Director: Marco Brambilla
Cast: Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Nigel Hawthorne
Have I Seen it Before: Lives with that long line of R-rated actioners that were waiting for me when I turned 17 and not even the MPAA could stop me. It might live a little interchangeably in my head with Judge Dread (1995). Yet another reason to view Rob Schneider (uncredited but positively pockmarking the film) with suspicion.
Did I Like It: You, know I’m almost willing to say that I do. It is at or near the top of Stallone films in the 1990s. even though that isn’t exactly the decade he shined most brightly. It’s made with a brisk pace, and while it’s humor might be confused for being just on the wrong side of winking, but it’s all in service of its fundamental concept, introducing admittedly stock action movie characters into a classic sci-fi dystopian utopia.
And yet, I’ve got some issues, too. Had the film been set centuries ahead of the 1990s-set prologue, instead of decades, they would have been able to sell the whole thing a lot better, and all they would lose for the tweak is a small moment between Stallone and the one cop (Bill Cobbs) who had been around in Spartan’s time as a rookie, but now is an old man. I might be willing to cede that this becomes all the more glaring as I am writing this just a stone’s throw from the future the film depicts, but am I supposed to believe human society changed that much in the span of thirty years? The pop culture of the 1990s has all but disappeared? Language has changed that much? Sex* and going to the bathroom have changed so much that there’s barely even the language to be aware of the differences?
Not quite.
*Which Spartan seems all too eager to jump into just hours after realizing his wife is dead.