DREDD - Judgment is coming (more specifically on September 21st)

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > DREDD - Judgment is coming (more specifically on September 21st)

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Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Vagabundo posted:

Are there any Judge Dredd fans here? It never really was a thing where I grew up and while I know of the principal characters - Dredd, Hershey, Cal, Death and the setting - MC1, I don't know a whole lot about it. When I saw the Stallone film, I was 10 and even then I could tell it was a piece of poo poo, but due to my lack of knowledge about the comic itself, I didn't realise how much of a crushing disappointment it was. Could someone do a quick and dirty schooling on Dredd, please?

It's set around 130 years in the future (so Dredd ages in 'real time' - the strip's been running for 35 years, and he's now pushing 70) and is a sci-fi-action-thriller-black-comedy-satire, depending on the whim of the writer that week. The world has been ravaged by war and environmental collapse, so most of the surviving population are crammed into a couple of dozen mega-cities scattered around the planet. Crime is high, so the cities use the 'Judge System' to keep control, where cops are replaced by elite Judges with the power to arrest, try and sentence criminals on the spot, and even execute them if the crime is serious enough (or if they resist arrest in the tiniest way). Judge Dredd is the most feared Judge in Mega-City One (a conurbation that used to run from Boston to Miami, until the writers decided it was too big and nuked the entire southern half with the death of 400 million people); he's dedicated, incorruptible and utterly ruthless. Crusading hero or murdering fascist? Both. He is the Law!

There you go.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2012 08:20

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 17:31

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

drunkill posted:

I've not read the comics or anything, kinda like the Stallone Dredd just for the crazy 90's sci-fi aspect but in this trailer Mega City One is pretty bland. A bunch of lowrise slums around the base of very sparse megabuildings? Sure the stallone version might have had a totally cluttered skyline but at least the city looked awesome with these massive structures towering above everything with only a small gap between them.

That was one of my first thoughts on seeing the trailer; I said in the Greenlight thread that Mega-City One should look like Blade Runner on acid and crazy pills, while this looks like District 9. The reason there's so much crime in the comic is because everyone is crammed into these awful WTC-sized blocks with tens of thousands of other people (and almost no hope of finding a job). One of the few things the Stallone movie got right was the city itself.

I hope it's not going to be 'Dystopic Sci-Fi Action Movie (with a Judge Dredd licence)�. :ohdear:

# ¿ Jun 23, 2012 17:33

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

I suppose one problem is that the Stallone film burned through some of the more iconic and 'straightforward' Dredd villains (Rico, the Angel Gang) and the Dark Judges are too extreme and weird to use in an introductory movie. The alternatives are people like Chopper (not technically a villain, just a rebellious kid), PJ Maybe (a 13-year-old serial killer who literally got away with murder until he was old enough for Dredd to beat the poo poo out of him with impunity), Judge Cal (who needs the horrible nature of Dredd's world to be set up before you see that his insane alternative is even worse), Orlok (who needs the political situation between the western and eastern Mega-Cities to be established) or America Jara (who shows up Dredd as a flat-out fascist monster).

So that leaves you with one-off weirdos like Call-Me-Kenneth, Dobey Queeg, Captain Skank, Father Earth and Barry Dreery (although I'd love to see 'The Game Show Show' done as a movie :haw:

), or doing a huge and insanely expensive epic like The Cursed Earth, The Judge Child or Block Mania/The Apocalypse War. I guess if you've only got a $40m budget, keeping it in one location with a new villain who fits it is about all you can do.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2012 23:14

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

bobkatt013 posted:

Will we get Ronald McDonald shooting a guy for spilling a milkshake?

They'd shoot it, but the film would mysteriously become shorter and have a hastily-done new scene with Dredd eating delicious tinned peas within a few days of its initial release.

