The more Alex Garland solidifies his identity as a proven auteur, the clearer it becomes that he has a fascination with the human impulse towards violence as a way of enforcing social order. With Civil War in the past and Warfare on the horizon, Garland keeps looking into the eye of the pervasive storm that never ceases in the hearts of those who feel a need to fight against a senseless world. He’s come a long way from his days as a go-to screenwriter for intelligent science fiction and shocking horror, and it turns out we should have seen this shift coming, as he combined those two sides to write Dredd, an action cult classic that he may have had a way bigger hand in making than people initially thought.
Alex Garland Was the Genesis of ‘Dredd’
Garland was the primary creative engine of Dredd long before it even started production, as he’d written a script for it as far back as during postproduction of Sunshine. Moon director Duncan Jones could have directed it, but he found his vision of the Judge Dredd world to be “really weird and dark and funny…maybe too off the wall” and not aligned with Garland’s script, which was more faithful to the original comic. Once Garland’s script was picked up for production, Pete Travis was chosen as director, who had only made the multi-perspective thriller Vantage Point at that time. Somewhat suspicious is the fact that when this was announced, Judge Dredd comic co-creator John Wagner was quoted as having faith in Garland and producers Andrew Macdonald and Allan Reich…but doesn’t mention Travis at all. Furthermore, if you look up any interviews given on the creative decisions made for the film, they usually come from Garland, and any Pete Travis piece of insight almost immediately mentions Garland and the ideas of his script. This was the first of various breadcrumbs that the production of Dredd would wind up being a repeat of the alleged Poltergeist situation with Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper.
Karl Urban Claims Alex Garland Deserves Full Credit for ‘Dredd’
By the accounts of those who have spoken or reported on Dredd‘s production, Alex Garland is the person who made all the chief creative decisions, not Pete Travis. The iconic SLO-MO sequences, the commitment to Dredd (Karl Urban) never showing his face or having a full character arc, and the changes to Dredd’s signature costume: all were Garland’s ideas that proved bedrocks of the film’s appeal. Garland’s firm hand on the film’s identity, despite Travis’ alleged title, got to the point that, when the film reached postproduction, Travis was outright fired, and Garland stepped in to finish the edit, with the two posting a public statement acknowledging their “unorthodox collaboration.” The public let the sleeping dog lie, and the film went on to be a financial bomb but grew in estimation as a bona fide cult classic, but Karl Urban himself brought the issue back up in 2018, when he boldly proclaimed that Dredd should be considered Alex Garland’s directorial debut. He’d been quietly saying things like that since 2012, when he admitted that if he ever needed direction, he always turned to Garland and never Travis. It seems that Urban wound up being on the right side of history, as Dredd is now officially included in Garland’s canon when people retrospectively discuss the trajectory of his career.
‘Dredd’ Set Alex Garland up To Make Bigger and Bolder Films
If any connective tissue can be drawn from the relatively scaled-down pulp story of Dredd to the grander nightmare visions of Annihilation and Men, it’s the command of environmental storytelling and rumination on the savagery hiding under human civilization. The musty and radiation-tinged 200-story building that Dredd almost entirely takes place in is packed with details that are unremarked upon, yet make it feel like it has history in every room. While Dredd’s method of justice no doubt barrels into fascistic, Garland seems amused by the way he’s rigidly sticking to his code and trying to problem-solve in ways that won’t break it, observing the aggressive Darwinian nature of his judgment calls.
The use of slow motion for the drug scenes is gorgeous eye candy that puts Zack Snyder to shame, and it harbors the same queasy mixture of awing reverence and ambivalent disposition for the potential that violence has to be beautiful and exhilarating that Garland has shown in many of his recent films. Any film Garland makes now immediately invites controversy and heated discussion about what he actually believes or wants us to feel, but Dredd has an admirable simplicity in its intentions that Garland has long abandoned for his increasingly propulsive designs. Nevertheless, Dredd was not only a film single-handedly hatched and saved by him, but it also must have been a great training exercise for Alex Garland before he made his “official” debut with Ex Machina.
