DREDD reviews. (SPOILERS!)

[James]

I had Olivia Thirlby and Lena Headey fighting in my front garden _again_ last night. I wish they'd be quieter about it

Well I was fighting over their front (lady) gardens.

[BPP]

we can agree to disagree, not too sure its a young Dredd tho. He looks the same age as the guy '20 years on the streets' regardless of what comic readers know of the history of MC1. Urban does a great Dredd but it in no way looks a yound Dredd.

[CYCLOPZ]

20 years on the street is young Dredd.

[JOE SOAP]

For me the most important dramatic points in Dredd are Lex's 'meatgrinder' speech coupled with Anderson's exercising of her own Judgement in letting Gleeson's character/victim go - they both plant the seeds of change in Dredd's character and actually prove he has an arc in the film.

[hazy efc]

1 of my favourite scenes in the movie is when a perp tells dredd to freeze and dredd just looks at him and says why haha the only thing missing for me anyway in the movie is mega city 1 speak ie drokk or grud i know you see drokk on the back of a perps jacket in the van which was cool but the only reason i can think they went with regular swear words so to speak was so movie goers new to dredd would understand the dialogue better rather than have them sitting there thinking what the fuck does drockk mean haha 

[Michaelvk]

I reckon the reason that there are no drokk's and grud's to be found is because tonally it would've felt out of place, and also the greater non 2000AD movie going crowd would've not had a clue what people were saying. I think it's one of those compromises that gets made to enable the transition to the big screen.

[James]

I'll wait until someone overdubs the swearing with Big Meg swearing once the Blu-ray hits a la Phantom Edit

[Endjinn]

Logging on for the first time in years just to give my opinion on the film: Simply Magnificent.

[CYCLOPZ]

Some MC1 speak actually works in day to day life. Like Grud in place of God, something I reckon an audience would get without prior knowledge of the comics. Similar approach to language was taken in A Clockwork Orange. If they can do it in Lord Of The Rings they can have elements of the comic language in Dredd. A lot of the lingo is already there, like the perps
Juves and Resyk.

They should go all out for the sequel.

[radiator]

The fake swearing would have worked IF they were making a heavily stylised 300/Sin City version of Dredd. For what they were going for it totally made sense to go with real language/slang. This is an adaptation, it isn't a page-to-screen facsimile.

[JOE SOAP]

How many cities/states are left?







5 stars left on the old US flag.

[CYCLOPZ]

The fake swearing would have worked IF they were making a heavily stylised 300/Sin City version of Dredd. For what they were going for it totally made sense to go with real language/slang. This is an adaptation, it isn't a page-to-screen facsimile.

No, it would never work as a carbon copy, but there is still room to introduce elements of the language. My point is audiences do get more than they are often given credit for.  Part of the reason that first movie (95) failed was because they assumed their audience were stupid.

[JOE SOAP]

The say juve, iso-cube, perp...that's enough for me.

[CYCLOPZ]

Gruddamnit!

[A.Cow]

BUT, for me, Ma-Ma was a victim too and so it did seem a  trifle vindictive of Dredd to, not only kill her, but prolong the agony of her death... I mean she was clearly scarred in every sense.

For Dredd she was a Lawbreaker who skinned people and was the biggest narcotics manufacturer in the city.

...and she'd also just gunned down dozens of innocent men & women indiscriminately.

Sorry, Darnmarr -- she was as much a 'victim' as killers like Myra Hindley or John Wayne Gacy (who both tortured, raped & murdered children).  There may be a cause-and-effect link between the abuse they suffered in their youth and their later crimes, but this does not absolve them of responsibility for their premeditated acts.

As a character, Judge Dredd normally reflects the emotionless implementation (& execution) of law; a law which is based on a common notion of justice, demanding fair retribution for the kind of crimes Ma-Ma commits.

Does Dredd go too far by prolonging her agony?  It could be argued that, purely rationally & logically, it was a necessary step to ensure that she could not trigger the explosion sooner, manually, as she fell.

Of course, movie justice always includes a bit of vengeance -- we like our retribution to be proportionate, satisfying us both ideologically & emotionally -- and this hint of humanity is what keeps Dredd interesting.  (Otherwise we'd just be reading stories about a toaster mechanically handing out sentences using a mathematical formula.)