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So this came out in the UK yesterday, I saw it and I gotta say it was damn well worth it. I was unsure on 3d since the last time I saw something in it I had red and blue glasses but it was really used well. Honestly it might be better than The Dark Knight Rises for me. Won't spoil anything yet since I know it's not out in US but I'm glad I saw it, I had high expectations and it met them.
Fantastic film and well cast also. I've never seen the actress who plays Anderson but she did the role superbly I felt.

So, anyone else seen it yet wants to chip in about it?

The Metro gave it 3/5 and the Evening Standard gave it 4/5, so I'm looking forwards to it.

Should have been called Judge Dreddd though.

Is it better than the Stallone film,?

From what I have seen of the Dredd trailers, the aesthetic of the 1995 film is more like Mega-City 1 than the new film. It should be a city like in Blade Runner, more like the dense metropolis of the comics. But everything else about that first film was horribly, horribly wrong. From various reviews I'm optimistic that the story and characterisation is a lot better in the new film.

That's great news that it has been getting some good reviews!

The Stallone vehicle wasn't really true to the source material at all, with I think far too many instances of Execs saying "but wouldn't it be cooler if we did this?", so they were always going to be better in that regard at least.

What rating did it get in the end? Any heat-sinking or Hi-ex rounds fired from the lawgiver?

I remember when DC started putting out Judge Dredd and was really disappointed with how it was no where near the story quality of the 2000 AD version.
When I saw the Stallone Dredd movie, the first few minutes were good due to the look of the film. Once Stallone took off his helmet and started getting all emotional I knew the film was doomed.

The old one actually had a plot, tho. From the trailer this one just seems to be "go here and kill this chick." Am I wrong?

The plot is similar to the recent Thai film "The Raid".

 Pacific wrote:
That's great news that it has been getting some good reviews!

The Stallone vehicle wasn't really true to the source material at all, with I think far too many instances of Execs saying "but wouldn't it be cooler if we did this?", so they were always going to be better in that regard at least.

What rating did it get in the end? Any heat-sinking or Hi-ex rounds fired from the lawgiver?

Hotshots and hi-ex both feature during the movie.

(late to the party)

Wow, that was just horrid. Grim and dark and humorless and brutal and bloody and totally lacking in any satire, dark humor, surreality or even basic cleverness.

It was Dredd by way of the saw movies.

I don't think I had fun once and I LOVE Judge Dredd. I love the flying rodent gak crazy stuff from the 70s and 80s, I love the Simon Bisley over the top era of the 90s and I love the serious sci-fi crime stories of the 2000s.

I did not like this. At all.

Carl Urban is great. The more realistic costume looked fine. Anderson was reasonably cool, not very true to the character but still well done.

The 70s concrete buildings and beater cars worked OK, but it had none of the cool craziness of the comic's Mega City 1 or even the charm of the old Max Headroom show.

No, nothing here which I liked. Go see the original Robocop instead, still the best Judge Dredd film ever.


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 lord_blackfang wrote:
The old one actually had a plot, tho. From the trailer this one just seems to be "go here and kill this chick." Am I wrong?

You are not wrong.

Now had the journey been reasonably cool and included I dunno sky surfers and fatties and all the other madness of MC1 it would have been instead it was just blood and more blood and blood and beatings and blood and emasculation by way of a hostile BJ and blood and nothing fun.

Karl Urban made a great Dredd and contrary to KK I have to say I enjoyed it for what it was... but it could have been so much more. Especially with Mr. Urban on board.

It isn't often that I completely disagree with KK, but here we are.

I thought it was a tightly told story with a lot of focus, and one of the things that was nice was the fact that it wasn't 'someone trying to destroy/take over the world' sort of villain; it was done as just another day in the (mega)city.

I would argue that Dredd wasn't even the main character, but that Anderson is really the main, and the stand in for the audience. We are purposefully placed at some distance from Dredd and are just as much observers as the others in the landscape.

This really seems like a love it or hate it movie. Admittedly I am only passingly familiar with the comics so I am not watching it to critique it as a transliteration of the source material. As a bit of lean, mean, action cinema though I thought it worked well, and still quietly raises some questions about absolute authority and criminal systems.

 KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Karl Urban made a great Dredd and contrary to KK I have to say I enjoyed it for what it was... but it could have been so much more. Especially with Mr. Urban on board.

Yup... it was a great Rated-R "Action" flix... not the old campy "super hero" show...

Am I the only one who loves the old Stallone JD movie? Oh wait, most of my buddies love it too...

