Mad Max: Fury Road

I liked it. I would have appreciated a bit more plot depth, as well, but I think it worked with what they provided: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2015/05/furiosa-road.html

@Legomancer - you really should hunt up The Road Warrior. That's Fury Road's badass old man.

Mr. White wrote:

EDIT: I like that his car appears in more than one film, but gets destroyed. I mean, in all these legends the Max character has to arrive on the scene somehow. It also works to cast different actors in the role as perhaps various tribal/community elders recall his features differently. Wait...is this whole 'Mad Max movies are re-tellings' true? A buddy told me about this Friday night at the theater and I guess I've taken his word. Haven't looked into myself...does anyone know?

I'd think the first one is not, but the rest are. At least that's what I'm going with. Otherwise I have to think too hard about what happens to Max's Interceptor.

Ha. Don't think too hard because then you'd have to think about why, if fuel is so precious, everyone drives these cars that MIGHT get a half mile to the gallon. Maybe.

I think the lone deviation from storyline is the BEYOND THUNDERDOME SPOILER:

fact that the Interceptor gets destroyed in that film but appears at the beginning of Fury Road. If that means they're saying that Thunderdome (the shitty one) happened long after Max's life stopped being interesting (i.e. the first two films and Fury Road, plus rumored continuations he's working on now), that's fine with me. But it's possible that they've decided to mount these as "legends", but I think they just continued the narration schtick of the Feral Boy from the Road Warrior into Thunderdome and have now dropped it. And Thunderdome. Thankfully.

Jackwraith wrote: I liked it. I would have appreciated a bit more plot depth, as well, but I think it worked with what they provided: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2015/05/furiosa-road.html

"A trend over the past decade or so has been to close in on action sequences to try to simulate the chaos of a fight for the audience. What that has led to is a lot of blurred action and an inability to follow what's actually happening until they cut to "really cool move" by whomever the star is. In the comic world, we'd accuse the inker of having spilled water on the pages except for the one panel he managed to preserve. You lose the ability to follow the story with that technique and your choreography that you likely spent thousands on goes for naught. In contrast, Fury Road, with dozens of bodies flying about the screen and scrabbling across vehicles at high speed, still managed to follow a sequence of events from one point to the next so you knew exactly how dangerous the Polecats were (to their targets and themselves) and exactly how destructive the Buzzards could be (again, to targets and selves.) It was a really refreshing experience to be able to know just where everyone was on the highway of death even before they were smoking hulks left to the side."

Really wanted to ++ this quote from your blog. Absolutely true.

Sequel to be titled Mad Max: The Wasteland.

This movie filled me with a childlike sense of wonder. I was rapt. Best movie since Under the Skin. Keep the sci fi feminist propaganda coming please.

The only time my attention wandered was for a brief moment when I wondered if I still had my stuff stashed away somewhere to play some


Also, how awesome is it that the box says "3D Roleplay"? Rhetorical question. It is shiny and chrome.

Sitting in the theater right now, credits are rolling. I kind of just need to sit here for a minute. Stunned.

Attrition wrote: This movie filled me with a childlike sense of wonder. I was rapt. Best movie since Under the Skin. Keep the sci fi feminist propaganda coming please.

The only time my attention wandered was for a brief moment when I wondered if I still had my stuff stashed away somewhere to play some

Also, how awesome is it that the box says "3D Roleplay"? Rhetorical question. It is shiny and chrome.

The oldhammer movement has embraced Dark Future over the past year in anticipation of Fury Road. There are blogs, sites, and FB pages if you want to see what everyone is doing with DF. Also, now would be a good time to sell if you don't see yourself playing.

The '3d Roleplay' is what GW put on the cover of a lot of their boardgames games back then. It was a trick to try and swindle role-players to buy the game as well. Though there were pedestrian and campaign rules that came out later.

Another thing about this Fury Road that I find pretty cool is that this came from a guy who is what...70? I enjoy seeing folks do really well later in life. Very affirming.

Finally, I see the Alamo put up on youtube the 'don't talk' message they ran this weekend.

OK, had some time to catch my breath.

