Demolition Man, 1993.

Directed by Marco Brambilla.

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne, Denis Leary, Benjamin Bratt, Bob Gunton, Glenn Shadix, and Grand L. Bush.

In the year 2032, a cop frozen in suspended animation for 40 years is thawed out to catch the criminal he put away in the 1990s.

A bit of a mainstream choice for cult movie specialists Arrow Video to give a limited edition 4K UHD release, but 1993s Demolition Man has been one of those movies that crops up every so often in memes or hashtags whenever certain themes or ideas happen in real life, which you could say was predicted in the opening scenes of a burning Hollywood sign amidst a city seemingly destroying itself.

Of course, the movie originally came out a year after the infamous 1992 riots in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King incident, and a lot of movies at the time reflected this social upheaval, distrust in the police, different methods of punishment, etc. What re-releasing Demolition Man in 2024 does is show how far we have moved on as a society, and that these things cannot happen in today’s… hang on.

Despite coming from a serious place, Demolition Man is really quite a silly movie and this is highlighted by the movie’s main antagonist, Simon Phoenix, and the performance that Wesley Snipes gives as said character. The pre-credit sequence is set in the then-futuristic world of 1996, and Phoenix is given bleach-blond hair, piercings, a goatee and he leaps about cackling and shouting out slogans and puns, so as well as predicting a future with softer authority, Demolition Man also anticipated nu-metal.