Movies - Demolition Man

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	Movies - Demolition Man

Demolition Man is a 1993 American motion picture. It was directed by Marco Brambilla, written by Peter M. Lenkov, Robert Reneau and Daniel Waters, and produced by Howard Kazanjian.

Cast

Sylvester Stallone
- John Spartan
Wesley Snipes
- Simon Phoenix
Sandra Bullock
- Lt. Lenina Huxley
Nigel Hawthorne
- Dr. Raymond Cocteau
Benjamin Bratt
- Alfredo Garcia
Bob Gunton
- Chief George Earle
Glenn Shadix
- Associate Bob
Denis Leary
- Edgar Friendly
Grand L. Bush - Zachary Lamb (Young)
Bill Cobbs
- Zachary Lamb (Old)
Pat Skipper - Helicopter Pilot
Steve Kahan - Captain Healy
Paul Bollen - T.F.R. Officer
Mark Colson - Warden William Smithers (Young)
Andre Gregory - Warden William Smithers (Aged)
Jesse Ventura
- one of the Cryocons

Plot

The film is a story about two men, one an evil criminal and the other a risk-taking policeman. Although the initial scenes are set in an anarchic, dystopian version of Los Angeles, circa 1996, most of the film is set in the year 2032, where San Angeles, Southern California has become a peaceful, sanitised paradise. (In the film, San Angeles has been created from the joining of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego and the surrounding metropolitan regions following a massive earthquake.)

Simon Phoenix (played by Wesley Snipes) - incarcerated in a "cryoprison" (which, unlike traditional prisons, keeps its prisoners cryogenically frozen in suspended animation) for his activities as a crime lord in 1990s Los Angeles - escapes during a parole hearing and soon embarks on a reign of terror throughout the city of San Angeles. Because police officers no longer know how to deal with ultraviolent criminals like Phoenix, supercop John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), aka "The Demolition Man", is paroled from the cryoprison for the purpose of apprehending Phoenix. (Spartan had been imprisoned as a consequence of underestimating Phoenix's evil genius in the first scene; numerous hostages had died as a result and, after Phoenix implicated Spartan in their deaths, Spartan became the scapegoat.) However, it is revealed that the ruler of San Angeles, Raymond Cocteau, engineered the escape of Phoenix in order to have Phoenix kill resistance leader Edgar Friendly and allow Cocteau to assert even stronger control over his citizens. Unfortunately for Cocteau, he underestimates the criminal genius of Phoenix (much as Spartan had) and is killed, leaving Spartan (and his partner, Lenina Huxley) to try and stop Phoenix from rebuilding his crime empire in a San Angeles ill-equipped to resist it.

References and trivia

The film runs for 110 minutes, and is available on VHS and DVD. The film is heavily shown on US cable television networks, partly because several of its cast members (Snipes, Bullock, Bratt) became more famous after the film's initial release.

The future world portrayed in the movie, akin to the postcyberpunk subgenre, where human reproduction has been entirely relegated to medical science, and humanity was kept from its own bloody past in the interests of society, is reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Bullock's character is a reference to this - "Lenina Huxley" combines Huxley's surname with the first name of a major character in the book, Lenina Crowne. Additionally, both Chief Earle and Huxley refer to John Spartan as a "savage" - making him "John the Savage" (another character from Brave New World). In one scene, Phoenix comments that it is a "brave new world".

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Demolition Man (film) ]

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