Is Stallone’s 1996 film a prophetic guide to today’s realities?
“Be well’ the greeting used in the ‘future’ of 2016 sounds a lot like “Be kind”, the current hashtag du jour promoted by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
When coupled with the no-touch handshake, and the aversion to toilet paper (out of preference, not necessity) the movie starts to draw some quite creepy parallels.
The crime-free, sanitised (no pun intended) vision of the future includes people being nice to each other, and civil disorder all but eliminated.
If you include the restricted access to firearms, the Los Angeles of the future isn’t looking too bad-in fact positively utopian.
This is, of course, discounting the Orwellian practices of surveillance, and the control imposed by removing peoples’ personality.
Still, we are probably already halfway there.
Also worth noting is it’s about the only film from the 1990s where Rob Schneider doesn’t say “You can do it!!.”
