Pete Travis (director)
DNA Films (studio)
18 (certificate)
95 Minutes (length)
13 September 2012 (released)
13 September 2012
Superhero films have evolved. Traditionally it was a battle of pure good versus pure evil. The evil never have any redeeming features. The good are upstanding citizens, with ironclad morals, long distance stares and shiny teeth. They fight evil. They ask for no thanks.
Things had to change.
In recent years there’s been 2 developments. First: an attempt to humanise the affair, with mixed results. Batman as a troubled loner unable to let go of the past worked brilliantly. Iron Man as the self-centred playboy was a roaring success. Spiderman just cried a lot.
Secondly, there’s been a refocus on the comic books these characters originated from and on the comic book genre in general. This has brought a new wave of exciting films to the front, from the dark themes and cartoon-like style Sin City (who can be credited with bringing back Mickey Rourke), to the bloody glory of 300, to all the electric-blue well-endowed, naked, massive, (‘I’m not looking at it bro, you are’) massiveness of Watchmen. Comic books added darkness, added in flawed heroes. It took the philosophy of hero films out of Democracy/American Values/The West/Capitalism Saving The Day routine and into the marbled realm of the comic book writers themselves. Scorched earth, bleak future, disenfranchised humanity, a massive, massive force needed to change everything. Superhero films went sci-fi.
Dredd 3D is an evolution further with this. Picking up on cues from 300’s fight scenes, Watchmen’s landscapes and Sin City’s camera angles, the film itself is as close as physically possible to be a real-life moving comic as a film can be without becoming a Sin City quasi-cartoon. The script of the entire movie is purely comic-book in style, all dot-dot-dot one liners, jagged-edge-bubble voice-boxy dialogue and simplistic conversation. The camera angles - shifting between big vertical shots, rolling corridors and up-close face shots of Dredd and his Rookie (the psychic Judge Anderson) are straight out of panels. Even the use of colour - dirty yellow lighting - retropunk rusty walls and stairwells, sparking neon lights and deep red blood everywhere positively smells like printed ink.
The plot is straight up comic book hyperbole. Add numbers everywhere. Deep in the future, 800-million people inhabit Mega City 1. Insane drug-dealer ex prostitute MaMa controls a 200 floor towerblock. The authorities only control 6% of the crime in the city, so they’ve created Judges - elite police with the authority to execute on site at their own discretion. The city is slowly becoming overrun by SloMo - a drug that makes the user feel like time is operating at 1% of its usual speed. Following the outbreak of a turf war, Dredd and Anderson find themselves locked inside the tower, where they have to fight up 200 floors to take out MaMa.
It’s the use of the drug SloMo that propels the film. In between shots of bleak, ruined city scapes are occasional glimpses of the world through a SloMo users eyes. Amazing colours (if one can imagine snorting a line of Instagram) and importantly, the creation of stylish violence: shimmering crystals of glass, waves of bullet ridden flesh, splashes of blood across camera. The film makes the goriest scenes look incredibly beautiful. Which, in effect, serves to remind people that it was these brightly coloured, beautiful comic-book panels of yellow gun muzzles and deep red splattered car seats that helped catalyse the huge hunger for violence in movies to begin with. The makers of Dredd 3D themselves have picked up on this too - “We wanted to push slowmotion as far as possible, in effect entering a new type of film altogether” - a kind of synthetic space between comic book and motion picture.
This film is destined to be a cult classic. On the surface it’s a straight forward movie. Tough cops shoot up drug dealers in an old tower block. But the use of photography, colour, comic-book like framing and original script makes this film easily the best comic book adaption there’s been yet - amongst an already impressive field.
This is destined to change the way action movies are shot.
Watch before you die.
10/10
Ally Byers
