TIME” and demolitioned that big cryo prison.
Meme aside, the movie was actually a lot of fun and felt an awful lot like a prophecy of what Apple “campuses” would look like and what kind of fucked up gentrification they’d promote.
It’s a fun movie, but I’m not sure what to make of the ideology. On one hand, the movie seems to kind of say it’d be bad if cops never used violence, but on the other hand, it portrays a world run by corporations where all culture has been commercialized to the extent that ad jingles play on TV and all restaurants are Taco Bells (or Pizza Hut in Europe, because they didn’t seem to get that that product placement wasn’t meant to be seen as a good thing).
And yeah, gentrification is a major theme there whether it’s intentional or not. Anti-graffiti walls?
I think it might be a time capsule of gen-x slacker libertarianism. The anti-villain/decoy villain is Dennis Leary living in a sewer because he wanted to say gamer words and ear meat.
And then John Spartan is beating up Dennis Leary and is all “wtf these are poor people stealing food?” Which just goes to show how today is incomprehensible even by the standards of the distopian cop fiction of the past.
Definitely one of my fav Wesley Snipes characters. That man was born for the stage.
I think there was a certain elemnt of good humor to it that keeps it tolerable. The whole la crime hell sequence in the beginning seemed over the top enough that I think it was deliberate parody and stallone’s character is a self-satire of the 80s super-murder-cop guy who turns out to actually have some emotional intelligence and isn’t just a violent killer. The core message is something like California hippy-fascism is bad and utopia is boring, but not that utopia is outright bad. It does have an anti-igentrification thing going with all the clean hippy fascist places being dull and lifeless, excluding poor people to literally live underground for not being sanitized enough. The underground crime rebels are shown being almost as naive and gentle as the hippy fascists when confronted with Simon Phoenix, which to me at least suggests the authors weren’t intending a completely reactionary reading of utopia as bad.
The movie had action movie banger line after banger line, including the novelty of “lady of the future trying really hard to say tough guy talk from the past.”
My favorite part was when he said “IT’S DEMOLITION TIME” and demolitioned that big cryo prison.
Meme aside, the movie was actually a lot of fun and felt an awful lot like a prophecy of what Apple “campuses” would look like and what kind of fucked up gentrification they’d promote.
It’s a fun movie, but I’m not sure what to make of the ideology. On one hand, the movie seems to kind of say it’d be bad if cops never used violence, but on the other hand, it portrays a world run by corporations where all culture has been commercialized to the extent that ad jingles play on TV and all restaurants are Taco Bells (or Pizza Hut in Europe, because they didn’t seem to get that that product placement wasn’t meant to be seen as a good thing).
And yeah, gentrification is a major theme there whether it’s intentional or not. Anti-graffiti walls?
The movie was an ideological mess but it was such a creative mess that I enjoyed it anyway.
And some of the one-liners… “You’re on TV!” uses an old TV as a bludgeon!
I think it might be a time capsule of gen-x slacker libertarianism. The anti-villain/decoy villain is Dennis Leary living in a sewer because he wanted to say gamer words and ear meat.
And then John Spartan is beating up Dennis Leary and is all “wtf these are poor people stealing food?” Which just goes to show how today is incomprehensible even by the standards of the distopian cop fiction of the past.
Definitely one of my fav Wesley Snipes characters. That man was born for the stage.
“DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO” turning into goblincore squatting.
Lol.
I think there was a certain elemnt of good humor to it that keeps it tolerable. The whole la crime hell sequence in the beginning seemed over the top enough that I think it was deliberate parody and stallone’s character is a self-satire of the 80s super-murder-cop guy who turns out to actually have some emotional intelligence and isn’t just a violent killer. The core message is something like California hippy-fascism is bad and utopia is boring, but not that utopia is outright bad. It does have an anti-igentrification thing going with all the clean hippy fascist places being dull and lifeless, excluding poor people to literally live underground for not being sanitized enough. The underground crime rebels are shown being almost as naive and gentle as the hippy fascists when confronted with Simon Phoenix, which to me at least suggests the authors weren’t intending a completely reactionary reading of utopia as bad.
The movie had action movie banger line after banger line, including the novelty of “lady of the future trying really hard to say tough guy talk from the past.”
And then later…