Dredd 3D (2012) [Blu-ray 3D]
Action | Crime | Sci-Fi | Thriller

***PLEASE NOTE: A Blu-ray 3D disc is only compatible with 3D Blu-ray players.***
(But this is a 3D/2D disc and the 2D version should play in a standard Blu-ray player)
Tagline: Judgment is coming

The future America is an irradiated wasteland. On its East Coast lies Mega City One - a vast, violent metropolis where criminals rule the chaotic streets. The only force of order lies with the urban cops called "Judges" who possess the combined powers of judge, jury and instant executioner. The ultimate Judge, Dredd (Karl Urban) is tasked with ridding the city of its latest scourge - a dangerous drug and the sadistic prostitute turned drug pusher who is using it to take over the city.

Storyline: The future America is an irradiated waste land. On its East Coast, running from Boston to Washington DC, lies Mega City One - a vast, violent metropolis where criminals rule the chaotic streets. The only force of order lies with the urban cops called "Judges" who possess the combined powers of judge, jury and instant executioner. Known and feared throughout the city, Dredd is the ultimate Judge, challenged with ridding the city of its latest scourge - a dangerous drug epidemic that has users of "Slo-Mo" experiencing reality at a fraction of its normal speed. During a routine day on the job, Dredd is assigned to train and evaluate Cassandra Anderson, a rookie with powerful psychic abilities thanks to a genetic mutation. A heinous crime calls them to a neighborhood where fellow Judges rarely dare to venture - a 200 story vertical slum controlled by prostitute turned drug lord Ma-Ma and her ruthless clan... Written by Production

Editor's Note: Think about this for a moment: how many television shows or films can you think of which are set in the future where things actually improved? For some reason people who are drawn to writing about the future often color their predictions with calamities, dysfunction and outright catastrophe. This is nothing new, as readers of Nostradamus will concur, but even noted writers like H.G. Wells tended to err on the negative side of things with their predictive fiction like The Time Machine and Things to Come. This tendency toward dystopia has only increased with the so-called Age of Anxiety, as if we're projecting our deepest fears onto a yet unseen and unknown time to help us cope with the present. And so we come to Dredd, the 2012 reboot of the 2000AD comic Judge Dredd which was previously made in 1995 as a fairly lamentable Sylvester Stallone feature. Both Stallone and Dredd co- creator John Wagner are on record as voicing their disappointment (at a minimum) with the project. Stallone seems to think Judge Dredd missed the boat by not being more satirical, while Wagner seems to think the 1995 film had relatively little to do with his conception of the character to begin with. Aside from the similarity in titles and (not to state the obvious) the leading character, there's little else uniting these two films, and whatever else its flaws may be, this "new, improved" Dredd is a considerably sharper and better written adaptation than the Stallone vehicle. But forewarned is forearmed: the future in Dredd is anything but bright, so sunglasses are generally not needed, though a Judge's helmet (replete with shaded visor) is de rigeur.

From the perspective of several basic premises, there are quite a few similarities between the 1995 Judge Dredd and this new version. Both follow the original source comic in setting their stories in a dystopian future made of metropolises called Mega Cities, with the actual locale being Mega City One, a sprawling oasis of sorts that spans the entire Eastern seaboard and has been built on the ruins of an irradiated apocalyptic wasteland. Within these Mega Cities are huge skyscrapers called megablocks that house hundreds of thousands of people. Crime is rampant and the quasi-fascistic government has appointed Judges to handle it all. These "one-stops shopping" judicial enforcement agents are not just judge, but also jury and executioner, dispensing justice as they see fit once they encounter a crime scene.

That said, the 1995 Judge Dredd was a kind of misbegotten casserole of ideas that may have struck some as having some unintended irony by including both some tangential references to cloning along with that "makin' copies" guy from Saturday Night Live, Rob Schneider, as a supporting actor. Dredd has a much more streamlined plot which focuses on the titular Judge (Karl Urban) "assessing" a psychic rookie named Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) to see if she has what it takes to join the "judicial" ranks. Anderson has failed the actual test for being a Judge, but her unique psychic abilities have brought her to the attention of the highest echelons of the government bureaucracy, and they want to see how she performs in "field conditions". Meanwhile, a notorious drug lord and megablock gang leader named Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) is manufacturing and dispensing a virulent new drug called Slo-Mo which, when smoked, makes its users sense time at around 1/50th of its normal speed. Ma-Ma does not take kindly to having her turf questioned, and when she literally skins three ill-advised competitors alive and dumps their remains in the atrium of the high rise city within a city that she commands, Anderson decides that's the crime call she and Dredd should answer.

The rest of the film plays within the confines of Ma-Ma's megablock, the anachronistically named Peachtrees. What Dredd and Anderson initially think is going to be a relatively simple drug bust turns into a life or death cat and mouse game between the two Judges (or in Anderson's case, prospective Judge) and Ma-Ma's gang of thugs. When Ma-Ma closes down the megablock under an engineered "war" shield program, Dredd and Anderson find themselves trapped in a towering deathtrap with threats around every corner.

