Judge Dredd casting rumours

[kidsick5000]

Oh no...  I had such high hopes too.  Perhaps there'll be a director's cut somewhere along the line.

EDIT: Just read up on it and apparently Alex Garland has taken over.  Which suggests that the footage that was coming in wasn't reflecting what the script was supposed to do.  It's not a good sign, anyway.

Maybe Garland's going to get pointers from his mate Danny Boyle

[Jemble Fred]

Garland had a hand in directing the (pretty damn nice-looking) videogame Enslaved too, I seem to recall.

[SavageHedgehog]

I'm not a big comic fan (though I do like this particular character), but absolutely everything about this project has reeked of a typical botch job since the script review that said it had absolutely no satire or humour. This latest news is just the next logical step. Jusr seems like a dull B-Movie along the lines of the Dolph Lundgren Punisher film. At least the 95 movie looked nice. Shame

[Santa's Boyfriend]

A press release by the Dredd team say it isn't true, the director is still on board.

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=32186

[Santa's Boyfriend]

BUMPITY

Wagner says it's good - more or less, anyway.

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/06/05/dredd-movie-mini-rushes-a-nice-tribute-to-the-fans-john-wagner-gives-his-verdict/

[Phil_A]

Still no trailer yet. Fuck's sake.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

Something just occurred to me.  I've not read the script but from what people have said, isn't this essentially The Raid?

[Mister Six]

BUMPITY

Wagner says it's good - more or less, anyway.

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/06/05/dredd-movie-mini-rushes-a-nice-tribute-to-the-fans-john-wagner-gives-his-verdict/

John Wagner'll be getting money from the film, surely? In which case he'd have a vested interest in it being successful and spawning a franchise. Not saying this influenced the quotes he gave, but I doubt he'd be rushing out to pan it.

Not sure why I'm being so negative about this. I want it to be great. But I'm very pessimistic about the whole thing, and its chances.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

I think an interesting analysis of Wagner's approach is how he dealt with the previous movie.  He didn't openly slate it, I think he probably did say that it wasn't as good as it could have been, but he went out of his way to defend Stallone, whom everyone was blaming for it becoming the turdfest it was, saying that without Stallone the movie simply would not have been made at all.

It's true that he's not openly saying "it's awesome".  I'm also a little pessimistic about this, I think it's perfectly possible to make a great Dredd movie, but I'm not convinced this is going to be it.

[Replies From View]

a budget effectively less than a fifth of the Stallone piece

I was unaware of this.  Does anyone know the reason?

[Santa's Boyfriend]

Even today Stallone can probably pull in over five times the crowd that Karl Urban can - particularly considering he's not taking his helmet off.

[Phil_A]

I was unaware of this.  Does anyone know the reason?

Because unlike the 1995 movie, it's not backed by a Hollywood studio. It's been produced by DNA Films(Sunshine, Last King Of Scotland, etc) with all filming done on location in South Africa to save on costs.

[Feralkid]

Here be the trailer.   It's looking a lot like this year's Solomon Kane.   


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxvXAW3Nfwk&feature=related

[Slaaaaabs]

Urban as Bale as Batman as Dredd.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I hate to say it, but it looks awful to me. From the trailer Dredd could be any hard boiled cop in the near future, and the plot doesn't really inspire me either. Ah well, let's hope the finished product has a bit more depth to it.

[sirhenry]

That trailer could be from any SF action movie or comic movie from the last ten years. But then maybe that's its point - to appeal to everyone who went to Batman et al, rather than the fans. It would explain why it looks so generic and cliche'd.

I'm just trying to convince myself that there's hope for it yet.

[Jemble Fred]

Am I the only one getting a note saying that Lionsgate has locked the content in the UK?

[sirhenry]

Am I the only one getting a note saying that Lionsgate has locked the content in the UK?

No, it was caught (it was a leak) fairly quickly. But that should hurry up the official release, and it's not as if you missed much, to be honest.

HD is here now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PifvRiHVSCY Bigger, better, brutaler (?).

Needs more chin.

[non capisco]

Needs more chin.

In a nutshell, yeah. Needs more prescence, at least. Judge Dredd is meant to be overwhelmingly intimidating, in this trailer he's just a bloke wearing a helmet who needs to have a cough.

[Feralkid]

The music at the start is built around a sample from Vangelis's Blade Runner score.   That seems like a depressing portent.   Everything's recycled from elsewhere but given a patina of whatever's zeitgeisty right now.

I'm really loathing the design work, too many of the weapons and props are identifiable as objects available for purchase in 2012.

