You Love to See It: Dredd

When movies employ slow-motion shots, the point is almost always to emphasize how cool something is within the context of an action scene. The Matrix’s influential “bullet time” and its slow pans around martial artists suspended in time mid-strike are effective methods of guiding viewer observation toward a single action, infusing a single kick or leap with additional tension and thus a greater sense of kinetic payoff. Zack Snyder’s 300 does much the same, though with considerably less visual ingenuity. Not until Pete Travis’s 2012 sci-fi action flick Dredd did anyone really pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the Wachowski sisters in 1999. Travis uses slow-motion, introduced through the fictional drug “Slo-Mo” which distorts the user’s sense of time, not just to control the pacing and focus of action scenes but to heighten depictions of sensory experiences, rendering simple moving images like unkempt gangster Ma-Ma’s (Lena Headey) arm pushing through bathwater hypnotically entrancing. 

Paul Leonard-Morgan’s shivering trance soundtrack gives the film’s slow-motion scenes a dreamlike quality, and when they do concern violence the application of the effect is far from thoughtless. In one such scene a gang-affiliated tenant of Peach Trees, the massive apartment complex in which the film takes place, takes a hit of Slo-Mo just moments before the titular judge bursts into his crew’s safe house. In that moment we see squalor, abuse, violence, and desperation washed with the drug’s crystalline glow, rendered numb and safe by the temporary release of getting high. It’s not exactly Marxist theory, but at least it centers the gangsters as human beings with full and complex experiences of the world. When Dredd does come in, guns blazing, the gangster’s still tripping and must live through the graphic murder of everyone around him in syrupy slow-motion. Bodies burst like balloons filled with blood. Skin ripples like water as bullets tear through it.

Dredd’s use of slow-motion isn’t about building up to a kinetic payoff. Instead, it smears a single moment into a complete experience, using the conceit of the drug to let us live briefly in the bodies of violent, desperate people eager to escape their surroundings, to float through life in a haze of tinkling electronica and lurid overexposed colors. When Ma-Ma meets her end at the film’s climax, given a hit of her own designer drug and flung through a plate-glass window to plunge hundreds of stories to her death, the film opts out of the windup-pitch use of slow-motion by letting the effect play out even as her face literally splits open against the tile of the building’s courtyard, her blood spreading into a Rohrshach blot of gore. The point here isn’t to show us the boot, give us time to think about it, and then snap back to real time as it whips into some schmuck’s face. The point is a sense of embodiment, of fleshly experience, of slowing down reality to watch its machinery turn in full knowledge of the inevitable result. That’s how you do goddamn slow-motion.