Haven't seen the new one yet, but I'd like to. I think my theater pulled it after a single week though, so I'm not having high hopes for it.

I need to see it.

KK has a point, if it's played straight, that it's missing an element of the original. The classic comics were in part a satire of dystopian facist states, as were many of the old 2000AD stories/series which inspired 40k. There was a great absurdity and humor to them. When you're looking at such a grim future, being able to laugh at it is kind of a big deal.

That said, I don't know if that was necessary or the only way to make the movie entertaining.

 Mannahnin wrote:
I need to see it.

KK has a point, if it's played straight, that it's missing an element of the original. The classic comics were in part a satire of dystopian facist states, as were many of the old 2000AD stories/series which inspired 40k. There was a great absurdity and humor to them. When you're looking at such a grim future, being able to laugh at it is kind of a big deal.

That said, I don't know if that was necessary or the only way to make the movie entertaining.

With what you just said...

Go see it. It's really good.

I loved it.

If you want to see it, see it in 3d... and hurry up, it's not been performing well and cinemas aren't holding onto it... and it'll be a shame cos 3d is it's ideal viewing format.

I've been a 2000ad fan for the last 30 years, whilst it lacked the 'zaniness' of a lot of the early stuff, it's certainly brutal and visually stunning and Urban is excellent as Dredd, as is the rest of the cast.

I'm seriously reevaluating if I loved it even more than the final batman film.

Unfortunately, it's gone out of theater around me and I wanted to see it again in 3D. I'm not happy. :/

I found the movie to be very satisfying. Dredd killing many, many people in such an efficient manner, while not having any sort of moral questioning, all wrapped up in a visually stunning production made me say 'YES!' to myself quite a bit during the film. I loved it. 3D was worth it, when usually i find it to be pretty 'meh'.

timetowaste85 wrote:Am I the only one who loves the old Stallone JD movie? Oh wait, most of my buddies love it too...

Don't worry, I liked the old one too. At least it got the visual designs right, and Stallone has the body and chin to actually look like the Dredd I've seen in the few comics I read of that franchise.

For the new one, the "more realistic costume" alone turned me down already. When the developers do not embrace the corny comic look of AD2000, what should I expect from the finished product?
What I'm reading here vindicates my belief that it's not worth going to the cinema.

Ultimately, it comes down to personal preferences, of course. I'm sure there'll be loads of people who think this is better than the old movie and the comics.

I thought I had posted my thoughts here weeks ago but Alpharius pointed out that I actually hadn't.

I thought it was great. Rather than humorless, I found it deadpan. At the end of the movie, after they've gone through hell, the Chief Justice and Dredd exchange remarks to this effect:

Chief: What happened in there?
Dredd: Drug bust.
Chief: You don't look so good.
Dredd: Perp was uncooperative.

Not everyone will find that sort of thing funny. Maybe it's because I'm not British, but I always found the humor of Judge Dredd to be very ambiguous. If you take it seriously, it's not very funny at all. And it can be taken seriously. I remember that John Wagner once complained that fans kept sending him letters about how the UK needed a real-life Judge Dredd. And this was in the Tatcher years! So people can make the mistake of just taking it at face value and missing the humor, even when it's way over the top like in those early days of 2000 AD.

It seems to me that they came up with Anderson because people were taking it too seriously -- or rather the wrong kind of "serious." Cassandra Anderson is my favorite character in comic books bar none. She's a real three-dimensional person. I mean, she's like what a smart real person would behave like in the Big Meg: she's eccentric (or "high strung" as everyone who's not a Psi Judge would say) and a wise-cracker but she retains a warm strength that you can't find elsewhere in the Judge Dredd universe. In this movie, you just see the beginnings of that. It's her very first day on the job so she's not busting cliched jokes. But that warmth is really strong and is a nice counterpoint to Dredd.

Anderson: So, yes, I do think I can make a difference.
Dredd: Admirable.

Is Dredd making a joke? No, not at all. But it's a funny line nonetheless. That's authentic Judge Dredd humor. He's not being sarcastic nor even sardonic. He's being as literal as always, what for him is sincere. But it's still ultimately dismissive. That creates discomfort and therefore humor. And in the comics, Anderson's cornball zingers aren't meant to be funny to anyone, including the reader. They're somewhere between a self-defense mechanism and a nervous twitch. The humor, such as it is, comes from the absurdity of this noble, brave woman stuck as a fascist judge in a gak hole like Mega-City One. It ain't funny "ha ha," it's funny "God no."

