sauchieboy
Posts: 303
Joined: 31/7/2011
From: The City Of Sauchie
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quote:
(1995's Judge Dredd is) 'a Big Mac film. That said the production and design was pretty cool', by Marwood
Like Spaldron, I'm not a big a fan of the look of 1995's Judge Whopper (with extra cheese), partly because that film misunderstood how the contrast between Dredd and the city he polices (i) illustrates better than any explanatory dialogue (ii) the outrageous contrasts, exaggerations and disparities of Megacity One, its inhabitants, and its culture. I'm not arguing that the 1995 film's production design was awful in itself, just that it did not serve the purposes of the story particularly well.
An Action Film is going to present its makers with relatively few opportunities to tell the audience about the relationship between Dredd and his city through dialogue, so missing an opportunity to use the production design to show the viewer (or at least suggest to them) the relationship between the brutal, pragmatic and regressive (iii) approach of the judiciary and the citizenry's outlandish, infinitely creative, self-destructive idiocy; seems self-defeating.
In the best science fiction films, like the original Alien and A Clockwork Orange, costume and environment are characters and storytelling devices too. In Ridley Scott's film, the integrity of the credible near-future look of the costumes and technology- an almost tangible world the director spends so much time establishing at the outset of the film- is troubled by the discovery of the Space Jockey ship, and violently destroyed by the appearance of H R Geiger's fantastically odd and other-looking creation. The contrast between these two design paradigms does a lot of the story's work for it, by instilling in the viewer the same fear and confusion felt by the film's characters as they too face something so completely outwith their previous experience and frame of reference.
By contrast, the fact that Stallone's Megacity One reminds Marwood so much of the brilliant production design of Bladerunner cues the viewer to expect a similarly noir near-future reality- only for Sly to show up looking like one of Ming the Merciless's henchmen (iv). The visual tone inverts the relationship between the austere, practical judges and the gloriously silly excesses of the citizens. Amidst the smelly, leather-jacketed old punks the casting director has bussed in from the King's Road, Stallonedredd looks like he's wandered onto the set from another (more fabulously camp) film.
Just as Blazing Saddles's rampaging cowboys crashed into the filming of a Busby Berkley musical and out onto the studio lot, jolting the audience out of the film and effectively signalling the end of any proper story; the arrival of Stallone, with his blingy epaulettes and Cameo-codpiece (v), breaks the fourth wall and destroys the integrity of the story and the world it has created- with consequences just as hilarious as Mel Brooks's masterpiece. In the comics, Dredd strikes a sober, intimidating figure and the citizens provide the comedic backdrop: in Judge Dredd (1995) the laughs are all on Stallone.
(i) The role played by this aesthetic contrast in understanding Dredd, his world and the nature of the justice system is fundamental: the visual disparity between the grim, black-leather-clad motorbike cop riding through- and dwarfed by- an eccentric, mushrooming backdrop of buildings that looked like C3PO's dildo collection (in Carlos Ezquerra's 2000ad prog 2 back page pin-up) was what inspired Pat Mills to accelerate the timeframe of Wagner's near-future early Dredd scripts- and led directly to the social, political and cultural exaggerations that lie at the heart of the strip's appeal. In the context of that city and its weird inhabitants; Dredd, with a parrot on his shoulder and kinky black leather, looked positively reserved and sensible. Wagner described Ezquerra's early sketches of the character as looking like 'a fucking Spanish pirate'.
(ii) Better than a James Earl Jones-narrated screen crawl, anyway.
(iii)Just as Justice Dept's founding fathers obliterated the finicky, complex checks and balances of the US constitution in their monomaniacal pursuit of Justice as an end in itself (as shown in Origins), their Tek Department sees an explosive cartridge and carbon-fibre baton as providing the shortest route from the detection of a crime to the neutralisation of the perpetrator.
(iv) Flash Gordon really understands the contingent and relative nature of camp. Having Brian Blessed running around naked, but for a pair of downy y-fronts, allows the costumers to dress everyone else fairly outrageously; safe in the knowledge that they won't be the most ridiculous looking character on screen. Because the entire production design is turned up to eleven, any ideas the audience has about what's realistic and what's fake go right out the window.
(v) Has anyone synced Stallone's shiny-jockstrapped introduction as Dredd to Cameo's Word Up on Youtube yet?
< Message edited by sauchieboy -- 31/12/2011 1:42:37 PM >
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