Movie Review - Dredd

Dredd  $$  

 

 
R
95 Minutes
Starring: Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, and Lena Headey.
Director: Pete Travis.

            All of you who read the original Judge Dredd comic raise your hand.

            Aw come on, there has to be someone besides me who is familiar with this hilarious series. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

            For those of you who never read the comic, let alone have a pile of them stashed in your bedroom closet, let me give you a brief setup. In the future, the majority of humanity lives in one of the mega-cities that cover the area of several states. Dredd operates out of Mega City One, which runs along the eastern seaboard of the United States.

            It is densely-packed and dotted with mammoth building that each can house the population of a small city. With all of these people jammed together crime has rocketed. Judges have been instituted as a means of stemming the flood of chaos that plagues Mega-City. They are the legal system; police officer, judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one mean package. And the most legendary of these judges is Dredd.

           

            The film begins with a crime in process. We are able to see Judge Dredd (Keith Urban) in action. He efficiently deals with the three psychopaths who have left a trail of bodies in the wake of their crime. Dredd efficiently deals with all of them while doing his best to protect civilians from further harm. And he does it without once cracking a smile – or anything else resembling an emotion.

            This sets up the gritty nature of the film as we see a typical day in the life of one of Mega-City’s finest. Perhaps this a good time to warn you that the “R” rating on this film is no accident. It is extremely violent and gruesome. Obviously, a stylistic choice by the director, but this could have been just as effective of a film if it had been made without the gratuitous gruesomeness. It also contains several disturbing sexual images that many will prefer to avoid.

            Back at the Hall of Justice, Dredd is given the assignment to evaluate a rookie judge. Anderson (Olivia Thurlby) is a mutant with psychic abilities that the Department of Justice think will be useful in rooting out perps.

            Meanwhile, over at the Peachtrees block (block being the term they use for one of the mega-structures where people live) the crime lord Ma-Ma (Lena Headey) makes an example of two members of a rival gang. She has them tossed from the top of the 75 story building as an example to anyone else in Peachtrees who is thinking of competing with her. She has developed a new drug called Slo-Mo that makes the brain experience reality at a much slower pace and is getting ready to expand her crime empire across the city.

            Dredd and Anderson are called in to investigate the double homicide and soon find themselves locked in the building with the Ma-Ma gang. Two judges with limited ammunition are pitted against an extremely well-armed crime syndicate. Let the shooting begin.

            Dredd was entertaining. The basic story line is solid, that of a rookie judge during her first day on the job. Those elements of the story work wonderfully and I truly enjoyed that. Other than the gruesome content, this was a good adaptation of the comic. It definitely felt like Judge Dredd.

            The acting was good. Although, to be fair Judge Dredd is very dead pan and doesn’t require a master thespian to play the part. Thurlby and Headey both do good jobs in their roles and the performance of the supporting cast was seamless.

            Special effects were good. There were plentiful amounts of explosions to satisfy the demolitionist in all of us. The technical aspects of the film were reasonable – no shaky camera style that makes the action hard to follow. As previously mentioned, the writing was good. Overall, it is a competently made movie. I just wish they hadn’t felt the need to include copious amounts of gore.

            This movie earned two movie bucks from me. If you don’t mind disturbing images in your movie going experience, then add another movie buck to that score. I enjoyed watching the movie, but it was just to gruesome for me to recommend it to everyone.

 

            Randy’s Rating System

$$$$   = Full Price    See this movie right away and pay full price, it’s worth it.

$$$     = Matinee      Catch this as a matinee or other discounted showing.

$$        = Discount     Wait until this movie reaches a discount theater near you.

$          = Rental         Wait until this movie reaches your local video rental outlet.

0          = No Sale       Don’t see this movie at any price.

Writing Prod - Gibberish Times Five

            Another Monday and another Writing Prod. My hopes are that at least reading through these will give my fellow authors the creative boost they need to start the week off with a bang.

            This week we are revisiting the prompt that I call . . . Gibberish Times Five. Actually, this is a pretty common prompt. Many of the blogs that offer writing prompts offer a variant of this.

            All you need to do is take five random words and come up with a story, or a story idea, that makes use of all of them. To select the words you can flip through a book or magazine and insert your finger, using the closest noun or verb to where your finger lands. Alternatively, you can switch television/radio stations and jot down the five words that stood out.

As usual, my example will be a story pitch for a novel. I decided to combine the methods and randomly selected words out of the T.V. Guide. Here they are: Symptoms, Walking, Stash, Spooky, and Survive. Seeing as Halloween is quickly approaching and I amazingly put my finger on “Spooky” it seems only right that I put a bewitching spin to my story pitch.

 

 

 

            Mummy Apocalypse

            Charles claimed that it was the greatest archeological find of the century, but for Jason it was just spooky hole in the ground. He’d seen enough movies to know that one of these mummies would rise from the dead and walk among the living. And it did! No sooner had they found the secret stash of urns, sarcophagi, and gold then people started turning up all mummified . . . and dead.

            Except, they didn’t stay dead! They moved about with purpose, serving a hidden master for some secret purpose. Then it got worse – Charles showed the symptoms of becoming one of the mummy-zombies. That left Jason less than twenty-four hours to find a cure and stop an evil plan to control the world.

Writing Prod - Fairytale Cocktail 2

            It is time to start over with the prompts. It would probably be easiest to present them in the same order that I did the first time around. Anyone have a different suggestion?

            The first of the twenty-four prods that I presented was . . . Fairytale Cocktail. It has some similarity to several of the other prompts in that in mixes plot elements from different stories or just recasts them in a different setting.

            Although any story line will do, I suggest taking a fairy tale and adapt it to form your story. Forgive me if I mentioned Frankenstein during my first round of prods, but this is a great story to use; the protagonist creates something that takes on a life of its own and wreaks havoc. That could be a little league coach that creates a drive in his team that grows past the accepted sportsmanship of the game to a self-help guru that starts a trend that ultimately ends up hurting people more than it helps them.

            The purpose of all these prods is to start you thinking about a story line and then allow your creativity to come in and make it yours.

            Hopefully, my example isn’t the same one I used the first time I wrote about this particular prompt. I purposely stuck close to the Frankenstein idea to demonstrate how this technique can produce stories that have a vague similarity, but are still totally unique.

 

 

 

            The Monster Kit

 

            Pseudo-life had such great promise as a new technology. Being able to create customized life forms out of a handful of chemicals and various other odds and ends would have changed the world. But the process was unstable, the creatures dissolved into pools of slime after only a couple of hours.

            Nora Johnston had found a perfect use for the failed technology: Monster Kits. The basic elements were relatively cheap. Put them into a box and sell them to children in order for them to create their very own pet monsters. A big Halloween push had been enormously successful and now thousands of the kits were in the hands of teenagers.

            Then Nora’s first monster came back to life. It was missing a few parts and had gained some that she hadn’t included, but it was the same mini-frankenstein that she put together in her garage over a year ago. Except that Frankie wasn’t adorable and obedient anymore. It wanted to kill her.