First of all, I think this film is really something special- especially if, like a lot of us, you grew up watching the kinds of iconic action movies that were around in the 1980s and somewhat into the 1990s but are now more or less extinct. This is a genre film on the level of Terminator or Aliens...or the original Road Warrior. It's been a very, very long time since there was a movie quite like this. It felt like how watching these kinds of movies in the 1980s did, when we were kids and just got swept up in a director's vision. Movies like this are why I fell in love with the movies in the first place. Movies like this are why I wanted to be a director before I realized that if I were going to do that with my life, I'd probably never get to make something like this because of the reality of how movies get made and which ones get made. I really don't know how Miller managed to get this made...I guess all that clout he had from the success of the Babe and Happy Feet films paid off.

It may not be as definitive or innovative as RW was and there may be just a couple of moments that might have gone a little too over-the-top, but on balance I think it was every bit as good as RW and Thunderdome (I love Thunderdome, BTW). In some ways, it was actually better if only because it had a couple of surprisingly rich, surprisingly heartfelt subtextual threads that gave the film- and the characters- a deeper sense of humanity.

I've probably seen all three of the original films as much as I've seen the SW OT. I saw the Road Warrior in the theater when I was six, not sure what my parents were thinking there. Four years later, I remember waiting in line to see Thunderdome. Then there was a whole summer, it must have been '87 or '88 where I had a tape of Thunderdome that I recorded on HBO that I just about wore out. Watching Fury Road, I lost count of the number of times that this movie RHYMED with the others. It never directly referenced anything and could stand alone. But there were all of these moments, some just throwaway shots, where there was no doubt that the same George Miller that made those movies made this one. Little character beats, the position of a camera...and slightly more specific things like Max divesting the War Rig of all the weapons (except, of course, the hidden knife), arm-mounted crossbows, a little music box. I was literally in tears for a lot of the film because it was just EXACTLY what I wanted over the 30 years since Thunderdome.

Hardy was excellent. Theron was even better. If the next film was just her, that would be totally fine. She was EXACTLY what a female heroine should be, and at no point was she just a dude with breasts. Always a woman.

The feminist angle was brilliant. It opened up one of the many new angles this picture explored. Before it was gas and water. In this one, it's blood and breast milk. There's always a shortage, and always someone exploiting someone else. The brides were such an unexpected element- that first shot where we see them crawling under the rig was just beautiful. All of this metal, all of this machismo...and then something feminine and soft. Such a powerful image, especially in the context that we know at that point what Immortan Joe was doing with them. The old women were another completely brilliant out-of-nowhere concept. Loved seeing them in the fight- apparently they did their own stunt work too.

And what a villain. I love that it's the same actor that played Toecutter. Definitely on par with Humungus and Aunty Entity. One for the ages. Loved everything about the V8 cult. Loved the War Boys. Loved the accountant with the giant cancerous foot. Loved the Polecats. LOVED the Bullet Farmers' tank.

The production design in this film was quiet literally as good as it goods. Watch for this film to win every single award available for art direction, costume design and so on. There were times when I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing on the screen, and most of it REAL at that. It was beautiful and savage.

I thought it was really, really cool that there was a specific visual reference to The Cars that Ate Paris, another Australian film that influenced Mad Max but is all but forgotten by most folks today.

As far as the script goes, I don't get the complaints about the plot. There was as much plot there as there should have been. It didn't need to be complicated. It was written at just the right level, and hats off to the writers (including 2000AD's Brendan McCarthy) for TRUSTING the audience enough to buckle in and go with it. There didn't need to be fucking "walk and talks" where a character explains everything we're seeing to another character. There didn't need to be elaborations on BS "lore" to keep audiences from wondering why the War Boys spraypainted their teeth or whatever.

It was an incredibly confident film from top to bottom. The kind of thing that you can definitely call a "masterclass". Everyone in Hollywood that is currently working on an any kind of action picture should be on notice- the bar is raised, and ironically by a film that could have been made for the most part 30 years ago.

Michael Barnes wrote: I saw the Road Warrior in the theater when I was six, not sure what my parents were thinking there.

Tell me about it...I saw Conan the Barbarian at about 7 or 8.

I'm trying to convince myself it would be ok to take my 8 year old to see this in the theater. I think ultimately it may be too much, but damn, this is the type of movie experience that rarely comes out anymore. It's a shame his generation is stuck with these Marvel films...which have become little more than commercials for the next Marvel film...

