The movie is based off of the British comic book character Judge Dredd, who was previously the subject of a 1995 film of the same name starring Sylvester Stallone. Unlike most Americans I actually have read a lot of the comics and was very intrigued to see the new spin this movie would offer. The Stallone film fell short in a lot of ways, but the primary ones were a lack of understanding of the character and his world, and the fact that they tried to shoehorn the concept into a standard Hollywood action blockbuster format. The two problems really play off each other: Judge Dredd is not a superhero, by far. If he is remotely close to any hero Americans are familiar with it would probably be Batman, but more because in the DC realm some of the Elseworlds comics that see Batman's style carried to extremes (like the graphic novel Kingdom Come) show some serious fascist undertones, but even then Batman operates under strict rules against killing opponents and saving innocents when he can. Judge Dredd, on the other hand, is an iron-fisted enforcer of the law, with no qualms about executing the guilty. "Anti-hero" is probably the best descriptor of what he is. Furthermore, unlike many American action heroes, he anything but the "everyman." He is purposefully the opposite of that: a clone of the founder of Justice Department, trained physically and programmed psychologically to be an unyielding enforcer of the law. Dredd is a lot of things, but "sympathetic" is not one of them. He is not "one man against the system"--he is the system, or as his catchphrase puts it, "I AM the law."
Before I start analyzing this movie, a couple qualifications: yes, this movie is extremely violent. If that means you give me the stinkeye because "How can you be a Christian and watch that?!" well, I'm sorry. That's not really my point of getting into this, and I don't have an intention of getting into arguments over at what point violence becomes gratuitous. I would definitely argue that in this movie, the level of violence is crucial to imparting the hopelessness of the world this is set in. So let's set aside the hand-wringing over the children and talk about what this movie is saying like adults.
The concept of Judge Dredd was developed in the 70s, not exactly the most optimistic of time periods. In the future America, a nuclear war has left the middle of the continent an all but uninhabitable desert, with American civilization surviving only in three megacities, one on each coast and the third in Texas. They are overcrowded, with most citizens living in high-rise apartment buildings called "city blocks" that are often named after random celebrities or fictional characters from the past (though the one this film is set in is just given the generic name "Peach Trees"). Due to virtually all industry and jobs becoming automated or performed by robots, unemployment is rampant; I believe in the movie they say 97% of the occupants of Peach Trees are unemployed and on welfare. Of course, how such an economy could possibly persist long-term is never addressed, but it's not terribly relevant to the larger story.
In this world people exist to basically fill their minds with entertainment, commit crimes to relieve boredom, and in general just try to get by day by day. Crime is beyond out of control, and the Judges were established to streamline the justice system. Due process is out, instant sentencing is in, including executions on the spot. Two kids make the mistake of pulling a gun on the judges, and Dredd just glares at them and says "Juve cubes or body bags, makes no difference to me" before showing the one tiny amount of mercy displayed in this film and hitting them with stun shots from his gun. (I suppose that even the producers of a film as gritty as this one balked at showing teenage kids shot down without so much as a second thought)
In this world there is very little evidence of hope, of mercy or compassion; certainly no faith. It is the ultimate world of consumerism: people live, get their checks, and spend what little they're given on feeding their hunger--for food, for entertainment, for a trip away from their mind and the drudgery of the world outside. The massively selfish nature that has consumed humanity combined with the utter boredom of such a routine and the lack of any good reason to care about anyone else, results in a world where crime is almost literally everywhere. And what happens in such a world? People beg for security from the government, and it gives it to them the only way any government can: with an iron fist.
Lots of potential reactions to it all, but I am always struck in watching films portraying a dystopian future that people have utterly abandoned any semblance of faith in God or anything else beyond themselves. What strikes me about it mostly is that it's probably the one element of these films that has the least relation to how the world actually works itself out.
I think in general, when someone living in free Western civilization sits down to write about a future that's been affected by either cataclysm or encroaching fascism (and this film's world is the result of both), they imagine that such hardships will drive men to utter levels of despair and abandonment of any semblance of faith in a God or anything good beyond them. Man's ability to take joy in his world is rooted utterly in his circumstances, according to this philosophy, and therefore a decline in those circumstances will destroy the ability to take any level of joy in one's life.
But the problem here is twofold: from a strictly humanist perspective, man has always demonstrated far more resiliency than those who first wrote and drew the world of Mega-City One attribute to them. People live in conditions ranging from "delightful" to "deplorable" and still manage to find reasons to celebrate and love their communities and families.
From a Christian perspective, the argument is that God has historically done His best work in the midst of hardship. Mark 10 displays the reality that wealth, in fact, is a hindrance to joy in many cases. Iron sharpens iron, and likewise a piece of steel that spends its existence wrapped in silk cloth will take much longer to become a sword than one that is heated in fire, tempered and hammered. This is not to say that wealth or relative ease precludes knowing God, but having met many people who lived in nations which oppress their people I can say without much fear of contradiction that strife, pain and even official oppression in the form of discrimination, arrests and even executions has done little to stifle Christianity in those nations. On the flipside, Western countries are certainly struggling much more with regards to general apathy and drawing people into the church. "Attractional" ministries have sprung up and while I will not question the hearts of people brought into a saving faith in Jesus in these ministries, I have to question their methods and how deep one can really be led in the walk when entertainment is one of the big draws.
So what's the point of this rambling diatribe? I'm not going after the movie or calling it on the carpet, because I think the idea that fascism could come even to the shores of America, that people would be willing to surrender their liberty for security, are very real and good points to consider. But I believe that no matter what the future holds, the three qualities from 1 Corinthians 13 of faith, hope and love will not evaporate, for two reasons: firstly, because they are encoded in our beings as men and manifest themselves in every culture and situation, and secondly, because we do not live in a world that tumbles along on the winds of chaos and chance, but in one where God's purposes continue unabated and unthwarted, and where every bad thing intended by man, every bit of destruction wreaked by nature is ultimately intended by God for our good. Knowing that, and seeing the way that God has moved in my heart through the work of the Holy Spirit, through godly men and women loving me and living out the Word around me, I have been empowered to walk in a place knowing that there is no government, no law and--indeed, no earthly Judge--who can separate me from the love of Christ. May such assurances bolster us as we move into an unsure future.
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