The unintentional connection between ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Demolition Man’
Outside of their shared status as sci-fi movies set in futuristic dystopias, Ridley Scott’s seminal Blade Runner and Sylvester Stallone’s bombastic Demolition Man have almost nothing in common.
The former is one of the genre’s all-time greats and one of its most influential, with almost every neon-soaked metropolis to emerge in the last four decades indebted to Scott’s masterpiece. Blade Runner throws everything, including the kitchen sink, into its thematic melting point, but every part of it is important.
The mystery Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard finds himself drawn into touches on the dangers of technology, the hubris of mankind flying too close to the sun, all steeped in spiritual and philosophical symbolism and perhaps the biggest and most unanswerable question of all: what does it mean to be human?
Demolition Man, meanwhile, is none of those things. It’s big, broad, loud, and incredibly stupid, which makes it supremely fun. Stallone’s John Spartan is frozen in time, only to be woken up for the express purpose of blowing shit up and reigniting his ongoing feud with Wesley Snipes’ defrosted arch-nemesis Simon Phoenix.
That being said, Demolition Man does have an existential quandry of its own that handily defeats Blade Runner. Whereas Scott’s film ruminates on the perils of existence and the complex morality of what constitutes a life, Marco Brambilla’s explosive action blockbuster contains the mystery of the three seashells.
Blade Runner has origami, Demolition Man has Taco Bell. Suffice to say, they are not the same, but they almost took place in the exact same place. Well, sort of. In an interview with Wired, Scott revealed that there was talk of his movie taking place in a fictionalised city until it was decided plain old Los Angeles would do.
“I even wanted to call it San Angeles, and somebody said, ‘I don’t get it’. I said, ‘Duh! San Francisco and Los Angeles?’ And they go, ‘Oh, oh, oh’. They’re not even thinking like that; they don’t get it,” he said. “It’s bizarre. People only think about what’s under their noses, for the most part, until it comes and kicks them in the ass.”
Fast forward more than a decade, and the writing team behind Demolition Man set their story in the megalopolis of San Angeles, an idea Scott had unsuccessfully suggested for Blade Runner. Was it a coincidence? Maybe, maybe not, but it was, at the very least, hugely ironic considering how each movie opted to present its bustling urban hub.
The Los Angeles of Blade Runner is cloaked in darkness, coated in thick fog, and constantly being pelted with rain, while the San Angeles of Demolition Man is perpetually sunny and almost entirely free from crime, violence, profanity, and even sex until Stallone and Snipes’ men out of time renew their hostilities.