(This really happened in the comic. :ssh:

)

# ¿ Jun 24, 2012 18:30

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

TheScott2K posted:

That's actually something I really like about the movie - Judge Dredd doesn't learn a god damned thing after everything that happens to him. That, its brief runtime, and the fact that it also functions as a dark follow-up to the "hooray we're destroying a utopia where everyone is nice" ending of Demolition Man gives me a soft spot for this movie. The villain's whole caper never really works, but the world building is great and the movie has the good sense to be less than two hours long.

The movie would have been longer (and probably made a bit more sense) if they hadn't cut out a big chunk of the 'let's make some new evil clones!' plot. As it is, Rico makes a good-bad one-liner, half-formed clones start waking up, then EVERYTHING EXPLODES!!! for no particular reason.

I feel a bit sorry for Danny Cannon, though. He was a huge fan of the comic, so it was probably his dream job - then he's thrown in at the deep end on a set where he is very much not the one calling the shots. Some kid on only his second movie, versus one of the biggest stars in the world who's previously had directors fired for not doing things how he wanted? Cannon didn't stand a chance.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2012 07:22

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Bugblatter posted:

...I really need to find a copy of Tank Girl.

Just to go full circle, Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett has also drawn Judge Dredd! So he's had two strips he's worked on have their points completely missed by Hollywood in the mid-1990s.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2012 18:36

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Grendels Dad posted:

I'm not very familiar with the source material beyond the basics, would she be suitable as a character the audience can connect to in the way AccountSupervisor talks about? Kind of like this movie's Rob Schneider?

The film's already moved away from the source material, because Anderson was already a full Judge when she was introduced rather than a rookie. But she's definitely more of an audience identification figure than Dredd, because she's everything that he's not - flippant, caring, open-minded and willing to do what's fair rather than just what's the law. (In the comics she's constantly cracking one-liners, but it's as much a defence mechanism against the human misery all around her as anything.)

# ¿ Jun 26, 2012 13:13

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

MrFlibble posted:

Yep. And We've actually seen him helmetless too (Various clones of him/ Judge Fargo have taken off their helmets at one point or another)

Plus we even saw Fargo's face in a flashback during 'Dredd Angel', and since Dredd's a clone of him...

Not that it matters, really. Dredd is Dredd. The helmet is his face, just like Batman's mask. Does it matter what Bruce Wayne looks like?

# ¿ Jun 26, 2012 16:17

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

DocHorror posted:

He spends a lot of the Necropolis storyline helmetless, but since he is so horribly burnt he just looks like he's made of bark.

He almost smiles when he meets McGruder again out in the Cursed Earth. Getting his face burnt off and losing his memory for a couple of months actually improved his disposition.

Actually, in the Dead Man storyline he looks a lot like a hosed-up Clint Eastwood, which is interesting because Urban sounds like he's doing a kind of Dirty Harry/Man With No Name voice and taking Dredd back to his roots as a sci-fi Harry Callahan.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2012 22:00

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Bugblatter posted:

The motorcycles (and everything else about the highway shots) are pretty low-rent too. The props and costumes all look like something from a fan film.

When the first on-set shots came out and the vehicles were all contemporary, I was a bit disappointed but thought "They'll be shot at night and just be filling out the background, they'll look fine."

Then the trailer shows them in broad daylight, so Mega-City One looks like Soweto. Oh well.

EDIT: I just realised that the Batpod from The Dark Knight is one big-rear end gold eagle away from being an actual Lawmaster bike, wide tyres and twin machine guns and everything. Was Nolan a Dredd fan as a kid?

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Jun 28, 2012

# ¿ Jun 27, 2012 09:01

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Baron Bifford posted:

He's got a sort of X over his visor. Don't they obscure his eyesight?

I'd noticed that too - the X is usually (depending on the artist) drawn much lower down in the comic. They must have had a reason for it, but now I'm wondering if Karl Urban is going to be cross-eyed in his next movie because the helmet had the same effect as the Opti-Grab from The Jerk.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2012 07:45

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

LtKenFrankenstein posted:

I'm a little bugged that they give away the main villain's death right in the loving trailer.

