So my friend Josh has been raving about the new Dredd film
coming out, with Keith Urban. As cheesy as it was, I still have fond nostalgic
thoughts for the original Judge Dredd (1995) so I was have interested, half
weary about a new Dredd film, what with this age of remakes and reboots. I was
mainly in love with the 90s colourful Blade
Runner style environment that was created, as fake as it sometimes looked,
and seeing images from the teaser made me suspicious it would turn out to be (what
Josh and I call) ‘Lo-Fi Sci-fi’, that is to say, a sci-fi movie that doesn’t transport
you to a completely different context, because they film in uninteresting
contemporary locations, most probably somewhere in Toronto or Vancouver. Think
of the difference between the all encompassing dystopia of Blade Runner and the uneven, real world/crazy futurism dichotomy of
Minority Report or The 6th Day. Let’s just say
that the old Judge Dredd consisted of completely fabricated sets and environments,
while they’re filming parts of the 2012 Dredd in South Africa.
Admittedly I’ve started to appreciate the location idea: Judge Dredd
stories are set in a post-nuclear-war city, why wouldn’t the whole place be
sun-drenched? But it wasn’t until the big trailer debut where my doubts really
came to the forefront. The plot of Dredd is such: in the future thousands of
people live in giant apartment blocks, one such block ruled by Lena Headley, a
controller of a powerful drug. The Judges, police with the power of judge, jury
and executioner, storm her building, battle to the top and attempt to capture
her.
It was in this trailer where I found there was a huge
comparisons to and Gareth Evan’s Serbuan maut (The Raid or The Raid: Redemption) (2012) come about. In both trailers, cops
raid an apartment building, only to have the gang boss inform his criminal
tenants that they must kill the invading cops. I know both films were created
and developed independently of each other, and my friend Josh has insisted that
trailers sometimes screw a film up completely. Some early-bird reviews have
reassured me that the film is much better than it seems on paper, so while I’m
now a little keener to watch the film (pictures like this make me excited) the
comparison cannot be ignored.
But why is such a story so prevelant. As I said, both films developed independently
(Dredd is written by the amazing Alex Garland, after all), so how could two
completely different sets of moviemakers come up with the same basic story? I
thought about some great foreign films I’d watched along the same veign:
violent murder and chaos in an apartment building. And you’d be surprised at
how many there are. Those films are Jaume Balagueró
and Paco Plaza’s [●REC] (2007) from Spain,
Benjamin Rocher and Yannick Dahan’s La Horde (The Horde) (2009) from France and the aforementioned Serbuan maut (The Raid or The Raid: Redemption) from Indonesia.
Lets start with a movie called The Horde. Oooh boy, is it rough.
Imagine a combination of two of my favourite films from the past couple of
years, Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) and Dawn of the Dead (2003).
In this film, violent, corrupt cops raid a dilapidated apartment building to
take out a drug lord (see the theme?). This time it’s over the death of one of
their own, and of course, there’s a super race of shark-toothed zombies
attacking the building, while Paris burns on the horizon.
The characters are what make
this for me. Low down and dirty gangsters teaming up with low down and dirty,
violent and vengeful corrupt cops. Not a single soft character in the bunch,
really, all vicious and all of them violent killers. It makes for some fun
moments, there’s no pretty heroine, no handsome hero, just tough guys being
tough, none of them sympathetic or relatable, just hard. It really is
one of the most badass horror films I’ve seen, and if you’re a dude, like, a
DUDE’S DUDE, then you’ll appreciate some of the badassery on display, involving
one of the most brutal and heroic sacrifices in a Zombie film, ever.
Another zombie apartment
building film is Balagueró and Plaza’s [●REC]. In this, a very
good looking journalist (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman tail emergency
workers, who receive a call about an apartment building. Within they find a
situation of escalating terror, where a viral zombie infestation has taken
place, of which there is no escape: the police have sealed the place up, and
anyone who breaks this quarantine will be killed (which they learn the hard
way). This film was also made into an American version called Quarantine
(2008), and eventually a crappy straight to DVD sequel. Despite it being a
first-person camera perspective film, or found footage film, the Spanish REC
films have spawned two very successful sequels and is very popular in that
part of the world.
