Judge Dredd (film)/Headscratchers


 * Early in the movie, Dredd removes his helmet and shows his face. This troper turned off the movie at that point. Dredd is not supposed to HAVE a face. Because he's not really a person. He Is The Law.
 * Blame Stallone. He demanded to have a scene where he removes the helmet.
 * Yes, I'm sure that's what it was. I'm sure that the director wanted him to leave the helmet on the entire time... including during the scenes where he's arrested and sent to prison... but that Stallone threw a fit. The production was clearly perfectly happy to leave their superstar actor and main draw's face covered the entire time otherwise. It's just a coincidence that Karl Urban had to actually fight to not have Dredd remove his helmet in his version.
 * In the early part, before Dredd is framed, he comes to intervene in block wars to find the other Judges huddled for cover from the automatic gunfire above. He then strides down the middle of the street and declares that they are beyond the effective range of the rifles. Can weapons have an effect range when being fired straight down?
 * One of the many reasons I suppress the memory of the film.
 * "They're firing caseless Fletcher rounds...", as Dredd states, suggests to me that the perps are using some sort of shotgun. The sound and look of their guns backs this up to some extent. Over a large distance, caseless shotgun rounds will disperse to the point where they're not going to be a problem for an armoured Judge, despite the speed at which the shrapnel is flying.
 * Possibly Flechette rounds? In most fiction I've read, flechette rounds are highly effective in short ranges or against unarmored targets at medium range, essentially firing several razor sharp darts, however drag on the darts causes them to lose power quickly when compared to standard rounds. Real life mileage varies, with such weapons used as antipersonel weapons when dropped from planes in World War I.
 * It's certainly possible to have a maximum range. Either due to excessive spread and the like, which would make hitting the judges highly difficult, or simple air friction reducing the bullet's speed to terminal velocity, although I doubt you'd have it slow down that much any time soon.
 * I take it as Dredd saying 1) that at the range they're firing, accuracy and power have diminished to the point that even if they accidentally hit a Judge, which is about the only way they'd do it, the armor would keep it from being lethal, and 2) in light of 1, Judges shouldn't cower behind their Lawmasters but instead make a show of being as strong and unyielding as the Law.
 * Rico replaces the DNA sample being used to clone new Judges with his own, declaring with scenery-chewing glee that the resulting army will be just as crazy as him. What he doesn't seem to realize is that he was cloned from the exact same DNA that was already there. He and Dredd are both clones from an earlier phase of the project, and they both have the same DNA, an important plot point that explains how Rico is able to frame Dredd for murder earlier. Rico just replaced the existing DNA with an exact copy. Given the quality of the movie as a whole, the writers might have realized this and just not bothered to change it.
 * Also, when Chief Judge Fargo finds Dredd in the Cursed Earth, he explains how Dredd was cloned from his DNA. In that case, shouldn't the DNA sample at Dredd's trial have been identified by the computer as Fargo DNA, rather than Dredd's? Even if the DNA was modified for the cloning experiments, the findings should only suggest that the person who fired the gun belongs to one of the clones, for which Dredd would not be the only individual on record. Of course, it's arguable that the council could have tampered with the findings to gain a conviction against Dredd, but nothing is done to explicitly suggest this.
 * The system may only have current judges on file, either because it's new or because it looks through the recent records first and doesn't check for multiple matches (the cloning being a secret here).
 * Chief Justice Fargo would have been a "current judge" at the time of the hearing. He was presiding over the Council at the hearing.
 * The Dredd/ Rico genetic sample was an amalgamation of available genetic material at the time, not just Fargo's as in the comic. It explains why Fargo didn't get pinged, but not why non-identical twins have the same DNA.
 * Plus, Fargo states that Rico mutated at some point.
 * But if Rico's DNA is mutated, how could it have been pinged for Dredd's non-mutated DNA without deliberately tampering with evidence (which, again, is never suggested to have been done here)?
 * Most likely the Lawgiver only checks a specific bit of DNA code instead of the entire strand, and the bit it checks is identical between Dredd and Rico rather than one of the bits with chromosome errors or whatever.


 * The evidence at Dredd's trial was a security video from the victim's apartment and a DNA sample from the gun that was used. Several problems with this:
 * First, why would a Judge's pistol have a feature that recorded the DNA of the user on the bullets fired? Lawgivers are DNA-locked, so only the authorized user can fire them in the first place. Recording that on the bullets would be redundant.
 * It wouldn't. Your version would allow a Judge to kill someone and then get rid of his Lawgiver to avoid a concrete link to such murders altogether. Tagging the bullets is better because getting rid of bullets you've used to kill people is not something you can do on the fly.
 * Second, why would that feature be kept a secret? Wouldn't Judges know all the capabilities of their weapons and equipment?
 * So that a Judge wouldn't know about it ahead of time and thus try to plan around it by using another weapon. Or, as actually happened, frame someone else somehow using the Lawgiver.
 * Third, in a city as heavily monitored as Mega-City One, why was there no record of the real Dredd's location at the time of the murder? Shouldn't there be some record of where Dredd actually was? An alibi? Cameras near his home? Something?
 * There's never any mention that the Judges are tracked at all times. Since it's not brought up, apparently they don't.