I realize that there is a deep comic history behind Dread, as well as the Stallone movie Judge Dread. I know little about that stuff. I am arrogantly reviewing this movie none-the-less, as I found it entertaining in a crude way, and very telling in a societal way.
I was recently told by someone that ‘space opera’ is not sci-fi. I disagree. To me space opera is bad sci-fi. Last night I strolled through the Barnes & Nobles and spent over an hour investigating the science-fiction section. Half of it was fantasy. The science-fiction publishing genre is not really even a genre, but more like a label that could read, ‘ghettoized speculative sub-genres here’.
As Science-fiction Dread really clicks for me. This is a starkly dystopian view of a world that consists of an 800-million person Mega City One that stretches from New York to D.C. To me the setting is absolutely believable, as it is just an extrapolation of New York subsidized housing projects. What is even better is this is an outsider’s view of future America. The film was shot in South Africa, which seems to be the Baltimore City of that continent, with Nigeria standing in for Detroit. The actors are all British, South African, and Australian—which means they are good. Karl Urban actually manages to replicate a character with less than no personality, doing a much better job than Stallone.
In Mega City One there are 17,000 crimes per day, and the judges are only able to respond to 6%! This is already happening. What is realistic to me about the judgment and execution of justice on the fly by extremely lethal cops, is that a police force so vastly outnumbered would have to have such latitude to be able to sow the necessary dread of breaking the law among a massive population. Our police forces today enjoy huge local numerical and material superiority in most operations they undertake, and they are still unable to keep a lid on crime in most urban centers. 'Sowing dread' was the way that the Roman legions kept the peace in a huge empire with only about a quarter of a million soldiers. i wonder at the eagles on the judge uniform, and if Rome inspired the comic authors of Judge Dread. It is a system of martial retribution. Innocent bystanders in this movie are also just meat. This is about the most realistic thing about it, that civilians pay the price of crime. One minigun shootout 47 minutes in reminded me of a Mogadishu/Urban Iraq retrospective.
The movie is centered on one 200 story prison-like apartment mall, with an unemployment rate of 96%. This is like taking a cross-section of people from Urban Nigeria, Detroit, Oakland California, and Baltimore, shutting them up in a towering concrete box, and hiring the Greek government to manage their economy!
The violence was not as gruesome as it could have been, indeed does not exceed what is done in flicks like Predators. What really cursed this movie to low returns in American box offices where the following factors, which of course, resulted in me liking it a lot:
1. The chief villain is a woman
2. There is not a heroic morally unimpeachable supporting black man in the cast [the ubiquitous Uncle Tom on the modern Hollywood liberal plantation]
3. There is not a heroic woman of power stacking up bodies by kicking and punching machinegun wielding extras
4. The villains are mixed race gangs, not white skinhead bad guys
5. The police force is riddled with corruption
A brief on the other things I really liked about Dread:
1. A notable villain is played by the actor who depicted Barksdale, the kingpin character from The Wire, and has a part that suits his range perfectly.
2. The writing was full of irony, like a mall janitor cleaning up after a mass shooting with a scrubbing machine while a recorded message assures customers they will be able to resume shopping in thirty minutes
3. In minute 1:12 the ugliest extra in cinema has a full frontal facial moment
4. The drug ‘slow-mo’ is like LSD and heroin with a crack-pipe delivery system, and will be produced in the future—that is sci-fi prophecy there.
5. The quotes from the brief dialogue impart a sense of the grungy atmosphere: ‘Bodies for recyce’, ‘it’s all a deep end’, ‘meat wagon inbound’, ‘judgment time’, and ‘Mega City One is a fuckin’ meat-grinder. People go in one end, meat comes out the other. All we do is turn the handle.’
When you Americans think of how ‘unrealistically dystopian’ movies like Dread are, consider that the 1980s movie Robocop, set in a post-apocalyptic Detroit, depicts a Detroit that was much nicer than the real pre-apocalyptic Detroit we actually have 30 years later!
