In 1995, suffering under a barrage of Merchant-Ivory films and Britpop bands, a group of brave American patriots led by Sylvester Stallone boldly struck back with Judge Dredd, a Hollywood adaptation of a beloved U.K. comic book that was so aggressively mangled, it constituted cultural warfare. It was sort of like the Boston Tea Party, only instead of dumping Earl Grey in Boston Harbor, we dumped Rob Schneider (as a “hacker”!) into their dystopic science-fiction.
But the winds of war have since died down, and now it’s time to reclaim Judge Dredd for England: Producer Andrew MacDonald, director Pete Travis, and screenwriter Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Sunshine) have just made a deal to make a new, proper Judge Dredd—in 3-D, naturally—that will hew more closely to the original 2000 A.D. comic-book series. As a film, Judge Dredd still has plenty of potential: It’s set in a violence-ridden city of the future, which is a production designer’s wet dream, and its main character is the kind of hero on which you can graft tons of meaty, moral questions while still allowing them to go all punchy-punchy. So this falls under the category of “completely justified remakes,” a species so rare you should take a screenshot so you can show it to your kids someday.