I am the Law: How Judge Dredd Predicted Our Future

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By 2012, Stallone’s movie was far enough in the past that another shot could be taken, this time with genre Renaissance man Karl Urban in the role. Urban kept the helmet on throughout the film, which automatically made the movie more favorable to the fans of the comic, while screenwriter Alex Garland turned to the comics for specific inspiration for his screenplay. Fuppie: [ smiling nervously] Uh, this is getting boring, hey... So, uh, what's the tab? Come on, how much is this gonna cost me? You name the price. If you take these two movies and average them out, you get the prefect Judge Dredd movie. Each has significant flaws, and each has elements that are perfect.

At Griffin’s urging, Rico foments more chaos, which should be enough to unseal Janus and allow Griffin to tighten the reins, as it were, with his private army of clones. Rico uses his knowledge of judge procedure and his big-ass robot to kill more than a hundred judges. This massacre, and subsequent rioting, leads the council to unseal Janus so Griffin can re-create it.Fuppie: [ interrupting] Hey, you'd better listen! I suggest you walk away and bother somebody else! Dredd takes down the van, which kills two of the occupants. He chases the third into a food court where he stops the third despite his having taken a hostage. The song is about the 2000 AD character Judge Dredd and includes references to many of the character's storylines up until 1987.

Maybe some day we’ll get the perfect Judge Dredd movie that combines the production values of Judge Dredd with the script sensibilities of Dredd. These two movies’ failures don’t bode well, but then the comic book character’s still going strong after four decades, so who knows what’ll happen in another decade or two?However, the 2012 movie also failed to find an audience in theatres, though it has performed better on home video platforms, and there are rumblings of a sequel. Dredd is riding his bike through Mega City, chasing a van that is obviously being driven by someone under the influence. The occupants are taking Slo-Mo, a new narcotic on the streets that makes time go by very slowly. (Why this would appeal to junkies, most of whom want to escape from misery, is an exercise for the viewer, unless there’s a concomitant high, though that’s not at all clear from what we see of the drug.) The game does not rely on the IGOUGO system but is much more unpredictable but in common with a lot of games produced by Warlord Games, especially Strontium Dog. Every figure in the game is assigned an activation chip and these are placed in a bag to be drawn out one at a time until they have all been drawn, thus completing that turn. Rinse and repeat. You can never be sure who gets drawn first, which makes gameplay more of a challenge. I like this mechanic. Games are designed to be played with just a few figures per side. Figures are permitted two actions per turn, either two simple actions such as move or snap-fire, or one double action such as sprint or aimed fire. Play continues until one side defeats the other. It is simple, fast and fun and works very well. Rico and Dredd face off on top of the Statue of Liberty, Dredd manages to toss Rico off to his doom, saying “Court’s adjourned.” Because of course he did. The shuttle taking Dredd (and Fergie, who winds up sitting next to him) to prison is shot down by a family of cannibals who live in the Cursed Earth. Dredd and Fergie are captured, but they escape and kill the family—with some help from Fargo, who is fatally stabbed. Before he dies, Fargo tells Dredd about Janus, and says that Rico wasn’t just his best friend, he was his brother.

Judge Dredd: And you haven't even been out of jail for 24 hours. He's habitual, Hershey. Automatic 5 year sentence. How do you plead? Judge Dredd: You're one of the smartest of a new breed, but you've only been on the street a year. You haven't gotten used to the isolation yet. Judge Dredd: [ pulling Fergie, by the mouth, out of the service robot he's been hiding in and slamming him against a wall] Mega City code 7592: Willful sabotage of a public droid. That's 6 months, citizen. Let's see your Unicard. The dystopian future world of Judge Dredd is the most popular feature to come from 2000 A.D., and in 1990 it was spun off into Judge Dredd Megazine, which is still being published today. And twice, Dredd has been adapted into a feature film.We don’t get that with Dredd, which never manages to feel like it’s the future. There’s nothing in the production design that screams “awful future,” it mostly just screams “contemporary Los Angeles.” Worse, Peach Trees never once feels like it’s two hundred stories tall. The production design and look and feel never quite live up to what the script (or the source material) call for. However, for all that Judge Dredd looks like the comic, the story is a disaster. While the characters are nominally from the comics, they bear only a passing resemblance to them. The three writers of Judge Dredd took the basic setting for Dredd and slapped a bog-standard action-movie plot on top of it. The whole point of this particular future is that judgment is faceless and emotionless. That’s why we never see the judges’ faces. They’re the embodiment of the law. Having Dredd take off his helmet, and keep it off for 85% of the movie is just a disaster. And yes, it’s a movie, and yes, Stallone’s face is famous, but he was doing just fine at the beginning of the movie.