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FROM DREDD TO DROID: Judge Dredd and RoboCop

Back during the Reagan years there was a glut of violent action movies catering to folks who wanted less complicated heroes.  The Sixties and Seventies had been too confusing and upsetting; people wanted a return to the John Wayne era, when the Good Guys slaughtering the Bad Guys in an orgy of gunfire was considered wholesome family entertainment.

However, the new action heroes were not plain Everymen of the John Wayne or Gary Cooper stripe.  Instead they were insanely buff fitness freaks like Schwarzenegger (Commando, Conan) and Stallone (Cobra, Rambo), whose lavishly-tended physiques made them more like TV wrestlers than traditional movie stars.  As such, they were perfect symbols of the grotesque, steroid-enhanced egotism of the 1980s.

These films established all the tropes of the action genre which still persist today.  Obviously there are people who never get tired of this stuff.  But for others, the simplistic, even fascistic mentality of these movies was perfect fodder for satire.

One of the earliest such satires was the British comic-book Judge Dredd.

My first encounter with Dredd comics was around 1984, when I picked up a copy of the serial 2000 A.D., in which there was a story about nuclear warfare between two futuristic city-states, one of which is a crime-ridden American megalopolis policed by all-powerful Judges (thereby eliminating the need for courts or jury trials), and the other a Soviet-style dictatorship.

When Judge Dredd’s city is nuked and then invaded by its Russian counterpart, Dredd must lead a desperate resistance against the vast and ruthless forces of the enemy.  This includes executing civilian collaborators, putting radiation victims out of their misery, and even assassinating the Chief Judge, who has become a brainwashed propaganda tool.

Meanwhile, Dredd’s crazed Italian landlady and lisping house-robot follow him through the ruins, dodging angry mobs and Soviet kill-bots.

With its black comedy, goofy slapstick, apocalyptic action, and horrific body count, Judge Dredd struck me as a wonderfully bizarre amalgam of Red Dawn, Blade Runner, Dirty Harry, and Brazil.  I immediately thought it would make a great movie, but wasn’t quite expecting the first movie it inspired.

That movie was RoboCop.

RoboCop, directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Dredd fans Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner, came out in 1987.  There wouldn’t be an actual Judge Dredd movie until 1995 (and a second one, Dredd, just last year), but RoboCop was so good I didn’t care.

Unlike either of the Dredd films, RoboCop perfectly captured the dark, satiric tone of the Judge Dredd comics, carrying the fatuous Reaganite philosophies of corporate rule and frontier justice to their ultimate extreme:

RoboCop takes place in a crime-ridden futuristic Detroit, where cops are routinely murdered by the criminal gangs that own the streets.  When one such cop, Murphy (Peter Weller), is gunned down, his dying brain is salvaged and put in an experimental robot body:  RoboCop.

The problem is that RoboCop is owned by an evil corporation (is there any other kind?) that wants to privatize the police force as part of its plan to tear down and rebuild the city as a haven for organized vice.

When RoboCop begins interfering with the company agenda, a corrupt executive (Ronny Cox) enlists the gang that “killed” Murphy, plus a kill-crazy robot prototype called ED-209, plus the entire police force, to take him down.

Needless to say, it’s all a lot of fun. Sick, disturbing fun.

RoboCop aside, I kind of like the ‘95 Judge Dredd movie, and think it has a bad rap (Rob Schneider notwithstanding).  Stallone makes a decent Dredd, and the film certainly has the proper scale, unlike the much cheaper 2012 Dredd, which is okay but barely justifies the use of the Dredd character.  What both films sorely lack is the brutal satiric edge–the gleeful mockery of our twisted media culture–that makes RoboCop so great.

Here’s hoping they one day make a Judge Dredd movie that is as good as the film Dredd inspired.

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