Judge Dredd


JackFetch

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The video has been removed, but here's a link to another one.

Besides Karl Urban as Dredd, who looks and sounds awesome, I am a little worried. From the trailer, the plot does nothing for me and it looks like it's relying too heavily on stylized 3D action. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very excited for Dredd and will see it in the theater, I just hope my slight fears can be proven wrong.

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Resident Judge Dredd fan here: Dredd started out as a fairly standard cop but quickly evolved into something more subversive with the first multi-part strip "The Robot War". In that Dredd had to put down an uprising by the robots that did most of the work in the city. What made this fairly subversive was that the robots were blatantly shown to be a slave caste. Despite this they managed to make the perfect villains for the strip because they could be maimed and blown apart in the most horrible ways and no one would complain like they had with Action, another IPC comic that had brought a tabloid crusade against it because of the depictions of ultra-violence. My favourite part of this early story was that the robot's leader was a carpenter who was killed and resurrected part of the way through it.

As the years went on it developed into a really fun sci-fi/action strip with a great sense of dark humour. Mike put up a newspiece about the release of Case Files 5 which covers the Apocalypse War and some other strips around it. Without a doubt this is probably the best of Dredd from around that era, and me and Tom covered the Apocalypse War in our inaugural edition of Waiting for the Trade.

About 6 or 7 years into the strip, John Wagner and Alan Grant, the strips co-writers, were becoming concerned with the number of young readers who were clamouring for a Judge-style system in the UK. When their editor rejected a story "A Letter from a Baath Island nudist" they rewrote it as "A Letter From a Democrat" which was framed as a letter from Hester Hyman, a democrat terrorist who held a TV show audience hostage, to her husband and children. This was the starkest portrayal of the Judge system as a repressive, fascist-styled government yet. For once the repression of the citizens was shown without any nudges or winks and this storyline was visited several more times over the strips existence leading to America which I consider to be, not just the best Dredd story of all time, but one of the best comic stories of all time.

The work of Wagner and Grant and the short page count of each episode of Dredd meant that it could take any stance they wanted without betraying the character. Dredd could be the hero, the villain or barely even feature in any given story and it would feel like a Dredd story. It could be a whacky screwball comedy, or something relentlessly grim and Dredd's stoic character worked as a great centrepiece for the insanity that was Mega City One.

Really, to my mind, an almost perfect Dredd film has been made: Robocop. Between that and his adaptation of Starship Troopers, I'm utterly convinced that Paul Verhoven would have been the ideal director for a Dredd movie and it's a shame for all of us that that never happened.

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It looks OK. I've read a LOT of people now saying its ripping off The Raid but as anyone who has been following Dredd for a while, as I have as a long time fan, the script has been floating about for a good few years. It's not ripping The Raid off at all. I had a copy of the Dredd script before The Raid had even started shooting.

I think this looks like a good Dredd films, it has a kind of John Carpenter siege vibe to it.

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I figure that's almost the joke, that in making a movie they've created an in-story reasons for it to look like a action film. Plus I appreciate that they are doing something a little different and trippier than normal bullet-time. The bodies are reacting much more like they genuinely would to gunfire (credit lots of Deadliest Warrior testing guns on pigs for that knowledge).

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Really fun. It actually comes across like one of those labour of love fan films, where creating a suitably loyal and bleak visual style overrides any of the more Hollywoodish aspects that you might expect. Plot-wise it's got a lot of Die Hard in it's DNA. One of the most successful comic adaptations of recent years.

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