I mean, not like the movie was going to end with Judge Dredd not killing the bad guy, but still.

Dredd actually very rarely executes people on the spot in the comic (shooting them for resisting arrest, on the other hand...) It would be funny (and appropriately satirical) to have him just slap on the cuffs and growl "You're gonna spend the rest of your natural life in the cuuuuubes" [cut to black]. Dredd has gone to ridiculous lengths to see that people do their time, whether it be putting terminally-ill criminals in suspended animation until a cure's developed for their ailment so they can be revived to serve a full sentence, or riding hundreds of miles out into the Cursed Earth to arrest and bring back someone who was leaving Mega-City One forever for not paying their exit tax.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2012 16:20

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Hakkesshu posted:

That ABC Warrior looks so loving cool.

I would love to see a full-on ABC Warriors movie (as long as it portrayed them more like they were in 'Black Hole' rather than the Khaos Magick bullshit that followed). Moreso than a Dredd movie, to be honest...

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 14:55

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Analrapist posted:

Am I the only one who'd love to see a film adaptation of Strontium Dogs? The storyline in that 2000AD series was amazing in how emotionally gripping and deep it was, the story of Johhny Alpha, time bombs, Wulf Sternhammer, the Gronk... so much cool stuff just begging to be crammed into a big-budget film. Alas, I doubt it'll ever see the light of day.

Big Finish did a series of Strontium Dog audio dramas, starring Simon Pegg. Who is in Star Trek with Karl Urban. Who is Judge Dredd. Whoa, man, it's all connected...

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 18:52

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

marktheando posted:

The costume and set design in the Stallone film were great, it's just the rest of the film that's a problem. They choose to have Rico as the main villain- not the choice I would have made, I think learning about Dredd's 'family' is something you do after you know the character. But fine, there's a lot to work with there.

Then they just add everything they could think of to mess up what, in the comic, was a relatively simple story of two brothers at odds with each other. And they miss the point of just about everything.

Danny Cannon once said that writer Steven de Souza kept complaining about Dredd: "This guy is a fascist!" The reason for the bit where Dredd blows up the yuppie guy's car is because the thought process literally was "This makes him a dick rather than a monster, which gives us a starting point to redeem and humanise him." :ughh:

Now de Souza wrote Commando, The Running Man and Die Hard, so to me that lifts him above most criticism. But yeah, he really didn't get the point of Dredd at all, and was trying to fit him into the standard Hollywood formula.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 09:09

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Gooble Rampling posted:

Interesting reaction from Comic-con. Looks like it plays well with fans.
http://www.deadline.com/2012/07/comic-con-dredd-plays-to-cheering-fans-but-will-it-play-to-the-mainstream/

MC1 runs from Boston to LA? Christ, and it was ridiculously oversized in the early comics when it ran from Boston to Miami!

That report makes me more hopeful about the movie, though. Dredd's sometimes a hero, but he's always a bastard, and it sounds like that's the tone they're going for.

EDIT: IGN have a review up. 8/10.

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Jul 12, 2012

# ¿ Jul 12, 2012 13:42

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Dickeye posted:

Wait, Pegg was in the SD audio plays? Who was he? Those couple of plays were my favorite of the Dredd ones.

He was Johnny Alpha, believe it or not.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2012 18:30

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Kush posted:

It's brutal all right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8lMmRe6Z44

I hope they don't overuse the slowmo-gimmick too much, even if it looks quite nice.

I did a doubletake when I realised that the blood splatter actually goes beyond the edge of the frame. Now that's an interesting use of 3D.

I watched the Stallone movie for the first time in a while last night, and noticed some things about it that I hadn't considered before. The main one was how out of place the Judges look; the city and its populace are dark, grimy and damp, while the Judges strut about in their clean, shiny, brightly-highlighted uniforms almost as if they've been greenscreened into the scenes. While that's maybe a way of showing their detachment from the society they're supposed to be protecting, it's also yet another divergence from the themes of the comic; in that, Dredd is the city, both its protector and oppressor. The Judges are the symbol (and in many ways the creators) of this horrible, screwed-up society, not something imposed from above.