[The Region Legion]

This looks like an extremely dumb movie, but for some reason it kind of speaks to me... it's got a vibe to it that reminds me of an 80s action film rather than a 90s one, you know? That's how it should be.

Shame Urban had to go with the default Batman voice of the modern anti-hero but there it is - Judge Anderson seems particularly well cast.

[kidsick5000]

BTW, the drug they're talking about.
That's Cake, right?
Wonder if Shatner's Bassoon will get a namecheck?

[MojoJojo]

Second half of the trailer make it look like sci-fi knockoff of The Raid, or at least that they want it to look like the Raid.

Agree Dredd lacks presence.

[ZoyzaSorris]

looks a bit bland, amirite?
these sort of things should be animated / extremely stylised or not done at all in my book.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

I'm yet to be convinced.  I think Mega City One will look great, but I'd be surprised if this film was anything more than simply ok.  Hopefully it'll be entertaining, and it looks already to be more faithful than the previous one, but I'm actually not convinced that a Dredd movie can work, at least not in the way it works on paper.  I think a movie based on the America storyline would work really well, but it wouldn't be an action movie - which seems to be what everyone wants.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Most of the Dredd fans I know are frustrated that it doesn't highlight the weirdness of Mega City One, all of the insanely fucked up citizens, and that the distinct sense of humour of the strip seems to be completely missing. Then again, they're people who grew up with Dredd in the eighties, and not the youth of today.

[gatchamandave]

But do the youth of today read Dredd? Indeed, does anyone? I love the character and have a huge pile of collected editions amassed over 30 years, but last time I read it 'as new' Hershey had just been made Chief Judge. Since that's a dead-Judge-walking post*, I dropped it soon after.

I would suggest that a Dredd movie now trying to trade on an ethos of "hey look, it's Dredd, up there, on a big screen!" hasn't much more relevance, or attraction to modern youth, than would a Dan Dare movie.

* " Yeah,Ol' Stoney Face ain't stoopid"

[Repentia]

That trailer makes it look very 80's scifi, in a good way. Stupid trailer one-liners aside, this looks Robocop-enough to be a decent stab at a good action movie. Uncomplicated, goal-orientated plot. New Judge in tow for exposition. The Megablock is huge. The more whacky 2000AD things have been kept in check, or reimagined to be more realistic/low-budgetted. Good old-fashioned 80's "we'll win the war on drugs by shooting people" theme. Yeah. This could be good.

The problem with making Judge Dredd or indeed almost any British comicbook from the late 80's/early 90's is that the settings are steeped in 80's social satire. The comic wasn't about him so much as it was about Thatcher's Britain. He was barely the star of his own strip for ages and ages, before they had him wise-up to his true role. This doesn't lend itself well to film adaptations: "it's set in the grim, dark future of 1988".

But, if this is essentially Robocop 4, then it'll be good. I quite enjoyed Terminator Salvation because they chose to edit it like a cheap 80's scifi epic, a few set-pieces of overblown CGI aside. For the main it had that "Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone" flavour to things that this film seems to have appropriated, too.

Here's hoping anyway. It could turn out to be Yet Another FPS Movie.

[MojoJojo]

Agree with Repentia.

The problem was he's supposed to be a ridiculous extreme, but by current US standards he's not not even over the top too about 50% of the population. He's "just right", to use a goldilocks metaphor[nb]if you want to follow it through, when Judge Dredd was written he was porridge kept in a liquid helium fridge[/nb].

Rorschach from the Watchmen film is an excellent example of this, since there are lots of americans who see him as the true hero of the film.

[Santa's Boyfriend]

But do the youth of today read Dredd? Indeed, does anyone?

The majority of his readers are still the same people who bought it in the 80s, but yeah it's still going strong.  In fact it's changed a fair bit, arguably for the better.  At some point Wagner quite possibly watched The Wire and became heavily influenced by its complex structure, and in the last 5 years or so has created something closer to an ongoing soap opera with lots of grey area characters, but still with all the biting satire it has always had. 

The last few albums have been really superb, and apparently the current storyline, Day of Chaos, is one of the best ever.  Its story is based on the idea that the eastern block have been planning revenge for the outcome of the Apocalypse War for a very long time, and are now utterly destroying Mega City One from the inside out.  There's not a lot of point jumping on at this juncture, but I'd certainly recommend reading any of the recent albums, especially the wonderfully intricate Tour of Duty storyline.

The first fifteen years or so of Dredd is available as archive collections too.  The most recent reprints are, frankly, crap - and I don't think that much of the first three volumes either, but between volumes three and thirteen it's pure gold.