Oh boy, if The Horde was rough,
this was more terrifying than brutal. One of the most adrenaline-inducing films
I’ve ever seen, there’s one chase scene toward the end that’s full-on crazy. Though
more in the vein of 28 Days Later, with blood spewing, red eyes and
running zombies, the films makes great use of the camera conceit and the pace
of its vicious antagonists. The night-vision sequence at the end is classic,
and the whole film blends terror, dread and creepiness together into a great
little package. I remember watching the film on my TV the first time; with the
sound down, playing the computer a bit as well so I wouldn’t get too overwhelmed
by it, like the pussy that I am. It was so much easier to stomach without the
screams, haha.
And now we get to The Raid.
I stumbled across the trailer once, and showed it to my dad, who is Indonesian.
He thought it was great, but I never had any illusions that it would make its
way to Australian shores, yet low and behold, it was getting some impressive
international buzz and I took my dad out for Mexican and a movie.
The story is simple enough: a
team of elite police raid a dilapidated apartment block to take out a drug
lord. The inhabitants of the building are told they’d live rent-free if they
killed a cop, and thus Rama, the plucky rookie, kicks a lot of arse as they
battle floor by floor towards the penthouse. That’s about it for the plot.
I have to say that the film was
delightfully violent. I’m not really big on high violence, unless it’s against
bad guys, then I’m ok with that. I know it sounds like a dumb contrast, but if
you watch Rambo (2008), for all the violence against enemy soldiers
there was, there were scenes of innocent people being machine-gunned and
children being bayoneted, which was hard for me to stomach. This also marks the
first time I’ve seen people walk out of a cinema because of the violence.
I’ve read reviews damning the
film because of its tissue-paper-thin plot and weak characterisation. It
doesn’t really matter to me, not in this film, especially considering the
action and the entertainment is of a high quality. When you’re slapping your
knee they way I was and laughing as loud as I was (much to my father’s
embarrassed chagrin) it doesn’t matter as much as it should. Personally I was
pleased at seeing an openly Islamic hero, who prays before a rigorous workout. I
mean, yeah it’s a film from an Islamic nation, but in this post-911, post-Osama
world, it’s good to see a sympathetic, heroic Islamic character.
Ultimately the film is very much
like a computer game. I’ve always been aware of this when I watched an episode
of the now dead ABC program Mondo Thingo, a pop culture program, where
tey discussed videogame movies. It wasn’t just that they were making films of Resident
Evil and Tomb Raider, but now films are being influenced by video
games. To illustrate they simply played a clip from Once Upon a Time in
Mexico (2003), where a handcuffed Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas swing
their way down the side of a building, the whole thing structured like an old
Nintendo game. The Raid, however, resembles more a game called Die
Hard Arcade, and reminded me a little of Time Crisis in its story as
well, but that’s just me.
So perhaps that’s the most
enduring influence on all these films, the Video Game influence. All films are
in apartment buildings, all films have a constant violent antagonistic
presence, and all films ultimately involve reaching the very top (or, in The
Horde, the very bottom) to achieve some kind of conclusive end and all
films have a level-by level structure to them, which explains the apartment
building conceit.
So despite some imagery and plot conceits that both Dredd and The
Raid share, idea that both films have their roots in gaming and video game structure
has made the comparison a little easier to stomach. The whole situation reminds
me of the Coldplay Plagarism case, where Coldplay was accused of stealing a
song, though both songs were influenced by old Nintendo the Legend of Zelda
theme. There is such a thing as two independent artists coming to the same
conclusion. And here I am thinking that all these films were influenced by
American pop cinema, when it’s the home entertainment that’s the real culprit.
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