Judge Dredd comics are very hard things to
translate to another medium. The overall bleak, nihilistic and yet blackly
humorous ‘Ho-hum, let’s just get on with it despite all this violence’ tone
needs a lot of contextualising. The previous attempt with Stallone didn’t work
at all, but had a campy charm. On the other hand, this one, while it may not
have had the horrible matter-of-fact shots of dead bodies going into recyc
machines that have endured with me since early childhood, it managed to
maintain the tone of bleak hopelessness and casual violence while introducing a
perfect little humanising element – the young, sensitive rookie being taken out
with Dredd for her first day. It gives the audience someone to empathise with
while letting Dredd maintain his icy cool attitude.
The plot, written by The Beach and The
Tesseract author Alex Garland, who seems to have given up on novels in
favour of scriptwriting, was actually very simple, to the point it felt to me
like a half-hour episode of a TV series fleshed out rather than a large-scale
movie plot, and honestly I wasn’t at all impressed by the idea at the end,
where a device has to transmit a signal rather than what it triggered simply
happening when the signal stops, which is what anyone in Mama’s
situation would have opted for. Still, the small scale was clearly intentional,
to allow for the world to soak in. But I think a bit more of a chance could
have been taken expanding the storyline outside its location, perhaps to the
justice headquarters or some narcotics refinery outside, just to give more of a
sense of scale, even if it meant sacrificing that neat conclusion.
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