Category: Movies
Creepshow movie posters
Judge Dredd and the failed politics of Mega City One
The Judge Dredd comic book inside the pages of 2000 AD has been in publication the last 38 years and has spawned two films. The first film, Judge Dredd (1995), starred Sylvester Stallone and was, to put it mildly, terrible with Sly spouting lines like, “I am the luh (law)!” The second film Dredd (2012) had Karl Urban (Star Trek) in the title role and was actually pretty great.
The Judge Dredd backstory, as Dredd puts it himself in the latest film is, “America is an irradiated wasteland. Within it lies a city. Outside the boundary walls, a desert. A cursed earth. Inside the walls, a cursed city, stretching from Boston to Washington D.C. An unbroken concrete landscape. 800 million people living in the ruin of the old world and the mega structures of the new one. Mega blocks. Mega highways. Mega City One.”
Mega City One is kind’a like New York City in the 1970s to the extreme — originally, the setting of Mega City One was of a future New York in the 21st century. But with the criminals and corruption of the 1970s amped up to the extreme along with robotic uprisings, mutant invasions and evil demonic Judges like Judge Death from alternate dimensions to name a few of the woes of Mega City One. And Dredd, along with a cadre of other Judges, must keep their city safe from all this extreme violence.
These Judges have total power and act as police, judge, jury and sometimes executioner when the crime calls for it.
Except after watching Dredd for the many-ith time I came to the conclusion that while the Judges might be trying to “keep the peace” they’ve either failed in their duties or are so understaffed that they can’t effectively complete them.
In Dredd, it’s revealed that inside Mega City One there are, “12 serious crimes reported every minute.” Or 17,280 a day. While the crime rate of Mega City would be relatively low, it’s also revealed that the Judges only have enough resources to respond to around 6% of these crimes. Or you can count on a Judge to turn up to around a little over 1,000 of the 17,000+ “serious” crimes each day.
To put that another way, if you’re a criminal in Mega City One you’ve got a 94% chance of never having to deal with the law no matter what you do.
It doesn’t help matters that of all the new Judges who are recruited and trained 20% of them “don’t survive” the first day according to the movie. Looking at policing statistics now and assuming there are around four million Judges to 800 million people and that 10% of that force either retires or is otherwise incapable of fulfilling their duties each year would mean that there would need to be at least 400,000 new Judges annually. But you can’t just create 400,000 new Judges, you have to have MORE since of those 400,000 80,000 wouldn’t be around to see their second day of work!
And who knows what the casualty rate is for a new Judge after a week or even a month!
And Mega City One isn’t a very nice place to live either. The unemployment rate there is astronomical and the living conditions are abysmal. Most of Dredd takes place inside a run-down, colossal 200 story skyscraper that Dredd and his rookie trainee Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) become trapped in when they respond to a call there. This building houses over 75,000 people and is considered a slum with nearly 400 people crammed into each and every floor.
In Dredd, the Chief Judge says, “The Judges are losing the war for the city.” It seems to me that they’ve already lost. With the rampant crime, terrible living conditions and odds of survival for the Judges it’s a wonder why there aren’t MORE crimes in Mega City One where seems that crime does pay.
Both movies Judge Dredd and Dredd are available on home media and the Judge Dredd comics are still being published in the pages of 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine.
Behind the scenes pics of Night of the Living Dead
Disaster Du Jour: By Dawn’s Early Light
Fear of a global thermonuclear war was very real in the 1980s. At the height of the cold war the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the US and NATO countries and we had just as many aimed at Russia and Warsaw Pact countries too. What people feared was that some minor conflict between the US and the USSR would spiral out of control and we’d fire our missiles at them and they at us which would essentially send what was left of mankind back to the stone age. Movies like The Day After (1983), Threads (1984) and Testament (1983) explored life post nuke war and the picture they painted weren’t nice ones.
But after the Soviet Union began to collapse and the cold war started to wind down in the late 1980s and early 90s fear of a nuclear war between “us and them” began to diminish. Surly with the United States and the Soviet Union on good terms a nuclear war would be out of the question. Right?
The main crux of the movie By Dawn’s Early Light (1990) was that no, in fact the possibility of a nuclear war was actually GREATER now that controls over these weapons were slowly being relaxed in the Soviet Union.
In By Dawn’s Early Light, separatists steal a missile from Russia and fire it back into the country from Turkey making it seem like that NATO was at fault. And an automatic Russian defense program fired off a few nukes of their own towards the US in retaliation for this strike.
What follows are the President of the US and the Russian Premier trying to deescalate the crisis, even as Washington DC it nuked, the President presumed killed and the Secretary of the Interior, the highest surviving member of the government left alive, takes the reigns of the country. And if the real President who is still alive wants to stop the war, the first question the new Secretary of the Interior President asks the military commanders is if we’re winning the war or losing it?
The other side of By Dawn’s Early Light is of the crew of a B-52 bomber on the way to deliver their payload of nukes to Russia, and them debating the merits of killing millions upon millions of people for a war that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Eventually (spoiler alert) they turn their bomber around and head back home which causes the Russians to turn some of their bombers around too. And while the real President and the Premier see this as their chance to stop the war, the Secretary of the Interior President sees it as a sign of weakness and orders the B-52 shot down.
I originally saw By Dawn’s Early Light when it premiered on HBO and bought the VHS of the film when that came out a few years later. But honestly I hadn’t checked out the film in many years since a DVD version of it had only recently become available. While the special effects of the movie do look a bit dated, I did find that even 20+ years on the tension of By Dawn’s Early Light slowly builds and is maintained throughout the film right up until the very end.
Even though the movie is simply staged – there are really only a few sets in By Dawn’s Early Light and I think the whole story could easily be told as a stage play – I still found myself tensing up as the crew of the B-52 slowly comes to the realization that tonight’s flight isn’t a drill or the real President debating the Secretary of the Interior President on why it’s not a good idea to continue a war where everytime one side fires a shot tens of thousands of civilians die.
“Sir, do better next time sir.” Grade: A-.
While we’re probably not facing a situation like By Dawn’s Early Light in our immediate future, we still live in a world where there are thousands of nukes here in the US and thousands more overseas. And all it takes is one of those falling into the wrong hands to ruin everyone’s day. By Dawn’s Early Light is available on DVD.