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When people think about comics, they’ll generally think of DC/Marvel, or occasionally a manga series like One Piece and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. It makes sense - after all, the U.S. is currently in the grips of a multi-billion dollar Superhero Franchise War, and manga, while perhaps not as strong as it once was, is still a popular niche market. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people didn’t know the rest of the world even had comics, let alone its own unique and interesting superheroes and franchises. Did people watching that Tintin movie a few years realize it’s an extremely popular series from Belgium? Or that the Smurfs, which Hollywood recently exploited for a quick buck, was also of Belgian origin? We’d be surprised at just how global our lives really are nowadays, if we bothered to pay attention.
In the U.K., some of the most well-respected comics in the country (and the world, if you’re one of those people who give a shit about comics) come from a science fiction anthology comic called 2000 AD. Founded on Feb. 26, 1977, collective series of 2000 AD often trended towards the fantastical side of ‘sci-fi’, with a level of violence, cynicism and satirical political commentary that had only really been touched upon by independent comic artists like Dave Sim and R. Crumb here in the States. Strontium Dogs, Rogue Trooper, Nemesis the Warlock, Indigo Prime, Nikolai Dante, the re-imagined Dan Dare, comics that made Batman and Spider-Man seem realistic in comparison, and by that token weren’t afraid to be comics and go off in weird directions. Having the likes of Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Grant Morrison and Kevin O’Neill amongst your contributors doesn’t hurt either.
One of the earliest and easily the most popular characters to spring from the pages of 2000 AD was Judge Dredd, created by John Wagner. Taking place in a far-flung future, where nuclear war has reduced much of the Earth’s surface into an irradiated cinder and most of the Earth’s population are now concentrated into sprawling city-states known as Mega Cities, Judge Dredd follows the titular crimefighter himself, an elite member of the law enforcement/governing body known as the Judges, as he delivered swift and brutal justice to the lawbreakers of Mega City One. More a force of nature than a man, Dredd doesn’t take excuses, he doesn’t brook arguments and he doesn’t care about sob stories. If you break the law in Mega City One, then you’re going to get punished fo the fullest extent of the law, and Dredd won’t rest until you’re in handcuffs or in a bodybag. It doesn’t matter if you’re a robot, a chimpanzee gangster or a T-rex, all must answer to the Law.
It is this hyper-rigid morality in a world of total excess that Pete Travis attempts to translate to film in his 2012 movie Dredd, the second film to be based on the British comic. A new drug called slow mo, which makes you see everything in bullet time, has hit the streets and Judge Dredd, the greatest of all Judges, is not a fan of illegal narcotics. After a very public triple homicide appears to link slow mo distribution to a habitation tower known as Peachtrees (the ghetto of Mega City One), Dredd and rookie Cassandra ‘I’m the audience surrogate, but also totally an attractive blonde psychic mutant’ Anderson decide to enter and take the drug dealers to task once and for all. Peachtrees is not all fun and games though, and when Magdalene Madrigal (head of the MaMa clan) locks down the tower, the two Judges find themselves strangers in a strange land, with an veritable army of goons out for their blood. They’ll have to use every bit of their training to make their way through the gauntlet, take out MaMa and her goons and stem the tide of slow mo once and for all. No one is above the Law, and Judge Dredd is here to prove it.
There are two problems with Dredd that really stand out to me. The first is the look. If you didn’t know ahead of time that Dredd took place in the future, there’d be no way of telling it from any dirty, unimpressive desert town (so New Mexico). Compared to the Mega City One of the comics, which is this unbelievably huge, cyberpunk-before-cyberpunk metropolis, the MC1 of Dredd seems at most times to be disappointingly devoid of life and activity. Perhaps Travis was going for a more realistic take on the character, and of course faithfully recreating MC1 would be hell on the budget, but the problems with the design also pose problems for the film as a whole. Without the futuristic aesthetic of the comics, does Judge Dredd’s costume really make any sense? Does his super-pistol with four different concurrent ammo types? This Mega City One barely looks like it has running water, yet the technology is advanced enough to arm the Judges? It’s an unnecessary test of the suspension of disbelief for a movie that shouldn’t need it.
