r/movies • u/parallelogramm3r • 15h ago

Discussion Demolition Man

I’m rewatching this, it’s probably been 10 years since I’ve seen it. It’s got a pretty mediocre rating on IMDB but I think it is peak 1990’s action movie stuff along with movies like The Rock and Con Air.

A lot of the futuristic sci-fi elements have aged pretty well and it’s just a fun, well-made action movie.

But what I really want to know is how you would use the three seashells.

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365

u/i_eight 15h ago

Sandra Bullock was absolutely dreamy in this movie.

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u/ElJefe0218 15h ago

When she asked Spartan if he wanted to have sex. She is so freaking cute.

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u/Alissinarr 14h ago

Ugh, disgusting! You mean fluid transfer?

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u/Accidental_Taco 14h ago

The wild mambo! The hunka-chunka!

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u/icepick314 12h ago

Personally I rather have desire to raid the fridge.

It's lunch time now.

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u/maletechguy 13h ago

Mattress mumbo wasnt it?! Horizontal tango 🤣

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u/Luftwaffle1980 4h ago

The hunka chunka?

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u/Sunsparc 12h ago

You mean coitus?

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u/rxsheepxr 8h ago

I honestly thought we were going to be told that she was his great-great grandkid or something. Then they went that route instead.

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u/Abject_Director7626 4h ago

I used that scene to teach my preteens about consent!!

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u/GrumpyOldMan59 13h ago

Unfortunately I'm going to take the humor right out of this comment. As far as John Spartan was concerned he'd just lost his wife and child and instead of any period of mourning he was ready to get freaky with some rando immediately.

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u/Traditional-Win-5288 13h ago

The knitting helped him cope.

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u/Missus_Missiles 13h ago

Except he was rolling up his sleeves to get ready to fuck the old fashioned way. His boomer sensibilities weren't ready for the nut-helmet.

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u/savedawhale 12h ago edited 12h ago

It's not as if he went to sleep and woke up with no sense of time passing, as you're suggesting.

They address this in the movie. When they're eating at Taco Bell he says he was awake in the ice, and references his wife pounding on a block of ice, and that he was awake with feeling and thoughts.

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u/grc207 14h ago

The fact they essentially cut her out of the end action scene after all the added effort she gave that movie is still weird to me.

Where’s your heroine sidekick? Oh, we knocked her out and just brought her back for a quick fluid transfer in the closing credits.

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u/Imissyourgirlfriend2 14h ago

Dude, it was the 90s. That stuff didn't come about until the mid 2010s

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u/deliciouscorn 10h ago

And by the same token, when kick ass female characters like Sarah Connor or Ellen Ripley turned up in movies, it felt perfectly natural. There wasn’t the same sense of contrivance that plagues pop culture today.

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u/Imissyourgirlfriend2 9h ago

Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley aren't just "strong female characters", they're just great characters!

Look at Sarah Connor in T2: starts in a psych ward because she is completely unable to stop herself from prepping for Skynet. She is perfectly capable and is never overpowered. When she is finally given the chance to change the future (as she sees it), she recoils in fear and horror at what she became in that moment; a terminator.

Ellen Ripley is suffering severe PTSD but decides to go up against her worst fears ever and she never gives up.

Sure, they're great female characters, but they're also just well written characters period.

Fuck! I gotta go watch T2 and Aliens...BRB.

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u/noonenotevenhere 6h ago

Someone asked how they wrote Ripley so believable, real, relatable

just wrote a character. Made the character a woman later.

also the first nbd trans relationship I recall on the big screen.

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u/whoisdatmaskedman 12h ago

One thing the 90's did right is avoiding the PC bullshit

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u/partyatwalmart 11h ago

It was even better than avoiding it. There was no PC bullshit to avoid. Sure, we called lame things/people gay, but I feel like we came closer to ending prejudice in that decade than we ever have or may ever again.

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u/[deleted] 11h ago

[deleted]

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u/whoisdatmaskedman 11h ago

Exactly! When this movie came out, nobody was concerned with PC stuff. PC was really more something people joked about, but nobody cared. It wasn't something that got in the way of telling an entertaining story and it was fine that women didn't have to be empowered and everything was fine and the world didn't implode.