So here's what the movie needed to do: It needed to show me how and why the Big Meg is a gak hole. Check. It needed to show me how the Justice System is just a fascist, bully boy regime. Check. It needed to show me that the legitimacy of such an institution has a negative correlation with humanity. Check. And it needed to show me characters, some heroic, who get caught up in this mess in an interesting way. Check, check, and check. The humor is not really a check mark by itself. It must be there if the above boxes are all checked because fascism will always look absurd when juxtaposed against human beings.

That absurdity is the heart and soul of Judge Dredd. That's why we never see his whole face; that's why he never smiles or laughs; that's why he doesn't have a love life. Up above, I stated that humor follows from discomfort. My theory is that finding something funny is an involuntary reaction. Genuinely laughing at a joke is like sneezing. And just like sneezing, you laugh when something gets up your nose. The funny part of any joke is uncomfortable. If it was comfortable, you wouldn't have to laugh.

Now there's a particular kind of humor, dry humor, where the comedian doesn't crack a smile when he's talking about something absurd. In Mega-City One, this ridiculous, uncomfortable situation is the everyday reality people live with. As Dredd says in the move, the Judges only address less than 10% of the crimes that are even reported -- that's their idea of an authoritarian society? It's just ridiculous on it's face, like Nazism and the Soviet regimes. I mean, just think of those Stasi men wasting their lives listening in on the phone calls of house wives. It's awful and degrading but also funny. I mean, what can you do but laugh?

But anyway, you can't really argue somebody into laughing at something. No doubt there are people who require the cartoonishness of the situation to be obvious to find it funny. To me, this more "realistic" take just sharpened the humor to a razor edge and the narrative relied on that razor to slice through the bs of an archetypal Hollywood action picture. The closest analog I can think to Dredd is Escape From New York.

I mentioned to Alpharius that even after reading and loving Dredd for all this time, I only really understood the character's name after watching this film. Unlike Batman, whose dramatic flair is just impossible to kill (even Nolan could only tone down the vampiness), Judge Dredd really is a normal guy. People say Batman is a regular human without super powers but that's ridiculous. No human could do that even with billions of dollars. But a human could do the things that Dredd does and we've seen that several times in human history. He could really exist and that is something we should all dread.


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 Lynata wrote:
I'm sure there'll be loads of people who think this is better than the old movie and the comics.

Let's get it straight here, the Stallone Dredd film cannot be grouped with the comics except some elements of the visual design. Almost every aspect of that film was totally opposed to the comics. The new movie is exactly the opposite, with it breaking from the comics only in terms of visual design but sharing every other aspect completely.

Glad you liked it. Interesting point about the humor style. I think that 40K really took a lot of inspiration from Dredd. I find the Imperium's completely over the top fascism and it's superstitious attitude towards technology funny. It's funny to us but not to the people who live in the world you know?

Unfortunately, it seems this movie did not do well at the box office which is a shame because I really want a sequel. That's unlikely now.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
It's funny to us but not to the people who live in the world which you know?

Yeah, this is exactly the point. There are a few people who realize that Mega-City One is a big joke and it usually drives them bonkers (they call them "futsies," people stricken with "future shock") and Anderson is herself basically a futsie who barely keeps it under wraps (largely because being a PsiJudge is an outlet; regular futsies have hallucinatory fantasies about living Anderson's day-to-day life). In 40k, the orks kind of serve this role. It's weird to read about orks in BL novels these days because the authors need the orks to be super serious, lest the Space Marines look ridiculous.

I expected mega-city one to be a lot grimier. Not horribly like a 40K hive city but a little more decrepit. Is it more so in the comic?

It depends on what era you're reading. In the beginning, Mega-City One was very futuristic, with every square inch occupied by something. (That was captured well by the old movie.) These days, it looks more sparse and dirty but the new movie takes that to a new extreme. The movie version reminds me of the endless shots of middle eastern urban scenes I've been bombarded with since 9/11. The message is: "that's not on a TV, that's where you will live."

Really? This version made it seem like a normal city but with some really big buildings to me. I think they were going for a horribly complex over the top grimdark highway system....but it just looks like the one from LA.

I figured the point was to reign it in to reality and make you wonder if reality isn't already a little ridiculous and scary.

I read an interview where the new look of MC1 is discussed, the designers wanted to emphasize the size of Blocks by moving them apart and giving a sense of space between them to identify them as their own 'city states'. The old crowded ones didn't convey the vastness of the individual blocks.

Manchu actually snagged a point I didn't really articulate, I found the movie pretty funny... but I love dead pan/dry humor...

It was a great movie and damn shame that it bombed as bad as it did.