Michael-
I totally agree with everything you're saying about the movie. But can you explain this: "She was EXACTLY what a female heroine should be, and at no point was she just a dude with breasts. Always a woman." I've heard similar comments before about other things, but I honestly don't understand why a character would be described as a "dude with breasts."

On another note, here's a great long-form article about Miller and the MM trilogy from Variety:
Mad Max: On the Road Again

Well, if you look at a lot of "warrior women" types, they tend to play this weird middlefield between being male sex fantasy figures and somehow "empowered" co-eds, but with traits that aren't really very specifically feminine but really sort of psychologically androgynous. Female heroes, when you get down to it, are terribly complicated to properly pull off for a number of cultural, social and psychological reasons...not the least of which is the fact that when a woman is written by a man in a film like this, they tend to just be a distaff male like Sarah Connor. Or they're Lara Croft.

Furiosa is much closer to Ripley, who would be one of the best "not a dude with breasts" characters. She's very much a woman, her character arc is feminine and her motivations are feminine. We know that she's a mother, we see her being a mother, and the finale of Aliens has her squaring off with another mother. With Furiosa, she's seen these girls go through this awful experience and it resonates with her as a woman- not just as a good person or a hero or whatever. So her redemption has to include bringing these girls back to her matriarchial home.

How tragic is it that Immortan Joe's citadel is so full of life- human and plant- yet this warlord mentality means that it is just exploited and squandered down to the precious milk produced by nursing mothers. A society that exploits and abuses its women is a death culture.

I keep coming back to how fucking amazing an idea it was to have the War Rig filled up with breast milk. That is literally one of the coolest, most interesting ideas in a movie ever.

What about that scene with the stilt walkers? I just couldn't believe that...just a little off the cuff scene, no comment...and it made the entire Mad Max world open up even further. As did the body horror elements and the fact that we specifically see the cancerous effects of fallout for really the first time in these movies.

Mr. White wrote: I'm trying to convince myself it would be ok to take my 8 year old to see this in the theater. I think ultimately it may be too much, but damn, this is the type of movie experience that rarely comes out anymore. It's a shame his generation is stuck with these Marvel films...which have become little more than commercials for the next Marvel film...

Yeah, the whole time I was thinking "River would lose his mind over this". But he's five, and there's some stuff that is just way too intense for him to dig into without having a stronger sense of context. And all of that really special stuff about women in the film, he just wouldn't get at all. Let alone explaining the blood transfusion stuff, the emergency C-section what the brides actually were and so forth.

I'd say maybe a bright 10 year old would be able to grasp it with some guidance/discussion. The violence is up to the parents...it's not nearly as cruel or malicious as some of the other violent films I've seen over the past 20 years.

But yeah, anybody who says "they don't make 'em like they used to" needs to see this movie ASAP.

Gregarius wrote: Michael-
I totally agree with everything you're saying about the movie. But can you explain this: "She was EXACTLY what a female heroine should be, and at no point was she just a dude with breasts. Always a woman." I've heard similar comments before about other things, but I honestly don't understand why a character would be described as a "dude with breasts."

A "dude with breasts" is when you create a "badass" female character by simply writing the exact same role you'd write for a man and then having a woman play it. That is, you could swap the woman out for a man and there would be no evidence whatsoever that it was ever a woman. Every line the character says, every bit of (usually very little) characterization, every reaction of the character to others and others to the character is exactly the same as if the character is a man.

Usually this is nothing more than the fact that the characters have no actual characterization to them, so in addition to being a man, the woman could equally be a robot or a pile of hams. However, it's often used to throw a bone and say, "see? There's women in our movie! We took Private Joe and made him Private Jane!"

The immediate argument for this is, "but shouldn't they be treated equally?" and in some ways that's right and "dude with breasts" is preferable to "did she become badass before the movie started because she was raped or will she be defined as badass by how she deals with an attempted rape?" since that is usually the alternative.

There's nothing traditionally feminine about Furiosa. It's not that the movie is impossible without a woman in that role. But it would be a very different movie, saying very different things. Imagine a guy in that role and think about how the movie has drastically changed. And yet, she's not there to be rescued by Max or fuck Max or be a prize for him to win. She's a full-fledged female character with a life outside of the hero, whose gender informs her role. She's not just a character who happens to be a woman.