I hope none of you remember the mid-to-late ’90s, when after The Crow was a success at the box office, studios tried to adapt other gritty comics like Spawn into films– with disastrous results. (Thank God we never got a Sandman movie, right?) One of those movies was Judge Dredd, starring Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider, a film which bore as little resemblance to its source material as 2005’s Elektra did to Frank Miller’s comics.
Everything that “film” got wrong, this one gets right. First? The premise. Filmmaker Alex Garland (28 Days Later) keeps the post-apocalyptic and gritty, urban setting of Mega City One. We skip the origin story so many films feel they need to tell, and instead we’re put right into the middle of the action: Judge Dredd, amazingly well-played by Karl Urban (Star Trek, Doom, Lord of the Rings) one of hundreds of judges who act as police, judge, jury, and executioner to keep the law, chasing down a team of bad guys escaping from a crime. We see Dredd in action, and it is a sight to behold. We’re also introduced to a new drug the baddies are using, “Slo-Mo,” a hallucinogenic that is somewhere between Ecstasy, LSD, and. . . something that makes everything feel like it’s in slow motion. After Dredd has done his job, we’re introduced to rookie Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), whom Dredd is tasked with assessing in the field. Despite her low aptitude scores, she has latent psychic abilities, which the Chief Judge wants asessed to see if she is a liability or not. Luckily, explaining that the iconic helmets interfere with her psychic abilities, Thirlby never wears one. Urban, however, never takes his off– a point that he explained to me was stipulated in his contract. Alex Garland, coincidentally, had independently written the same thing into his contract.
So, placed in this “Training Day” sort of situation, Dredd and Anderson go to investigate what appears to be a simple case: three homicides in the Peach Trees, a slum where thousands of families live in dilapidated tenements in one giant concrete building over 200 stories tall. At first, this appears to be a simple gang turf war gone wrong, until the cops are clued in to the fact that only one gang controls the building, led by an ex-prostitute turned druglord named “Ma Ma”, played with utter glee and abandon by Lena Headley (Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles, 300). Dredd and Anderson then find themselves in outgunned, outnumbered and in over their heads as they’re forced to fight their way up the complex The Raid: Redeption style.
Let me point out that while there are obvious comparisons between Dredd, Raid, and even Attack the Block, it’s not fair to say, as I heard some of the film hipsters here at FantasticFest whine, that they “ripped off” the concept. That is utter bull$#!t, as Dredd started production long before those other films ever came out. What it is a sign of, however, is three great filmmakers each pulling something out of the zeitgeist to create films with similar milieus and to all come out as great fun.
This film gets so much else right. As I referred to earlier, the performances by all of the leads are top notch. I asked Urban about his process, how do you act with having half of your face obscured the entire time? “The voice became very important, as did the physicality of the character… We had a lot of discussions with Alex. We decided it would be a mistake to try to play the icon, what we needed to find was the man. We focused on the physicality of the character, the sense of humor, finding out where he’s compassionate, where the gear-shifts are.” Thirlby throughout the film has the most dramatic of the character arcs, where you can see her as she grows throughout the film. And then Headley, as I mentioned, brings a pathos and a lot of depth to a character that otherwise might have been just a one-dimensional psychopath. Garland in his conversation with us mentioned that this was a truly independent film that was independently financed and therefore, very low budget (don’t believe the numbers you read on the internet, folks– he implied, though never directly stated, that this number was incredibly inflated, but directly said that it was false). This low budget indie vibe permeated everyone on set. Karl was there not for a paycheck, but because he grew up as a kid working in a pizza parlor reading Dredd comics. Alex wrote it because Dredd was his favorite comic, and, he admitted, one of the first things he ever hid from his parents. You can see that camaraderie and craft that went into the filmmaking. This is, quite simply, the best acted action/sci-fi film we’ve had in a while. The only other contender I can even compare it to is the work by Idris Elba, Charlize Theron, and Michael Fassbender in Prometheus.
And then possibly the most important thing they got right in the film were the visual effects. I was extremely skeptical coming into the movie. “Oh great. It’s in 3D. And it’s got super-slow-motion shots. Great.” I was expecting a ho-hum reboot more along the lines of Total Recall than what I got, which was absolutely spectacular. The film shot mostly on practical sets, and they saved the digital special effects for when we see what happens when someone is under the effects of Slo-Mo. I have to say, I’ve never done a drug in my life. But Slo-Mo looks like a lot of fun. As we, the audience, experience the Slo-Mo drug, everything turns sparkly and rainbow-y and beautiful. It’s easy to get lost in. And the 3D is used to great effect to help give a sense of scale, and even vertigo, from looking down the center of the huge 200-story Peach Trees complex. There are some truly terrifying moments, at least for me as someone who is incredibly scared of heights, which only a 3D movie could help bring about. I asked Alex Garland if there was anything he couldn’t do with the film that he wanted to, and he said that it was so important to him to get the effects pieces right that they had to scale back on some practical set pieces, like he would’ve liked some more futuristic cars on the road instead of just 1970s Toyotas. But that investment paid off, for me at least, and I didn’t miss seeing futuristic cars. It’s also ultra-violent. During so many of the action sequences where people are under the effects of the Slo-Mo, we see people shot through the face, blown up, and impacts after falling 200 stories. So, for the faint of heart, look away during some of those parts. There’s also implied violent sex and rape (implied, but still) so this film really packs a violent punch. So much of the ultra-violence seems played up for camp, though, so it’s simply Tarantino/Rodriguez-esque that’s played up for laughs. So, again, while 3D and super slow motion are usually hackneyed and unnecessary, I highly recommend seeing this movie in a 3D format, on the biggest screen you can with the best speakers you can find.
Which brings me to the soundtrack, which perfectly fits the apocalyptic gritty future. It’s a lot of break beats and industrial music, which reminded me of other films like the first Matrix or Blade 2.
This movie is a lot of fun. Go see it, because the filmmakers deserve your dollars. And especially if you want to see a sequel, which Urban and Garland say they’re game for. But if not, they call this “an instant cult classic” (it is) and a film that stands on its own as a tribute to the great work done through the years by John Wagner, the creator of the Judge Dredd comics.
Go see this.
3 1/2 stars
Super-secret inviso-text for people wondering about Star Trek:
Oh, also, I asked Karl about Star Trek. He promised that all will be revealed in May and we should be excited. As for previous things he said about Benedict Cumberbatch playing Gary Marshall, I get the feeling he’s f@#$ing with the fanboys on the internet.Although it may be more possible that he’s playing Gary Seven, which was who I asked about, and he blithely confimed that rumor. Again, just think he’s messing with us.