‘Dredd’ and The Laziest Set Dressing of All Time
Dredd is a tightly-plotted and fairly well-written grimefest of a sci-fi thriller. It also looks like no one was in charge of set dressing.
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I very much enjoy the 2013 film Dredd, an adaptation of the legendary comic book series that, thankfully, has nothing to do with the 1995 Sylvester Stallone film1. I don’t read the comic, so my entire knowledge of the Judge Dredd universe comes from these two films, which I am entirely comfortable admitting, which also means I won’t be judging this film on its adaptation qualities2.
Dredd is a gritty little sci-fi film, made for a relatively small budget3. The decision to make the Dredd universe relatively realistic is both a smart visual choice and a way to save some scratch, as is the film’s video-game-like structure that puts Dredd (Karl Urban) and his rookie partner Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) inside a locked-down high-rise apartment building ruled by a bloodthirsty drug lord, Ma-Ma (Lena Headey). Setting most of the film inside a massive and crumbling apartment building saved them a lot of cash, but you don’t really notice it. The savings are organic—the story is well-constructed, so you never really wonder why you’re not seeing a lot more of Mega-City One.
On the other hand, the film is set in 20804, and that’s where things fall apart. The whole concept of Dredd is that civilization has more or less collapsed down into a few overcrowded points (the Mega-Cities), and order is only maintained via the brutal fascism of the Judges, who have the authority to arrest, sentence, and execute in the field5. On the one hand, the producers replicate a slightly more realistic design of the Judge’s uniforms and gear, including the Lawmaster motorcycles, which all look suitably futuristic and post-apocalyptic. And using a real city (Johannesburg) for some of the sequences certainly worked in terms of depicting urban decay.
On the other hand, the background vehicles and extras all look ... like they happened to be on the street in 20136.
Fuck It, It’s Fine
I mean, here’s the opening chase sequence from the film:
The cars all look like they date from the 20th century, everyone is wearing jeans and T-shirts, the streets look pretty much exactly as they do today. Sure, civilization collapsed and so you might be able to argue that everyone is scrounging whatever’s left from the garbage heap of history7. But some effort to sci-fi everything up would have been appreciated. I mean, here’s a later sequence:
This literally looks like time stopped some time in, oh, 1999 and then somehow the Judges came to be with their spiffy sci-fi motorcycles8 and fancy sci-fi guns and fascist-inspired uniforms while everyone else just kept using stuff that looks like it was last manufactured in the 1970s.
On the one hand, you can invent a lot of head canon for this, sure. On the other hand, I wasn’t paid a single dime of this film’s budget to do their writing for them, and exactly none of that is in the film, so you have to simply conclude that designing spiffy 2080s clothing and cars and beer bottles and such was simply outside the budget, so they just went all Olivia Rodrigo and said fuck it, it’s fine9.
And it’s distracting, at least to me. Suspension of disbelief is fragile, and when I see someone in the background who looks like they stepped on the wrong bus that morning and got sucked into a futuristic movie set wearing their school clothes, it kind of ruins everything for me.
A Bullet in the Head Might Interfere with Them More
One reason the lazy set dressing and costuming distracts me in Dredd is the judges, because they look great. So much thought and effort went into designing their body armor and weaponry to make them feel realistic, necessary, and subtly futuristic the lack of that same effort for the background players just stands out. Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t help but imagine that the producers simply assumed no one would notice because of the power of Karl Urban’s chin, which is certainly an incredibly powerful artifact10. Put Urban in that Dredd Helmet and wheel him around like the Arc of the Covenant and all the world’s armies would crumble and dissolve into madness.
This isn’t as big a distraction as it could have been, because so much of the story concerns Anderson and Dredd on their own, lugging around the criminal Kay (Wood Harris) and isolated from both the residents of Peach Trees and Ma-Ma and her gang, which reduces the contrast (though Kay himself looks like he stepped out of his role as Avon Barksdale in The Wire, which is to say 2002)11. And the rest of the film is so successful it’s easy to ignore the fact that it’s apparently set in an alternate 1999 instead of 2080, because the story is pretty tightly plotted, Urban and Thirlby sell their respective characters (Urban deserves all the praise for making the monotone Dredd into an actual character solely through chin acting, which is an underrated form of acting), and even the forgotten and regrettable 3D stunts aren’t so bad. And it all leads up to Ma-Ma’s final shot, which remains kind of disturbing and viscerally horrifying to this day12.
Of course, I’m a man who has dressed like it’s 1991 since, er, 1991, so what do I know?13 Well, a lot about the fashions of 1991, for one thing. So there.
NEXT WEEK: No One Will Save You and the Big Swing
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Although any opportunity to watch Armand Assante go Full Armand Assante is welcome.
Even in today’s geek-dominated culture, knowledge of Judge Dredd remains at a very low priority.
Did they have to pay Karl Urban more or less to keep his helmet on the entire film? I expect that to be a common question posed by future historians studying this era.
I admire the economic use of voiceover, as Urban’s Dredd gives you the thumbnail version of future history in a brief little speech at the beginning and that is all you get in terms of worldbuilding exposition. Shit’s wild.
You know, just like police today, except with slightly more Nazi-like uniforms.
I mean, at least pop some collars like they did in Aliens and paint a few shoes orange or give everyone ridiculous baseball caps like in Back to the Future Part II.
Unlike today, because society has totally not collapsed and used cars totally don’t cost $100,000 each.
I do appreciate the implication that being a Judge at least requires you to memorize, like, 10,000 laws and the applicable sentences, and isn’t just an outlet for sociopaths to go murdering people legally. Or not just an outlet for that. This is also why I could never be a Judge. I’d never remember that stuff and I’d just keep murdering my way through sheer incompetence. Oh, snap, is Murdering My Way Through Sheer Incompetence the title of my memoir? No … no, it is not.
I enjoy this album more than a grown man should. If I was still capable of experiencing shame on any level, I would never admit that.
I can totally imagine a desolate future where we worship Karl Urban’s chin as it floats in the air like an outtake from Zardoz.
He will always and forever be Avon Barksdale, which I am sure is both a blessing and a curse.
If you’re being charitable, the final shot of Ma-Ma’s demise is the final justification for the loopy “Slo-Mo” drug they insist is a thing in the future, as if anyone would want to slow down their experience of that crapsack world. But even if you don’t buy that, when Heady’s face hits the floor and crumples into blood it is a very disturbing shot.
JEFF WEARING FLANNEL AND RIPPED JEANS IN 1989: Slovely and uncool.
JEFF WEARING FLANNEL AND RIPPED JEANS IN 1991: Hip and ahead of his time.
JEFF WEARING FLANNEL AND RIPPED JEANS EVERY YEAR SINCE: Okay, Boomer.
I'm happy to see the Vanagon is alive and well in 2080, and never updated.