Something else that struck me was the ridiculous way the Angel Gang scene turned into a Marx Brothers routine, with more and more people pouring into that one room. The Angels attack Dredd! Hunters attack the Angels! Fargo attacks the Hunters! Mean Machine attacks Fargo! Dredd attacks Mean Machine! (Also, all the rifles in the movie are stupidly huge, so big the actors can barely get their hands around the grips.)

My view on the opening montage has changed over time, though. I used to think that starting with a collection of comic book covers and pages was out of place, but now I see it as the film practically begging the audience: "Please, see this as a comic book movie, A COMIC BOOK! Suspend your disbelief enough to accept our ludicrously oversized firearms and bell-ended skyscrapers and streets full of fetishwear-clad Boy George lookalikes and gleaming Versace golden codpieces!"

Meanwhile in the real world, instant justice gets one step closer.

EDIT: the climax features a large hi-tech set exploding for no particular reason around the hero and villain as they fight, and there's a Cure song over the end credits. Yep, this was made in the 90s, all right.

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jul 13, 2012

# ¿ Jul 13, 2012 12:18

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Bugblatter posted:

The comics depict violence, but they do so in a satirical fashion. They don't openly glorify it.

Weeeeell, that does depend on the story and the writer (and even the artist). A lot of the violence isn't so much satirical as blackly comic, such as just about anything the Angels ever did, most of PJ Maybe's killings, and even the Dark Judges when they slipped from horror to wacky through overuse. And it's hard to see something like Dredd killing Junior Angel as anything other than "gently caress yeah, Dredd threw that guy into a loving volcano!" :woop:

, while the Chopper story where he competed in the Mega-City Two Supersurf was basically carnage porn - "How many ways can we see human bodies ripped apart in lovingly painted detail?"

And let's not even start on when Garth Ennis and his pals took over as writers from Wagner and Grant. That whole period was just "Tee hee, look at how transgressive we are with our gratuitous ultraviolence!"

Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Jul 26, 2012

# ¿ Jul 26, 2012 23:19

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

When 2000AD did their first round of Dredd reprints (The Law In Order, back in the 90s), they did text recaps of 'Burger Wars' and 'Giants Aren't Gentlemen' to explain why there were missing episodes - and they changed the name Ronald MacDonald to Donald MacRonald to make sure they didn't have McDonald's leaning on them again, even 15 years after the fact. (They also avoided naming any of the corporate mascots directly.)

# ¿ Jul 31, 2012 09:31

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Vagabundo posted:

I did a quick search and it seems they in fact did get sued by McDonalds and whatever company it is that owns Jolly Green Giant and never printing the offending pages again was part of the settlement.

They also had to print an embarrassing apology mini-episode where Dredd and co have their supplies restocked by the 'real' Jolly Green Giant, with Dredd reminding the readers that he's a very nice guy and nothing to do with the evil one who attacked them a few weeks earlier, and how delicious his tinned peas are.

Which I suppose means that the Jolly Green Giant is technically part of Dredd canon.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2012 11:20

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Jose Mengelez posted:

Holy crap, remember how in the old 2000ad comics before poo poo was glossy as hell, how everything was black and white and then near the spine there would be a couple of "COLOUR PAGES gently caress yeah!"]....?

Megacity one looks grey as hell and huffing 'slo mo' makes all the colours super saturated

For full effect, they should cut away to a completely different movie in black and white for a couple of minutes. 2000AD had a period in the late 80s when only about a quarter of the pages were in colour, so for the Dredd episodes to be fully coloured they had to be split into two pieces with a B&W story between them.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2012 16:19

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Wonder if the last film will have Anderson as she was in her first appearance in the comics, with a Debbie Harry hairdo and judge boots with five-inch stiletto heels?