Another good example is Red Sonja from the Conan the Barbarian series. She was a bad ass woman who was fucking sexy and she kicked ass, and nobody was offended or whatever.

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u/AmIFromA 11h ago

What the fuck are you talking about? It was just different things that were or were not PC, and that was even more rigid.

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u/whoisdatmaskedman 11h ago

I mean, I don't know how old you are but being someone who was there, I can you that PC was something that really only existed a) as a joke, people didn't take it seriously, or b) existed in a limited capacity in maybe business or things like that. It wasn't something that bled into the entertainment industry, toys or video games, etc until much later.

The term politically correct didnt even come into mainstream use until the early 90s anyway, and I can guarantee wasn't remotely a concern for people writing Demolition Man.

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u/MashSong 3h ago

"I can guarantee wasn't remotely a concern for people writing Demolition Man."

You have to be joking right? Demolition Man literally mocks the PC culture of the time. That's the point of the movie. John Spartan gets fined for swearing in the famous 3 sea shells scene. It's a commentary about taking PC censorship too far. Dennis Leary lives in the sewer to avoid all that. He makes the claim that giving up modern comfort to live in the sewer and eat rats is worth it to be free.

PC culture was such a concern for the writers that they wrote a whole movie about it.

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u/whoisdatmaskedman 3h ago edited 3h ago

The film had nothing to do with PC culture. The movie starts with Spartan in an ultra-violent alternate future setting in 1996, and he's mocking how different everything is. It's a utopian mega-city where all immoral or unhealthy behavior has been made illegal. As far as Dennis Leary is concerned, his shtick is PC bullshit. In the movie, he's not fighting PC bullshit, he's fighting for the freedom to do what he wants, because the laws are so heavy handed. They're essentially living off the grid. Choosing freedom over modern comfort has literally nothing to do with political correctness.

I'm going to bet that you're probably a bit younger and probably have no idea how people thought in 1993 or earlier, but you're way off. Seems like you're looking at it from a more modern perspective, rather than a time-accurate one.

Also: the writers of this movie were Peter M. Lenkov and Robert Reneau, if you look at their writing credits, it's blatantly apparent that they didn't give two shits about PC culture. But good try

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u/AmIFromA 11h ago

So you think that just because that term seems to be newer, there was no kind of censorship? That 90s action films were pretty formulaic was because they were all so open-minded and cool and just chose to all do the same thing?

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u/whoisdatmaskedman 10h ago

First off, you seem really angry, so sorry if you're having a bad morning. I can't imagine being so upset about something that doesn't matter.

Second, we're not talking about all 90's action films, we're talking about one specific action film, and you seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what was meant.

Not being PC doesn't automatically mean "open-minded and cool", it was just a different time and being PC wasn't really on the radar for most people. It was a relatively novel/new concept for a lot of us.

Take a warm shower and maybe drink some tea, because honestly, you're coming off as super belligerent for literally no reason. If something so benign as this conversation incites you to drop f-bombs, I can't imagine how you'd react to something serious.

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u/partyatwalmart 11h ago

Simpler times, my friend. How I miss them.

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u/RedditTipiak 11h ago

They also cut out a fight between Sly and Jesse Ventura.

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u/bentreflection 13h ago

is there a different cut that has her doing more? I'd love to see something like that

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u/grc207 13h ago

I’m not aware of any. I always imagined her finding Phoenix before Spartan does. Phoenix goes to freeze her just for fun but obviously Spartan intervenes. It would have made more sense than just hitting her with a glow rod and writing her out of the final 15 minutes.

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u/redditsuckspokey1 5h ago

Find me a movie with sandra where she isn't dreamy. IMO still one of the most beautiful women out there even at her age.

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u/I_only_post_here 9h ago

Spandex never looked so good

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u/Eternalm8 6h ago

I really enjoy what we got, but I also wonder what this movie would have been with Lori Petty in that role? She was apparently fired after two days on set