The new Judge Dredd movie is a great chick-flick.

Most people have a favourite genre of fiction, one where they'll watch or read any old crap as long as it ticks the right boxes. For my mother, it's those crime novels that always have a dark picture of an alleyway on the cover and a blurb including the phrase "web of deceit". My friend Alex is a great aficionado of any and all vintage SF/F where the sets and costumes look like they were made out of cereal boxes. My own speciality is dystopic sci-fi/action movies, meaning that I got near-equal quantities of entertainment from the truly brilliant Children Of Men as I did from the baffling cinematic fart that is The Spirit. (For those of you who haven't seen The Spirit, it's basically what would happen if someone tried to remake Sin City while tripping balls. And allowed Samuel L Jackson full creative control over all of his and Scarlett Johansson's costumes. Seriously, ask me about The Spirit sometime. It has a bellydancer/Nazi/dentistry scene that you would not believe.)

My point is, you could not pay me to watch a three-star movie about a middle-aged white guy angsting over his divorce from Kate Hudson, but a three-star movie where the exact same guy duels a malfunctioning android in a city made entirely from neon striplighting and concrete rubble? I'm sold.

The problem is that my own outlook on the world often seems to clash with that of the filmmakers I love, ie: I generally view women to be people, and the creators of the films I watch give every impression of disagreeing with this viewpoint. Of course, I could try watching nothing but feminist documentaries and serious real-life dramas about women overcoming personal tragedies, but quite frankly those kinds of movies don't fulfill my needs vis-a-vis mutant zombie hordes, improbable leather body-armour, and soundtracks that sound like twelve-ton steel girders being banged together by Skrillex. Sadly, if I want to sit down and watch some ridiculous bullshit about a bunch of murderous idiots rappelling down the ruins of a post-apocalyptic megacity, then I generally have to put up with the only female characters in the movie either being Lara Croft clones, or a roomful of strippers who get gunned down in the second act.

My knowledge of the Judge Dredd comics is fairly limited (I'm more of a Halo Jones girl), but the trailers for the new movie were generic enough that I had every reason to suspect that it was your average run-of-the-mill "guy goes on a brainless killing-spree in the name of Justice" story. The surprising 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating and the presence of Cersei Lannister as the primary villain (!!!), however, were enough for me to give it a try. And you know what? This is an ideal girl-nerd action movie. It has all the exploding-head violence you'd expect from a movie about a capital punishment-obsessed cop battling drug-dealers in a futuristic towerblock, but none of the sexism you'd expect from, well, any film with that premise. Lena Headey is sneeringly excellent in her somewhat typecast role as a villainess perched at the top of the criminal food-chain, ordering her lackeys to rain death upon any commoners who get in her way. Dredd's rookie sidekick (Olivia Thirlby) may be young and inexperienced but she's also competent and professional, and actually gets more screentime and character development than Dredd himself.

Dredd (or Dredd 3D, because the 3D-movie marketing people are apparently still trying to make Fetch Happen) effectively shoots down the assumption that if you're going to see a brainless action movie, you're going to have to put up with some offensive shit as well. A lot of the time when people complain about Transformers and how it's, you know, sexist and all-round badly written, the comeback is that it's "just a stupid blockbuster". And this doubly counts for movies with higher age-ratings, where the filmmakers have a green light to show as much T&A as they want. In the case of Dredd, however, you have a relatively simple comicbook adaptation that's dark and gory enough to receive an 18 rating and yet mysteriously contains zero scenes where the camera lovingly pans over naked and/or recently-murdered strippers. The thing is, I'm not even advocating some kind of puritanical no-boobs law for cheesy action movies, I'd just like filmmakers to class up the boobs scenes a little, you know? Like maybe giving the lady characters a personality other than "daddy issues" or "likes to blow things up while wearing hotpants". 

After watching Dredd, I realised that the reason why it seemed so... weird, I guess... is that it didn't follow the kind of predictable cliches I was expecting. This type of movie -- especially one with an adults-only rating -- usually has very poorly-drawn characters and a lot of throwbacks to grindhouse cinema, but despite Dredd's plethora of extreme violence it never really went that route. Although it has the basic plot of a shoot-em-up videogame, the decision and emotional reactions made by the characters were far, far more intelligent and realistic than other movies of the genre. Which makes sense when you find out that it was written by the screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Never Let Me Go, all sci-fi movies with a broader appeal outside the main target audience of teenage boys and genre fans.

Judge Dredd has more in common with the emotionless killing-machines of '80s action movies than with the wrong-place-wrong-time John McClanes you see in most modern blockbusters. I'm kinda hoping this movie is successful enough for a sequel, actually, since the director has already stated that he'd like to explore the idea of Dredd as a fascist. Judge Dredd is in the unique position of being an adult comicbook antihero who hasn't been neutered or simplified by his film adaptation, filling a role that's almost a parody of the kind of right-wing American cop characters who glorify the idea of hyper-violent law enforcement. In some ways, Dredd 3D reminded me more of sophisticated films like Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly than it did of more thematically similar movies like Demolition Man. The vision for Mega City One was founded in the real world rather than looking like the type of cartoonish, larger-than-life post-apocalyptic settings where most leather-clad antiheroes seem to reside. The aesthetic was solidly reminiscent of inncer-city towerblocks in the real world, neglected and graffiti-spattered, with charmless breezeblock slums sporting ironically chirpy names like "Peach Trees".

