Best Dredd

It's not dissimilar to The Raid, but it's also pretty good at being Dredd. Fascist police, lots of good incidental details (including most of the bullet-types), Dredd keeps his bloody helmet on.

It also, I was _very_ surprised to find out, one of the most beautiful 3D films I've ever seen, up there with Avatar.

Al Ewing just posted his thumbs-up on Twitter.

Really want to see this in the cinema, but don't think I know anyone who'll go with me.

Personally, I would have liked Mega-City One to have been more like it is in 2000AD; more stylised, more sky walkways and rounded buildings. More life, more craziness. But as a rough, tough action flick, it delivers. And Urban nails Dredd.

I was thinking "Not enough chin!" but that's probably just a result of later artists (including imho the definitive Dredd artist Ron Smith) emphasising it, if you look at the Mike McMahon from Dredd's first appearance on the wiki page, Urban pretty much nails it.

Haven't seen the Raid but did really enjoy this.
It does look like its a lot less futuristic than the comic strip but it might be the more realistic for it. Also the uniform looks like its more practical than the strip one, may just be over what looked right on an actual human being. Though leather or synthi-leather smoothness plus joint pads might be more sexy.

I can't remember to what extent the Stallone film changed the uniform. & I'm also only just realising the absence of robots in the film, whereas there was a Hammerstein in the old one.

But it is great that this exists without a need to make a direct comparison to the earlier film, even having done so. This is a very atymospheric film that seems to keep up a level of intensity throughout. It just seems to be about 50 years before the comic version in termas of distance from now.

It starts with a chase on ground level in a part of the city that has been pretty much closed off to the normal human population in the comic strip. Seems that people are still living in contact with the original city ground level in this. I think it's a mutie only zone or at least an undercity in the comic. The roads in that are all in the sky to the current city level, in the film there actually does appear to be a floor.

Liked it though & it does seem that most films do tend to make rather large changes to source material to make things work on screen. Think I would have preferred a straighter translation though. But if there are more films by this team on this subject matter I won't be complaining, unlike the Stallone one.

Wouldn't mind seeing a Johnny Alpha film if it was done as well.

agree with the beauty in the use of 3D somebody says above too. droplets and water sheets especially .
& slow motion shootouts pretty impressive.

Really enjoyed this a lot, the repositioning in '10 minutes into the future' really works. This was made worse by the trailer for End of Watch beforehand, which made Los Angeles today look like a slightly more low-rent version of Mega City One.

Two Fatties shown during the film as far as I could see. My reaction to the first one was that he wasn't that fat and to the second one that he was a real guy without makeup. The future is now, huh.

ha this was awesome, saw it twice, in 2D and 3D. 2D was better i thought

i think the fatty in his apartment may have had some padding!

I was in a really annoys mood after being made to pay for 3D glasses, despite already paying a surcharge for a 3D film. But this film made me forget all that. Looks great, 3D I thought worked quite well for once, and with a tight storyline so refreshing in a Hollywood movie after seeing the interminable Avengers film or Prometheus earlier this year.

*annoyed*

Holy shit I loved this. It's nice to see a comic movie that realizes it can tell A Judge Dredd Story, and it doesn't have to be The Judge Dredd Story.

Some enjoyably eccentric music choices, too, between Vitalic's "Poison Lips" and, completely out of nowhere, Matt Berry's theme from "Snuff Box."

This was awesome.

This film is so fucking good and will be the first film i see twice at the cinema for many years.

This will be the first film I follow on BoxOfficeMojo (with a sense of profound disappointment, no doubt):

At the London Film and Comic Con in July 2012, Garland said that a North American gross in excess of $50 million for Dredd would potentially allow for sequels. Garland said that he had plans for a trilogy of films with a second film focusing on the origins of Dredd and his city, and a third introducing Dredd's nemesis, the undead Judge Death and his Dark Judges.[39][82] In August 2012, he also mentioned that a Judge Dredd television series would be a positive future step for the series.[83] In September 2012, Garland further expanded his sequel concepts. He said that he would explore the "Origins" and "Democracy" storylines and introduce the villains Judge Cal and Chopper. He also said that he would pursue the concept that Judge Dredd is a fascist.[26] Also in September, Macdonald said that further films would be made in partnership with IM Global and would likely be again shot in South Africa.[84]

love how the drug scenes in this looked like they had been run through blingee

hahaha yeah

i really, really enjoyed this -- it was actually the first 3d film that i've found worthwhile! but it does appeal to all my preferences e.g. people being shot in the face, tower defence, non-bullshit female characters, concrete, etc.

yeah it was p cool, they gave themselves a really narrow scope and basically excelled within it, thirby was good, there were a couple of inexcusably lazy plot things but that's fine.

this review on somethingawful is totally correct about what makes the film good, but completely overestimates how good the film actually was.

Very excited about the possibility of a TV series. Sounds pretty unlikely though.

completely overestimates how good the film actually was

nah this was cracking

also they're otm abt 2D's superiority tho i am biased

yeah, this was much better than i was expecting. felt like a peak-period john carpenter movie, which is the highest praise possible as far as i'm concerned. really looking forward to seeing where they take it now.

saw a bit of stallone's dredd movie on the tv last night. hadn't seen it since 15-year-old me was bitterly disappointed by it in the cinema, and i'd forgotten how amazing the production design is - mega-city one looks fantastic, and the angel gang are perfect. a mashup of the 2012 dredd with some of the stallone dredd's design would be just about perfect.