# ¿ Aug 14, 2012 08:51

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

At this stage, I just want to come out of the cinema thinking "Yeah, I enjoyed that." Because I realised that the last film I saw where that happened was M:I4, which means I haven't seen a movie that I enjoyed without reservation this year.

Come on, Dredd. Deliver some blackly satirical sci-fi as you tickle the reptile part of my brain with Verhoeven-esque ultraviolence. Is that too much to ask?

# ¿ Aug 19, 2012 22:31

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Aaron A Aardvark posted:

You know, if Cal ever becomes Chief Judge you'll be the first to be executed...

# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 18:29

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

tokidoki posted:

It's weird that all the promo stuff shows scenes that are in the script that's been floating around for ages, which makes me wonder if they did stick with that (with rewrites, I'm sure). The version I read had a beefier part for Anderson than Dredd. He just came off as a robot. Or is that what he's like in the comics? Never read 'em.

Dredd is not generally a deep character, and that's kind of the point. He has literally no personal life (he's still a virgin in his late sixties, and the only women who have ever expressed any romantic interest in him he's either rejected or killed), and on the odd occasion where he's displayed a normal human emotion like compassion it generally hasn't worked out well for anyone involved. Over the years he's acquired a kind of 'family' (a niece, a couple of clones, a very small number of fellow Judges who he would consider friends rather than just colleagues), but he's horribly uncomfortable about dealing with them on anything other than a purely professional basis. All he cares about is the law, and the only thing he enjoys is enforcing it.

The thing about the comics, though, is that Dredd is just as often a villain as a hero, and sometimes barely even appears except to show up at the end to arrest/kill the subjects of the story. (There was once an entire episode about the pet rat of a dead villain taking a poo poo on his bike's seat.) It could be argued that they're as much tales of Mega-City One in which he happens to feature as anything.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2012 23:42

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Brown Moses posted:

I don't remember if I'm recalling this correctly, but early on didn't Dredd get some sort of emotional lobotomy after he started to lose control of his emotions following the death of Rico? I think I recall it happening in a story where he arranges for a young girl who is horribly mangled in an accident to have her brain installed in a robot body, but then she runs in front of a truck after kids teased her for being a brain in a jar. After that some admin judge has a go at him for wasting money, and Dredd punches him in the face, at which point the senior judges decide to perform the surgery to stop him from going crazy or something.

Normally they would do the surgery, but since Dredd's the best Judge in the city despite his current issues, they decide he's too valuable to risk lobotomising and basically tell him to :dealwithit:

. Which he eventually does by seeing his old mentor, who advises him to get boots a couple of sizes too small - he'll be so constantly pissed off about having tight boots that he won't have any time for empathy.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2012 13:26

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:

Is he actually ageing in real time? If so thats incredible.

Yup. The strip's been running for 35 years, and Dredd is 35 years older than in 1977/2099. So he's now in his early seventies. (Future tech and medicine caveat, obviously, but he's still getting old even by 22nd century standards. For that matter, both Anderson and Hershey are now well into their 50s.)

# ¿ Aug 23, 2012 21:28

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

McSpanky posted:

And most of them are quite amusing/unsettling when you follow the links to their real counterparts. I really hope the film has the same parallel satire/commentary on current society, especially the drug war stuff (even if it's just in the background behind the dispensing of LAAAAAAAAAH).

My favourite little bit from that Dredd Report page was the news ticker that flashed up something like: 09:52 - homeless man found stabbed, Judges provide medical assistance. 09:53 - homeless man sentenced for vagrancy, sent to iso-cubes. That's exactly the kind of heartless bastardry the comic is all about.

Also spoof adverts like this:

Whenever I see someone eating a Bounty bar, the first thing I always think is "They came in search of paradise... they found LANDMINES!"

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 11:38

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

No, that was John Wagner's 'The Judge Child' in 1980; Alan Moore didn't really kick off with 2000AD until the following year. Weirdly, Moore's actually one of the few major British comics writers who hasn�t written Judge Dredd at some point. (Although he did apparently do a spec Dredd script that impressed Wagner enough to persuade Tharg to give him regular work.)

