After Action Report: Judge Dredd

Greetings WingNuts,

I'm sad to report that we didn't think much of Judge Dredd! It's such a weird mess of a movie... the cool British sci-fi world and the world class SFX just weren't enough to balance out a confusing, disengaged plot and some actors... chief among them the bizarre choice of Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider as the leads. The setup is too offputting and doesn't spend enough time engaging you... you just don't ever feel like rooting for anyone. Incredible props, visual effects and sets, though! The happiest surprise of the night was the discovery of the after credits song, the bespoke "Dredd Song" provided by... The Cure?! What was going on with this movie?

... but we DID find our Wing Commander tank pretty readily! The police vehicles show up throughout the film but are especially visible during the opening riot scene and then at the very end of the film when everything has been resolved.

In addition to the two that were turned into a tanker and a repair truck on Wing Commander there seem to be at least two Judge Dredd Saracens extant today: one spent a decade at a Planet Hollywood in North Carolina and is now in private hands and another is privately owned in the United Kingdom. I wanted to learn a little more: how many Saracens were used in the film? Luckily, there's a surprisingly comprehensive Making of Judge Dredd book which confirmed that there were four and talked a little it about the process of adapting them:

To provide a final touch of authenticity, four armored vehicles were adapted for use on the film's back lot. After looking at seeral makes, the designers plumped for the Saracen, a six-wheeled British Army vehicle. Before the Rover deal was even considered, this was how all vehicles in Mega-City were going to be made and David Allday spent a considerable amount of time going around Britain looking for the right ones for the job. "Because of the way the country unloads a lot of military hardware at the moment, you can actually procure this stuff extremely cheaply and in large numbers," he says. "The other useful thing about military vehicles is that they're extremely sturdily built, it's very easy to weld things to them and create a completely different look."

A hood and a bumper was added to cover up the front of the Saracens and they were given bigger wheels and mudguards to make them look even more imposing. An engineer was brought in to fix the bits that weren't working (some of the vehicles had been sitting abandoned in a field for six years!) and the Art Department added the finishing touches. "I'd been looking at a lot of aerospace hardware, bits of engines and things like that we'd found in various places. I found these - I think they're caled afterburners - from a jet plane and we stuck them on the side, four of them on each one and the whole thing looked awesome."

With that, the fleet of road-going vehicles were completed and ready to go on set with no problems - almost.

"We had a few moments with them," Dave admits, "but I would ay that they were superbly engineered and the way they performed was perfect. When one considers the amount of things that can go wrong with this sort of thing in terms of what happened on set. We had a lot of last-minute panics, particularly with the Land Rovers filling up with ehaust and that sort of thing. There were a lot of little adaptations that had to be done at breakneck speed. But, basically, on set they performed beautifully."

While most literature refers to the Saracens used in Judge Dredd and Wing Commander as standard FV603s, the Making of Book shows one before the conversion which seems to be the FV606/611 ambulance model:

Further research even revealed that we've already seen a Saracen during this movie series: one played a German armored car in Squadron 633:

Of course, the Saracens weren't the only thing from Judge Dredd that Wing Commander reused: Jurgen Prochnow played Judge Griffin... and the gravitas he added was nowhere near enough to save the film.

There's even ANOTHER Privateer 2 connection... one of the CIS taunts in the game is quoting Dredd's tagline: "I am the law" when the NPC pilot scores a kill.

Sully is the law.