The second problem? It’s not a satire, or at least the satirical portions don’t come often enough. Sure, the character of Judge Dredd is cool, but the whole point of him (in my opinion) is that he’s meant to be parodical. Never not ‘in uniform, perpetually sour demeanor, rarely if ever questions whether the laws he enforces are just or whether he punishments he sentences people to are exorbitant. The ultimate fascist, and likely what a lot of people envisioned the police to be like during the notoriously tense Thatcher years in Britain, or at least an idealized version. Yet the situations and enemies Dredd faces are so ridiculous, and the way he interacts with people is so over the top that it ends up being funny. The fact that Mega City One is essentially a police state, where the legal system is reduced to a one man job and human rights are treated as a privilege, and there still manages to be rampant crime is about as blatant as it gets. Like I said, there are hints of throughout the movie (the homeless guy scene springs to mind), but it never quite reaches the level of excess of the original comic. Another concession for the moviegoing audience, I suspect.
Still, for what it is, Dredd is still a decent action movie. You get a lot of violence, you get a lot of witty one-liners, and there’s a smattering of implied sexual situations. Exactly what we all want in an action movie, I’d say, with a little sci-fi twist. So if you’re interested in a little dirty, bloody violence this Halloween, maybe a costume idea that won’t break the bank, then get a little bit of Dredd in your life. Just don’t break any laws to do it.
It is this hyper-rigid morality in a world of total excess that Pete Travis attempts to translate to film in his 2012 movie Dredd, the second film to be based on the British comic. A new drug called slow mo, which makes you see everything in bullet time, has hit the streets and Judge Dredd, the greatest of all Judges, is not a fan of illegal narcotics. After a very public triple homicide appears to link slow mo distribution to a habitation tower known as Peachtrees (the ghetto of Mega City One), Dredd and rookie Cassandra ‘I’m the audience surrogate, but also totally an attractive blonde psychic mutant’ Anderson decide to enter and take the drug dealers to task once and for all. Peachtrees is not all fun and games though, and when Magdalene Madrigal (head of the MaMa clan) locks down the tower, the two Judges find themselves strangers in a strange land, with an veritable army of goons out for their blood. They’ll have to use every bit of their training to make their way through the gauntlet, take out MaMa and her goons and stem the tide of slow mo once and for all. No one is above the Law, and Judge Dredd is here to prove it.
There are two problems with Dredd that really stand out to me. The first is the look. If you didn’t know ahead of time that Dredd took place in the future, there’d be no way of telling it from any dirty, unimpressive desert town (so New Mexico). Compared to the Mega City One of the comics, which is this unbelievably huge, cyberpunk-before-cyberpunk metropolis, the MC1 of Dredd seems at most times to be disappointingly devoid of life and activity. Perhaps Travis was going for a more realistic take on the character, and of course faithfully recreating MC1 would be hell on the budget, but the problems with the design also pose problems for the film as a whole. Without the futuristic aesthetic of the comics, does Judge Dredd’s costume really make any sense? Does his super-pistol with four different concurrent ammo types? This Mega City One barely looks like it has running water, yet the technology is advanced enough to arm the Judges? It’s an unnecessary test of the suspension of disbelief for a movie that shouldn’t need it.
The second problem? It’s not a satire, or at least the satirical portions don’t come often enough. Sure, the character of Judge Dredd is cool, but the whole point of him (in my opinion) is that he’s meant to be parodical. Never not ‘in uniform, perpetually sour demeanor, rarely if ever questions whether the laws he enforces are just or whether he punishments he sentences people to are exorbitant. The ultimate fascist, and likely what a lot of people envisioned the police to be like during the notoriously tense Thatcher years in Britain, or at least an idealized version. Yet the situations and enemies Dredd faces are so ridiculous, and the way he interacts with people is so over the top that it ends up being funny. The fact that Mega City One is essentially a police state, where the legal system is reduced to a one man job and human rights are treated as a privilege, and there still manages to be rampant crime is about as blatant as it gets. Like I said, there are hints of throughout the movie (the homeless guy scene springs to mind), but it never quite reaches the level of excess of the original comic. Another concession for the moviegoing audience, I suspect.
Still, for what it is, Dredd is still a decent action movie. You get a lot of violence, you get a lot of witty one-liners, and there’s a smattering of implied sexual situations. Exactly what we all want in an action movie, I’d say, with a little sci-fi twist. So if you’re interested in a little dirty, bloody violence this Halloween, maybe a costume idea that won’t break the bank, then get a little bit of Dredd in your life. Just don’t break any laws to do it.
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