Didn't Chris Cunningham do some production work on the Stallone Dredd?

pretty sure he did, yeah. mean machine angel certainly looks like his work.

yeah, stallone's dread is a fantastic looking movie.

It was dragged down by Rob Schneider and spaghetti robots.

stallone dread is absolutely classic until rob schneider shows up

Hopefully seeing this Thursday, excited.

'dragged down' somewhat undersells the true horror of schneider! what a weird decision it was to give dredd a civilian sidekick at all, let alone one played by deuce bigalow. anderson in the new movie is a effective audience-surrogate character with the added bonus of not being annoying as fuck.

The one thing that would have improved Dredd would be if the restaurant worker at the end of the first chase dropped a bead of sweat on the counter and Dredd sent her to the iso-cubes for Health & Safety.

saw the new version last night.

loved every minute of it.

So this bombed in the US, then?

The one thing that would have improved Dredd would be if the restaurant worker at the end of the first chase dropped a bead of sweat on the counter and Dredd sent her to the iso-cubes for Health & Safety.

yeah. I thought the one thing it missed was some unfair judging on the innocents, but i guess they needed to keep him semi-likable for audiences that didn't know he was supposed to be a dick.

Saw it last night, firm endorsement from me.

ooh .. sick watched it today ..

thread needs his reaction ..

i never buy dvd editions but for this film i may just have to make an exception just to try and spot the fanboy easter eggs ('chopper' graff ! 20 seconds to comply ! etc )

Yeah, that did the job.

Loved this, such a pity it's tanking in the US.

Although, I can't bear another sodding origin story and if that's what Garland has planned it's probably a mercy.

IMO a sequel would just show the fascist tendencies and expand on the world, hopefully. Make the judges less sympathetic.

Garland said as much in an interview I saw, re: fascistic tendencies. 'Twould probably be the judges coming up against pro-democracy rebellions. The third in a possible trilogy would be the entrance of the Dark Judges, i.e. showing the Judge fascist state taken to its absurdist extreme.

i really dug this movie--never read judge dredd stuff consistently as getting it affordably in the us is a huge bitch. i've been looking through d-w0lk's dredd reckoning blog and have been trying to figure out where to start. is the case filed 04 book a reasonable place?

case files, rather

I think they had considered the Judge Child, the America story which could be what R Baez is referring to as coming up against the pro-Democracy rebels. and a couple of other things which I can't remember offhand.
There was a good interview with Garland in last month's Dredd Megazine which was a Dredd 3D special too.
I hadn't realised that Megazine was doing new stories until pretty recently, thought it was mainly reprints for some reason.
Might buy some future editions now. Bit expensive though.

If you can face sitting at a computer while you read through Dredd you can get pretty much everything as cbr files I think.
Certainly cam,e across all the epics from near the beginning a few months back though that was on Demonoid. Should be able to find it elsewhere though I would think.

yup, good call. thanks!

the more i think about this movie the more i like it.

So supposing someone had acquired the Complete Case Files 1-4 through *cough* entirely legal means, but couldn't find any of the subsequent Case Files books. Where should this hypothetical someone (and his- or her!- thorough respect for copyright law both domestic and international) go next?

alt.binaries.comics.british

film reminded me v strongly of something like enzo g castellari's bronx warriors - a suitably violent, properly exploitative, ersatz (european) approximation of america and american pop cult. movie also gave off a heavy death race 2000 vibe, p appropriate seeing that that was the main source for dredd's comic bk costumes/visuals.

thought the low budget showed in places - too many oppressively tiny sets and identikit corridors - and that the film needed a stronger supporting cast (more grotesque-sweaty british character actors, please.) also, in places the dialogue was a bit underpowered - it's faithful to the spirit of the comic bks, in that dredd isn't a zing-master, but lots of the dialogue exchanges still fell pretty flat, imho.

felt like a peak-period john carpenter movie

haha, assault on precinct 13!!

I was torn on whether I liked the score to the film. Had a few pangs of missing that DROKK album that came out.

Dredd has pretty much failed to meet it's budget, let alone turn profit, so I doubt we'll see another. And it's all thanks to stupid bloody 3D.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/10/16/dredd-shows-why-the-3d-film-format-is-doomed-again/

you should! 40 years of dredd stories have created a massive, intricate world that could supply a tv show with a huge amount of cool content

chap otm basically, although i think dredd is actually a really interesting character in his own right - he's aged in real-time over the entire run, and john wagner and others have handled his development in all kinds of interesting and unexpected ways

Yeah you're right, but the complexities of later years relies for their power on having built him up as an intractable facist for so many years, and is not something that could be pulled off effecively in the first season of a TV show, for example.

Sorry that was a very gramatically knotty sentence.

I realise I've not actually read any new Dredd since the late 90s.

yeah, that's true - still, they could dip in and out of dredd's origins (and judge fargo's story and the origins of mega city one) and add some neat shading to his character without waiting like 20 seasons for karl urban (or whoever) to get old first

I've just been re-reading the cursed earth saga, hopefully the tv show will make time for people getting their heads bitten off by dinosaurs and stuff in amongst the character development

wait is it still an ongoing comic??

On several levels (Dredd's Megazine, stories in 2000AD, IDW's recent series of miniseries).

It's hard to determine what the most recently updated or canonical Dredd thread is!

In any case, I finally read The Small House, the recently collected arc from last year. A few scenes didn't really land for me, and the twists are a little too on the nose, but I enjoyed it and am thinking about following more in real time instead of via collections.

I make this claim every couple years, forget, and then go back to buying trade paperbacks, though