The thing I dislike most about Dark Knight Rises is how much it screws up what the previous film struck me as noteworthy for achieving; I could cope with the garbled plotting of taking "the guy who broke Batman's back" from one story and "the bit where Gotham is isolated from the world and the rule of law" from another but an overlay of Frank Miller "all problems can be solved if you punch enough poor people, particularly the brown ones" both ruins the degree to which The Dark Knight understands that dressing up as a bat to terrorise criminals is an inherently highly problematic approach and needs questioning, and betrays and undercuts the way it's the Plain People of Gotham who basically win that movie.
Dredd is lovely, though. it's just a shame that the lack of compromise in making a film that's worth making about that material appears to have stood in the way of enough cinematic success in the US for the scripted sequels to be made; it needed to be an R rating and didn't open as widely as it would have in an ideal world thereby. The Dredd comic universe is huge and sprawling and complex and also has 35 years of almost entirely consistent history advancing in realtime, its strengths are the strengths of very large-scale worldbuilding accreted over time, and distilling the essence of it down that well is a thing I am really impressed by. (There are a lot of very neat little allusions to the wider world in the graffiti and background details, but that do perfectly well not getting in the way if you don't recognise them - pretty much every block in the wider city is named after an artist or writer involved with the comics, for example.) I've not seen Olivia Thirlby in anything else, but I shall be keeping an eye out for her, and I was impressed with how effective Karl Urban's underplaying Dredd was.
(The 1990s Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film is an abomination. Even by bottom-of-the-barrel 1990s Stallone vehicle standards.)
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Dredd is lovely, though. it's just a shame that the lack of compromise in making a film that's worth making about that material appears to have stood in the way of enough cinematic success in the US for the scripted sequels to be made; it needed to be an R rating and didn't open as widely as it would have in an ideal world thereby. The Dredd comic universe is huge and sprawling and complex and also has 35 years of almost entirely consistent history advancing in realtime, its strengths are the strengths of very large-scale worldbuilding accreted over time, and distilling the essence of it down that well is a thing I am really impressed by. (There are a lot of very neat little allusions to the wider world in the graffiti and background details, but that do perfectly well not getting in the way if you don't recognise them - pretty much every block in the wider city is named after an artist or writer involved with the comics, for example.) I've not seen Olivia Thirlby in anything else, but I shall be keeping an eye out for her, and I was impressed with how effective Karl Urban's underplaying Dredd was.
(The 1990s Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film is an abomination. Even by bottom-of-the-barrel 1990s Stallone vehicle standards.)