alternatehistory.com

Hello everyone, I had this idea flying around my head for some time and now here it is, a thread for alternate movies!

But the usual kind of alternate movies, no, this one is for your ideas for turkeys, flops, oddballs, for your ATL's version of "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or "Battlefield Earth", so let's get started. :D

Judge Dredd (1995)

Expensive, megalomaniac, infamous, everything about "Judge Dredd" is excessive, it might have been one of the most ruinous flops of all time but it did manage to leave his mark in history and people's minds.

It was the movie that brought down Kevin Costner if not for good, at least for a very long time, directing and starring he saw it as "the movie", the vehicle to showcase his cinema skills and his sense of what was right, he was decided to show the world how he could turn any story into a movie for the ages while uplifting and educating the masses, it was to be both a blockbuster and a morality tale, and he wouldn't let "small" things like the wishes of the character's original creators stand on the way...

It was the movie that swallowed rivers of money like if there was no tomorrow. Costner would have nothing less than magnificence on screen for his great work, backed by extremely deep pockets by cashing in his reputation and every favor he could, without words such as "taste" and "restraint" blacked out of his dictionary, as one critic put it, it would suck in money like a black hole.

It was the movie that generated rumor, scuttlebut and controversy in a massive scale even before it hit the screens. Besides expensive it proved difficult to film, as cast and crew struggled to work in the orbit of Costner's ultra-dense, ultra-massive ego. Combined with original creators that became increasingly horrified as they found exactly what was being done with their character and who would really being starring, to the point of trying to get their names of the credits, this made sure that it would be one of cinema's most infamous tales even before it's premiere.

And after all this, in the end, the result was a movie that was a mess of equally epic proportions, no great work sadly misunderstood, no good adaption unfairly reviled by hard-core fans, if anything it was just plain bad, unintentional comedy, to be watched worldwide by drunken audiences on "bad movie nights" for laughs. It would feed the internet's appetite for silly dialog with such "gems" as "I guess I am the law, then." .

As the critics put it:

Even the most hardcore Costner fan has to admit that this tale of a ruthless agent supposedly discovering a sense of right and wrong and bringing it a giant decadent metropolis just doesn't hang together. By the end of the movie Costner as the moralizing liberator manages to be even more ridiculous and laughable than Costner as the ruthless lawman, which is a feat worthy of being remembered for generations to come.

Perhaps the most appropriate symbol for this ego-driven mess is the main characters's mask, used at the beginning to give him an air of distance and ruthlessness, it quickly becomes just a prop to be removed in a over-dramatic fashion, so that the audience may gaze upon his excellency's smug, speechifying, megalomaniac mug.
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