My subscription magazines have arrived in their usual clump this week. Front and center is the latest copy of Empire magazine, adorned with a holographic image of Iron Man as part of the build up to the 2010 film sequel. The first Iron Man film was a triumph, marking the latest in a line of commercially successful geek-friendly films that (arguably) began with Stephen Norrington’s “Blade” in the late ’90s.
While Iron Man’s success was grounded in the ever-watchable Robert Downey Jr’s note-perfect take on the flawed billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, it was the film’s overall fidelity to the source material that made it a pleasure. Take the Iron Man suit for example: The character has been through dozens of iterations of the armour, but the producers of the film chose wisely to model (thanks to the late lamented Stan Winston) the final red and gold suit after the design by artist Adi Granov from his Iron Man : Extremis run with writer Warren Ellis. Even the origin story was brought up to date from it’s original Vietnam setting was largely a lift and shift of the underlying template. The whole thing worked because of fidelity to the source material.
The underlying idea for this post was prompted by my watching the maligned Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie from ’95. It was a case of oh so nearly, but like another first-time director’s outing – I’m thinking of David Fincher’s Alien 3 – it suffered from too much interference in its realisation. The Dredd movie, like Iron Man, got so much of it right: The epic Mega Cityscape that is right up there with Blade Runner in terms of futuristic urban vistas, the realisation of the Judges’ garb of office (tangent: they hired Gianni Versace to realise the Judge’s look; I can’t for the life of me see where any value was added. The look is completely the same as the comic!), the Angel Gang in the Cursed earth were note perfect, The ABC Warrior realised the Simon Bisley Hammerstein robot from my teens…I could go on. Unfortunately there’s no credit for getting things right when some things are wrong.
The interference alluded to earlier realised itself in the character of Stallone’s Dredd: Dredd never takes his helmet off. The filmmakers – Stallone in particular reportedly – hadn’t grasped the iconic nature of the lawman, and that his anonymity (sans epic jawline) was deliberate and necessary. Dredd is the personification of justice for the third millennium, replacing the blindfolded figure bearing a sword in one hand and scales in the other, with a Lawgiver pistol and a genetic incorruptability. Dredd is a cypher, something that every writer has maintained in the thirty odd years he’s been in print…a force of nature, not a hero in the conventional sense. Judges are part of the city, like an immune system. Certainly not a character to be used as a star vehicle.
Still, there’s hope for the 60-year-old yet. Rebellion, the owner of the parent 2000AD comic are lining up a cinematic reboot which should address the faults of its predecessor. If they don’t get it no-one will.
J
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