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 19:36

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

They'd have to ramp up to something like Judge Death; if the first movie is about Dredd fighting a drug lord in a horrible future dystopia, it would be a pretty big shift of gears to go straight to 'undead superfiend from a parallel dimension' in the second.

I suppose that since they're going with Anderson's psi-powers being a mutation (which is actually a pretty good explanation that I don't think ever came up in the comic; Psi-Division just appeared out of nowhere as if it had been there all along), that opens the door for them to build up the crazy in manageable stages if they did something like 'The Cursed Earth' or 'The Judge Child' in a second film, both of which are full of weird but not quite supernatural stuff (except for Murd the Oppressor).

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 14:27

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Hob_Gadling posted:

Death must be the worst-handled character in all of the comic. It started as a simple joke of "what if the Judges were even more extreme" and went to hell somewhere along the fourth story or so. The whole motif of "just like us!" has been forgotten decades ago. Shame, I liked the second Death story ever very much. Even if you drop all the crap that has accumulated along the years, the character doesn't make much sense unless you have a decent idea of what the Judge system is about.

Yeah, the Dark Judges in general have been fairly badly treated - they started out actually creepy and scary (Bolland's art on 'Judge Death Lives' is magnificent), but it didn't take too many appearances before they became joke figures, admittedly mass-murderous ones, cracking out one-liners before Dredd or Anderson found new ways to banish/trap them. 'Necropolis' was probably the last time they were portrayed as a genuine threat. Right now, I think Death is wandering around Nevada having nuked Las Vegas, and the other three are trapped in jars on PJ Maybe's mantlepiece.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 14:41

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

marktheando posted:

And also President whatshisname, the guy that started world war three, he'd have to be included. Meeting him after spending the whole movie seeing the radioactive wasteland he created would be pretty great.

President Booth (yep, naming the final president of the United States after a presidential assassin was quite deliberate).

Who would they have as the fifth face on Mount Rushmore, though? The Jimmy Carter joke probably wouldn't work as well today...

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 15:36

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Incidentally, the full score can be heard here. Some of the track names are probably spoilers, mind.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 15:56

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

gently caress. YES. They got it right! :dance:

Is it perfect? Nope. The action is some way short of the edge-of-the-seat kineticism of something like the Bourne movies or even an early Michael Bay flick. It's not bad, but it never quite gets to the stage of pulling you along with it; more that you're slightly ahead and waving for it to catch up. The relatively low budget shows too - even for a story that by design uses effectively one location over and over, you know that you're looking at the same corridor and the same balcony the whole time.

That said, I really enjoyed it. It's definitely got an Eighties exploitation actioner feel, and I mean that as a compliment. It's pared-down, gets straight to the point and once it's set up its world it goes all the way with it. And it's such a relief to see a comic-book movie that doesn't go on for three loving hours and have a third act consisting entirely of collapsing skyscrapers and CGI flying through explosions.

Urban pretty much nails Dredd - he's doing him as Dirty Harry Of The Future, which was how the character was intended in the first place. He takes no poo poo, delivers the occasional grim (but usually successful) one-liner, and kills a lot of people with maximum force. Which is really all you need from Judge Dredd. He's a hard man in a horrible world, and this is what he does. Deal with it. (The shot of him dispassionately watching a gang of screaming perps burning to death in a hail of white phosphorus while the flames reflect in his visor is as iconic an image of him as you could get.)

It's Thirlby who gets the bulk of the character work, and she did a really good job with it. Anderson's very human and reacts as such to some of the horrible stuff she encounters, but at the same time she's also trained as a Judge and acts accordingly. The moment when she executes a wounded perp is one of those cases of the film following through on its premise because you think "no, she's too nice to do that - whoa, gently caress! She did it!" - and then a few scenes later there's the darkest scene in the film, when she learns the full implications of what she's done. But she keeps it to herself even though she's obviously horrified - she's got a job to do. It's a strong performance that gets the most out of a deliberately lean script.

