Alex Garland is a fairly big part of the Danny Boyle story, or at least phase 2 of his career. After Boyle hit the U.K. scene running with the excellent, “Shallow Grave,” and the zeitgeisty “Trainspotting,” he hit some snags.
The first sign of trouble was an ill-conceived romantic comedy called, “A Life Less Ordinary” in 1997, followed up by 2000’s “The Beach.” It’s kind of amazing how much of a reverse thrust those two back-to-back, “failures” hit on Boyle’s forward momentum. Garland did first enter the scene on “The Beach” (his first real screen credit based on his original 1997 memoir of backpacking across Thailand) but it was his scaled-back work on “28 Days Later,” that really put Boyle’s career back on track. Garland would also go on to write Boyle’s vastly underrated sci-fi flick, “Sunshine” and while he wasn’t there for “Slumdog Millionaire,” he was a key player in Boyle’s phase 2.0 career rehabilitation that led to phase 3.0: Oscar winner with the pick of any project he wants (and some seven months later and Boyle is still choosy about what he jumps onto next).
Garland would also write an unproduced script for the “Halo” movie that Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) was supposed to direct, but that one obviously never happened.
That’s all your contextual backstory. So now word is Garland is writing a reboot of “Judge Dredd,” the D.C. comic book that was made into a movie in 1995 with Sly Stallone in the lead (personally if we have to watch one Stallone ’90s film it’s “Demolition Man”). The news originates from @jock4twenty‘s Twitter post that read, “working through script visuals for JUDGE DREDD movie. Alex Garland writes a great script.”
In non nerd speak this means Jock is a visual British artist (née Mark Simpson of “The Losers“ ) and this news does add up. In late December 2008 it was announced that DNA Films (“Sunshine,” “28 Days Later”) was planning on rebooting the Judge Dredd franchise. Then in January of this year, Jock revealed he was working on the concept art.
So DNA Films and Alex Garland, it all makes perfect sense. And even more revealing that this is truth: when the news got out there, Jock took down his tweet, but MTV persevered it. The dystopian police-state satire has been running in some shape or form since 1977. So Garland is writing it and that gives us hope that it won’t be a total loss and will interest normally not interested snobs like us.