Upon reflection, I'd rate Dredd as being significantly better than The Dark Knight Rises because it's so much more consistent and self-aware. Obviously Nolan's Batman trilogy is more complex than any Judge Dredd series is likely to be, but TDKR missed its mark by such a wide margin that I'd put it below a simpler but more clearly thought-out movie like Dredd. And -- surprisingly enough considering Judge Dredd's total absence of backstory or character-development -- I found him to be a more appealing and engaging character than the most recent appearance of Nolan's Bruce Wayne. The two characters fill the same basic niche, but Dredd is virtually ego-free while the Dark Knight movies gradually became more and more about Bruce Wayne's manpain until we reached a point where the actions of side-characters and villains seemed tailored exclusively to inspire an emotional reaction from him. Judge Dredd is motivated so purely by dedication to the Law that we never even see his entire face, yet he somehow seemed more authentic than TDKR's Bruce Wayne.

Links
The full Dredd soundtrack is available to stream online, and I'd highly recommend it for any and all criminal ventures out into your friendly neighbourhood post-apocalyptic megacity. Also available is the equally excellent but rather more '80s-influenced Drokk: Music Inspired By Mega City One, by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow of Portishead.

Interview with Alex Garland, the writer and producer of Dredd. Having read this, I can really see how the film turned out so well and so faithful to the comics.

Previously on Hello, Tailor: Dressing for the Apocalypse, and Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Doomsday.

Read More

Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Doomsday

photo from here.

At some point I'll go back to writing serious reviews, but having spent the day wandering around Glasgow, my thoughts turned to Doomsday instead. In this film the costumes, like everything else, are nonsense and should be taken with a pinch of critical salt. Doomsday is the film that would happen if someone put every 1980s dystopic/apocalyptic movie in a blender and then set the resulting mish-mash in mid-21st-Century Scotland. This quote from Cheri Priest will hopefully give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

"...it’s got humanity-eating plagues, tribes of cannibal punks, medieval-style fiefs with knights and torture chambers, rubber-wrapped gimps, futuristic soldiers with wacky hardware, cyborg eyeballs, embittered but noble old cops, corrupt and power-mad politicians, tanks, humorous decapitations, and Malcolm McDowell dressed like Henry the Eighth."

Also there's a dance sequence set to Adam Ant. This film came out in 2008, by the way. Not back when Adam Ant was still on the cutting edge of the anachronistic pop-culture zeitgeist. To ease you gently into the logic-free world of Doomsday, here's comparatively subdued screenshot:

Screencap from here. All screencaps are from there or HotFlick.net unless marked otherwise.

Important note: there is no time-travel in this film. Doomsday is set in the real world, albeit one where a plague wiped out most of Scotland and the British government then came up with the tip-top scheme of rebuilding Hadrian's Wall to keep the plague (ie, the remaining survivors) from entering England. Make of that what you will, metaphor-fans. In a characteristic example of Neil Marshall movie subtlety, the new wall looks like this:

The one surprising aspect to this photo is the fact that the wall didn't read "RIP, motherfuckers".

Regarding the earlier picture of our hero (Eden Sinclair, played by Rhona Mitra) facing off against what appears to be a medieval knight on horseback, holding a dragonhide shield... I'll get back to that later. Although probably not the shield. I'm not really clear on what that's supposed to be made of, unless there really was a dragon hanging around somewhere offscreen and they were saving it for a sequel that tragically never got made. This would not surprise me.

Eden is a cop. In a rather unusual move for this type of film, she's dressed very sensibly throughout. Tough boots. Body armour. That sort of thing. It's all black, because she's Serious, and has a Dark Past.

She also has a cyborg eyeball that records video and can be removed to look around corners, because WHY NOT?

.gif from this tumblr.

The plague reappears in London 20 years after the first outbreak, and the prime minister (played by Alexander Siddig, Star Trek fans!) needs someone to go to Scotland and find out if there's a cure. Eden, along with a ragtag bunch of British regional military stereotypes, cross the new Wall to Scotland in search of plague survivors.

Doomsday contains a lot of visual/thematic references to cheesy apocalypse cinema (Escape From New York, etc), and frequently borrows from video games and video game adaptations, none more obvious than the armoured suits Eden and her allies wear when they first reach Scotland:

Pic from here.