The 3D... well, it didn't add much. The Slo-Mo scenes are where it really stands out, but in my cinema the 'frame-breaking' effects from one of the trailers were barely noticeable because the projectionist had blown up the image so it practically filled the screen - making the gimmick pointless. Cheers for that! Everything also seemed 'soft', which again was probably a projection issue. That said, Lena Headey falling face-first into the camera so that her head explodes in slow-motion like a bloody flower was almost beautiful, in a seriously hosed-up way.

There were details that as a long-term fan of the comics kind of ground my gears, but ultimately I had to accept what superhero fans have had to ever since Tim Burton's Batman movies - things change. When Dredd and Anderson finally got radio communication and called for help, I was still in the mindset that a dozen H-Wagons and Mantas should have been there within five minutes, whereas here two guys stroll up and knock on the door. But this isn't the comic's Mega-City One with an all-powerful Justice Department that rules like a military dictatorship. This is Future Soweto and the cops don't even get replacement helmets when they get banged up. Besides, they threw in a ton of background references for the comics nerds like me anyway. Just off the top of my head I can remember Chopper, Kenny Who? and the Judge Child ('Khrysler's Mark'), and there were probably a ton more.

So yeah, that's a lot of words to say that while it's not a 5-star film, it still kicked rear end. :toot:

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 19:46

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Professor Clumsy posted:

That effect of stuff flying out of the frame was only noticeable on one occasion. The film is in the 2.35:1 ratio and there was one notable shot where they basically faked a 2.40:1 ratio in order to pull off that effect. It would actually work better in 2-D because the splatter leaves the bottom of the screen rather than coming toward you and exceedingt the frame that way.

Yeah, the 3D added basically nothing... except �1.50 or so to the ticket price, and that was with my own 3D glasses. Just shy of ten quid to see a movie, and not even in London! 2D only unless there isn't the option from now on, I think.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 20:16

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Professor Clumsy posted:

"FREEZE!"

"...Why?"

The film itself definitely has a lot more humour to it than we've been led to believe. It's not as outrageously funny as the comic, but it retains some of its silliness and manages to get some laughs. There are points where you feel like you either have to laugh at Dredd's murderous antics or be horrified by them.

My favourite moment of deadly black humour was when Dredd was out of ammo and shouting all the different munitions at his gun to see if there were any left.

"Incendiary!"
[boop]
"Armour-piercing!"
[boop]
"Heatseeker!"
[boop]
"Hi-ex!"
[bing!]
EXPLODING loving HEAD! :haw:

I was also pleased they didn't wimp out with the Lawgiver's defence mechanism like in the Stallone film. No puny taser shock here, it explodes and blows your entire hand off, as it should.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 21:16

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

'Peachtree' is supposedly the name of the curry house where Garland and others used to meet up to discuss things in preproduction.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2012 18:25

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Have to admit I thought the gatling gun sequence was one of the weaker bits of the film, simply because there was so much being thrown at Dredd for so long, and he came through it more or less unscathed even as everything around him exploded. I fully expect a Yakety Sax overdub for all those shots of him running down corridors.

But yes, disappearing silently back into the smoke after tossing the henchman over the balcony was a great moment.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2012 16:31

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 17:31

Small Strange Bird: Sep 22, 2006; Merci, chaton!

Comics-wise, Case Files 2-5 cover The Cursed Earth, The Day The Law Died, The Judge Child, Judge Death, Unamerican Grafitti, Block Mania and The Apocalypse War, all of which are pivotal classics. (Plus you get probably over a hundred smaller stories that show off Dredd's awesome/lovely world and the weirdos who inhabit it.)

America isn't part of the main run (it appeared in the spin-off Megazine), but it's pretty much an essential read as it shows the other side of Dredd - the unrepentant fascist monster - at his worst.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2012 18:53

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > Cinema Discusso > DREDD - Judgment is coming (more specifically on September 21st)

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