Dredd: we’re all monsters here…
I’ve heard casual mention of Judge Dredd as an antihero, even a superhero, as the date of the film’s release has drawn near and passed. The people who proffered these opinions are operating under a shared and far too-common misapprehension: Judge Dredd is, in fact, a fascist. But then that’s always been the joke; Dredd as the Captain America analogue of a post-apocalyptic dystopian slum under totalitarian thumb, the implacable enforcer of right-wing zero-tolerance. Sentencing and executing or imprisoning criminals without any form of due process he and his colleagues represent an impassive, unfeeling authority which doesn’t answer to its people, only holds them on the brink of self-destruction or, in its more nihilistic moments, determines only to choke them dead as they fall away into chaos. The design of Megacity One is more grounded in reality than that of its four-colour counterpart, perhaps to reinforce the parallels with our own cities and the increasing presence of absurdly over-armed police forces (whom, while they don’t have the authority to carry out summary executions, have shown little restraint and have faced few consequences when the option is available to them). The deadpan absurdity with which Karl Urban offers a post-homicidal bon mot or pat action cliché in hush Clint Eastwood growl shows an utter absence of empathy, the idea of humour as reduced to a brazenly hollow attempt to ape the mannerisms of its victims as he marches, practically goose-steps, through another day of killing. The murderous inculcation of Olivia Thirlby, literally psychic with an attendant empathy but increasingly detached as the film goes on, is the decline into apathy until, becoming complete, her face is also lost beneath a judge’s helmet, eyes buried beneath a reflective visor. It’s a brutal world, realised with a degree of eye-gouging and blood-spattered detail which highlights the obvious criticism of Dredd and the entire mentality and implementation of the law and power in the film; their violence solves nothing, ameliorates nothing, instead it begets a horrendous festival of skinned corpses and bodies blown apart in excruciating close-up. Dredd is not a film about a hero, Dredd is a film which pits two horrors against one another and lets the one which promises some measure of protection win out.
What makes The Pit such a good story is the supporting cast that surrounds Dredd, and, indeed, even takes over centre stage from him. Each has their own distinct personalities, each has their own purpose in the story and each has their own secrets that Dredd eventually manages to uncover. This is the closest that Dredd has ever come to being a soap opera, but showing a slice of life of the judges of Mega-City One breathes a feeling of normality in to their overtly abnormal existence. As an epic (and at 30 parts all told, epic is probably justified) there are few lasting repercussions for the city; nothing is destroyed, there isn’t the usual body count, the Chief Judge isn’t offed in a bizarre manner, but there was a lasting change in the introduction of a number of characters who would populate Dredd’s world over the following years.