It was only supposed to be a Movie!

I watched Demolition Man a couple of weeks ago. I was down with the lurgy again and instead of ploughing through with my work I decided to switch on some relaxing TV watching. Somehow, demolition man was in my queue so I decided to give it a bash. I'm finding that all the old films I watched when I was a kid I have a way better understanding of them and the messaging woven into the storylines. So a good old Sylvester Stallone classic it was.

I was about 13 years old when this film came out, and you have to understand, films when I was a kid were a bit of an experience. Whenever a new film was out; everyone, and I mean EVERYONE went to see it, or bought it as soon as it came out on video. We didn't have the internet back then to pass our time, or a gaming industry like we do now, so Films and TV were a big part of our lives.

I was 13 at the time so I didn't quite understand the underlying principles of this film -- to me it was just a good shoot em up. Bad guy shoots innocent folks, good guy stops bad guy and everything go boom in between. Not to mention some good ol futuristic sci-fi in between to wet your whistle (I was a big sci fi fan too).

That being said, watching it only a few weeks ago was quite an eye opener, and really surprising as to how far down the timeline we are in this film. The whole ideology that is interwoven into the storyline -- it is the prominent one in mainstream today, the one that is taking front and centre in the mainstream.

I'd encourage anyone who hasn't given this a secondary watch to do so, especially if you're my age and only saw this as a very cool shoot 'em up and not a cautionary tale of a pending future.

Now I know at times I'm being hyperbolic. Of course our Police force is as violent as ever, and if this carnage were to happen in our world then the army would be deployed before the real carnage even started. Wesley Snipes wouldn't get that far. And the people that take down criminals would in no way be scared of him, and by standers I doubt would be that naive, or as helpless.

But still, there are some great similarities as to what's happening today in this film. It was almost like a part prophecy. Political Correctness has taken hold and transformed society into a sort of hyper-tolerant and benign society; one that doesn't even know how to fight back when their boundaries have been breached.

I've also always said that Political correctness is a round about way to hate on the poor. It's a very classist way to turn their noses up on people that don't share the same ideology as them, or possess the same class ability to self-reflect. What I mean here is, how can one obtain a higher state of being when that person is forever hunting for food. Not that this is a higher state of being, but even giving the rigorous rebuttal it deserves is hard when food and shelter are more important.

And we see this with Edgar Friendly, banished to the underworld with his followers -- completely rejecting that way of life but is forced to live in the sewers with the people that reject this new way of life because they have all been "ousted" from society, forced to live like rats, foraging for what they can find.

It's so weird those similarities -- you can plainly see our institutions (in real life) refusing to contract with people who refuse to bow to the alter of the new ideology, circumventing any sort of local or country wide laws in the process, depersoning them.

Quite a chilling watch, to see the future part-predicted in a 1993 Stallone shoot-em up. But, all that aside it was a really good film, and a must watch. Highly recommend it.

Posted using CineTV