Alex Garland's new movie, Men, opens in theaters on Friday. Garland is not a celebrity auteur on the scale of your Martys. A new Garland project is a big deal for people who love sci-fi. Men, about a grieving widow stuck in some horror, is already being reviewed.
I consider myself a Garland Head. I fell in love with him after seeing Danny Boyle's "Sunshine", a movie about a bunch of doomed astronauts who have to nuke the sun. I've read some of his fiction, and I thought I'd seen everything he'd ever done. I learned last week that I missed Dredd. The star of the 2012 adaptation of the cult comic 2000 AD said Garland took over directing duties from Pete Travis. Garland established himself as one of the greatest working directors after Dredd, with his first two films, Ex Machina and Annihilation. Dredd is a loud comic-book movie, which feels like a direct contrast to Garland's delicate works, so it makes sense that the film rarely gets mentioned when fans discuss his most visionary projects. I learned this week that it should be.
In a crumbling world, Dredd is a Judge who is effectively a state-sanctioned vigilante. He is trapped in a tower block by a crew called the Ma Ma Clan while riding a ride-along with a psychic judge. The Judges have to kill a lot of people in order to survive. Brains are smashed, heads are melted, and bullets are flying through cheeks. There is blood and guts and body bits. Garland said in interviews that he was inspired by the high-speed photography of nature documentaries. Can it be so abstract that it becomes beautiful?
The commitment to making Dredd the best version of itself shines throughout. The Tech Guy Reluctantly Employed by Bad People cliche is a wonderfully bugged-out spin on the Tech Guy Reluctantly Employed by Bad People. The dialog is definitely cartoony, but there is also a joke about how we are all just meat in a giant meat grinder, and the judges are just turning the giant handles on that giant meat grinder, which is grotesquely entertaining. The story revolves around the relationship between Dredd and Thirlby. It feels like a real person.
The drugs are one of the elite elements to Dredd. The Ma Ma Clan makes money by making narcotics. The way life slows the way you take it through an inhaler. A grim world is transformed when a character indulges in a suck on a suck on a suck on a suck on a suck on a suck on a suck on a suck on a suck on a Garland and Jon Thum worked together to get the effect right. He said they labored on it until the very end of postproduction to figure out how far you can pull the viewer out into a weird hallucinogenic space.
The question of whether Dredd should be an official Garland-directed movie is difficult to answer. When the Los Angeles Times first reported that Garland had taken over mid-production, Garland and Travis shot back with a joint statement. The LA Times quoted a source that said that while he is no longer involved in postproduction, he is keeping up with progress via the Internet.
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