Once in Scotland, Eden and her crew of cliches discover that there are two groups of survivors: punk cannibals (in Glasgow), and medievalists (in a castle, of course). See, I told you I'd get back to the dude on the horse! The whole medieval thing... almost makes sense? I mean, castles are very durable, and once you've been cut off from imported fuel and other supplies then a 1000-year-old castle isn't the worst choice when it comes to warm-ish, defensible positions. Except...

Wait, what? WHY ARE YOU DRESSED LIKE IT'S 1300? Living in a castle: maybe. But it's only been 20 years since Scotland got cut off! And the population is tiny! You could probably continue to wear clothes looted from Primark and Topshop for at least another few decades, right? But no. Instead, they've gone to the trouble of weaving medieval-style natural-dyed clothes to match their castle. And adopt MEDIEVAL "FASHIONS". AND KNIGHTS ON HORSEBACK. AND....

The fact that he's wearing fur is probably the only thing about this that makes any sense. WARMTH IS KEY.

In a post-apocalyptic environment, surely your priority is survival, right? Not STAINED-GLASS WINDOWS WITH THE BIOHAZARD SYMBOL ON THEM. And TRAINED FALCONS.

YOU'RE WASTING CANDLES, MALCOLM MCDOWELL!

Malcolm McDowell's character is a prime example of the impracticality of the Evil Overlord mindset. Instead of, you know, trying to find a few generators and getting someone to set up WiFi so the surviving Scots can start a Twitter feed about how shit it is being trapped in a country full of plague corpses, he concentrates on making sure that everyone who lives in his castle is dressed with historical accuracy.

This picture is such a perfect example of the ridiculousness of both Malcolm McDowell's horrendous leadership techniques, and the movie Doomsday in general. You can't tell here, but Eden's about to engage in single combat with an armoured knight wielding a huge mace/morningstar. In the background, everyone is wearing velvet caps and cloaks and there are BIOHAZARD SYMBOL WALL-HANGINGS. What are your priorities Malcolm McDowell? Have you learnt nothing from when your evil plans were scuppered by that other badass post-apocalyptic heroine, Tank Girl, back in 1995?

Note: Tank Girl is awesome, but probably not as brilliant as Doomsday in terms of sheer extravagance.

(N.B. McDowell really is good value, isn't he? He can brandish a cyborg arm while sucking humans dry in Tank Girl, then do interviews like this where he describes his role in Doomsday as "a cross between Lear and MacBeth". MAGNIFICENT. Can you believe that this role was originally intended to be for Sean Connery? Surely he's not menacing enough! And he doesn't have that all-important futuristic megalomaniac experience that McDowell embodies.)

Maroon velvet: the fabric of OPPRESSION.

I actually have a theory about the silly medieval costumes. The castle where these scenes take place is clearly a castle that's been converted into a musem, as evidenced by the fact that there are still "EXIT" signs in doorways here and there (presumably because... they filmed it in a Scottish castle museum...). Maybe there were some re-enactment costumes left over when they moved in? It's probably best to not think about these things too much, and just revel in Doomsday's complete balls-to-the-wall lack of restraint instead.

I guess the armour KIND OF makes sense? And longbows are a very efficient weapon!

Let's take a look at the urban survivors. Surely they can't manage to have a crazier survival strategy than the medieval knight guys, right?

 No.

The people of Glasgow appear to have adopted a kind of goth/urban-tribal look, complete with intricate face-painting (somewhat celtic...?) and hairstyles that look bloody impossible to sleep in. The goth thing I'll allow because Glasgow has a fairly high punk/goth population, and in general I find that the further North you go in Europe, the more goths you find. I'd argue that in Glasgow any tough-yet-unbalance survivors are more likely to be neds, but let's not quibble. People in spiny fetishwear are more visually arresting than people wearing Burberry and Adidas, plus they're an homage to countless classics of the apocalypse genre, such as Mad Max and Escape From New York.

In addition to the whole inexplicable goth/urban-tribal infected-piercings extravaganza, these guys are cannibals. CANNIBALS. Cannibalism? Not a viable survival strategy. Their leader is a punk psycho who gets to ham it up to epic proportions during this party scene, which includes: guys in kilts doing the can-can, pole-dancers, chainsaws, a fire show, and... look, just watch it.

In the great genre movie tradition: He's wearing messy eyeliner, and therefore is probably evil.

I suppose if you were going to try and be smart about it, you could say that Doomsday has some interesting theories about how subcultures might develop in a closed-off society that until recently had all the stylistic influences one expects from first-world media and advertising. Once locked into the pressure-cooker of post-apocalyptic Scotland, the population divides itself into two disparate groups: the snarling, fashion-forward goth savages of the city, and the conservative croft-dwellers of the Highlands. People are so desperate to maintain a sense of belonging that they go to increasingly extreme lengths to prove that they are part of the tribe. Of course, it'd take more than 20 years for this type of society to emerge, but Doomsday isn't really concerned with boring shit like realism. Here's one final example of that beautiful truth: a woman from the start of the film who genuinely seems to have been transported directly from 1975, for no reason other than it seemed like an awesome idea at the time:

Read More