There's no denying that Dredd is often a bristling and viscerally exciting action film, but there's also no denying that certain aspects of it are awfully derivative. The opening "news footage" of various displaced classes plays like something out of District 9, while Karl Urban's husky whispered vocal take on Dredd seems an outright copy of the Christopher Nolan conception of Batman in The Dark Knight Trilogy. Meanwhile, Lena Headey's Ma-Ma might be mistaken for a not so distant cousin to the Joanna Cassidy character in Blade Runner. To its credit, though, the film doesn't really try to be anything than a massive knockdown, drag out fight between good and evil. There are some passing attempts to humanize Anderson and to give Ma-Ma a little backstory (something the motion comic prequel included with a supplement actually probably does a little bit better), but when you get right down to it, Dredd is more or less one gigantic set piece within the strangely claustrophobic confines of an immense skyscraper, and as such both Alex Garland's screenplay and Pete Travis' direction get their jobs done very well indeed.

Some of the horrific events that were visited upon our nation in December may come back to haunt Dredd at least tangentially in its home video release. The film was already under the gun (pun intended) for its extreme and often very graphic violence, but with the recent mass shootings, the wholesale destruction of so many innocent bystanders throughout the film may give some people pause. I personally live in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, which some may remember had its own smaller scale tragedy when an insane gunman killed two people in a crowded shopping mall shortly before Christmas, and unfortunately there's a shopping mall massacre that takes place early in Dredd as well. It's of course ironic in that Dredd is attempting to show us a vision of the future where lawlessness prevails and the mighty arm of the law is absolute and unquestioned, while here in our present time overtly violent films like Dredd are being questioned by some for fostering that very lawlessness.

The 3D experience here is similarly kind of non-intuitive. Instead of thrusting objects into the virtual face of the viewer, Travis and Mantle chose to go a more subtle route, by "suggesting" depth through extreme close-ups of faces (the film utilized a couple of cameras developed specifically for this shoot). Travis and Mantle both frame a lot of shots through foreground objects like chain link fences and wiring, but those are typically out of focus and don't appreciably add to the visual immersion. The film's kind of soft and often monochromatic color scheme also may not initially seem to offer much in the way of a 3D "wow" factor, but there are several standout sequences nonetheless. The "Slo-Mo" drug effects are probably the showiest, with Travis finally relenting and, yes, thrusting objects into the face of the viewer, but there are a number of other very effective moments, including some great shots up through the massive atrium of Peachtrees.

User Comment: Lugodoc from United Kingdom, 7 September 2012 • I'm a huge fan of the comic 2000AD and the character Judge Dredd since 1979, and this film completely satisfied me. They changed all the right things and kept all the right things. Director Pete Travis tackled the problem of filming a comic book by making something that looks nothing like a comic book and more like an action movie shot on location, with a simple linear plot that keeps rolling and never slows down.

Megacity 1 is made markedly less futuristic than the comic in order to become so believable that it is hard to tell where the real slums of Cape Town end and the CGI kilometre high city blocks start. I have an uncomfortable feeling that in less than a hundred years cities like this may actually exist.

The comic Judge's uniform works on paper but can't in real life - giant golden eagles, shoulder pads and bronze name badges hanging off a leather one-piece body suit would sag, wobble and look daft. The movie gives us body armor that looks like it actually gets used whilst keeping the helmet exactly the same. The effect is striking and believable, like everything else in this film.

The plot revolves around a drug which makes time seem to slow down a hundred times, the perfect excuse for scenes of ultra Slo-Mo explosive bloody (and beautiful) anatomically correct violence that earn this film its 18 rating. Not a kid's movie at all. Every supporting actor looks like they came out of a gang documentary, scarred, nasty, sweaty and mean. Lena Headey totally kicks ass as the ruthless gang lord Ma Ma, calmly relishing the deaths of her enemies, eyes sledging from narcotic addiction.

In a way this is Olivia Thirlby's movie, since she gets the character arc, rookie judge Cassandra Anderson assigned to Dredd for evaluation and finding herself on a very steep learning curve. She is vulnerable, spikey and tough as called for, vital to the movie in order to balance Dredd.

How do you play Dredd? He is the opposite of a character. He has no personal arc, never changes or grows. He has no sense of humor, the comic finds that by placing utterly deadpan 'ol stony- face in ironic situations that reflect off him. And where do you find an actor prepared to wear a helmet obscuring everything but his mouth and chin for the whole 95 minutes? Karl Urban must be a huge fan himself to play the part so right. One reviewer described his performance as "ego-free" and it is. I didn't see Urban anywhere in this movie, all I saw was Dredd.

Me and Dredd-heads everywhere thank you Karl. You smashed it.

Summary: Perfect Dredd.
Summary: A Superior Action Movie.

[CSW] -4.1- Forget that cartoonish disgrace from 1995 starring Stallone. This version is the true Judge Dredd from the classic comics of the late 70's from the UK. You may find it hard to believe, but Dredd was the best movie I've seen in many years. Why? Because it a throwback to the great R-Rated Sci-Fi/Action classics of the 80s (like Predator, Die Hard, Robocop, etc.), which studios just don't seem to make anymore. This is clearly aimed for adults & not the PG-13 crowd. The source material is rich & the writers nailed it perfectly in this movie. Dredd is a fascinating character study, great plot, terrific acting, lots of action, and plenty of violence (not for the squeamish). Karl Urban nails his performance as Dredd, one of the most memorable bad-a$$es of all-time. Although it received high ratings from critics, this film made little money the box office, which is a shame. In time, this film will be thought of as a great Sci-Fi classic. Give it a try!
[V4.5-A5.0] MPEG-4 AVC - D-Box 10/10.

Note: This is actually the first 3D Blu-ray that I have ever rented from Netflix that played in 3D.
I will be adding this to my collection.


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