Um. Yes. More of this, please.
Bravo to the stunt people, who looked like they were having a hell of a lot of fun.
I would like to like this times 1 million please!
Do they sell paintballs in chrome?
Mind if I hijack this thread with an anti Fury Road statement?
I was entertained, but 98% on rotten tomatoes? Isn’t a mindless action flick with trivial character development exactly what everyone has been complaining about for a while now?
Edited to add this quote: “A precipitous decline from “Beyond Thunderdome”.” Louis Proyect
LOL!!!
Needs more banana peels.
I am not certain I would insure this endeavor, but I certainly do applaud it.
I didn’t find it mindless. Just because it doesn’t slow down enough to allow for deep, rich character development doesn’t mean it’s dumb as a bag of hammers. A buddy of mine saw an early cut over a year ago, with much more dialogue. He says he wasn’t impressed by it at all, and the movie was much improved by excising a majority of the spoken words.
Part of what I liked about it was that the movie didn’t bother to slow down and explain its own mythology. There was a fair amount of world-building going on there, but you had to actively use your imagination to get all of what was going on. You could sit there in slack-jawed amazement and just enjoy the pretty explosions if you wanted to, but viewers who paid attention (especially with subsequent viewings) got glimpses of some pretty interesting post-apocalyptic possibility.
It’s hard to explain why Fury Road wasn’t nearly as dumb as any given Michael Bay movie… but it wasn’t.
I recently rewatched the first 3 films. Mad Max and Road Warrior stand up well although the budgets were obviously low, but Thunderdome really doesn’t and I’d forgotten all the annoying kids.
I dunno, I’ve been known to complain about movies that were supposed to be mindless action flicks but then spent upwards of 10 minutes at a time without anyone getting punched, shot, or exploded. I haven’t seen Fury Road yet, but from what I hear, it’s a strong step towards the ideal:
IMO Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior was the quintessential Mad Max. Truly gritty and believable as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Fury Road was waaay overcooked, overproduced and with its massive hordes, huge working infrastructure and unlimited fuel, ammunition and welding gear, seemed like a misnomer.
Fine for mindless blockbuster entertainment, but as social commentary or art, it’s flatter than the Road Warriors landscape.
So maybe there is an established world, but it is populated with throw away characters. I don’t need the characters to explain everything they are doing, but I would like to care for some of them.
Most of the movie is centered around the “save the slave women” cliche, including a super model group shower in the middle of the desert. And of course they are owned by an evil pig man villain who we can all be assured will meet his fiery death in another 119 minutes or so. Doesn’t this sound familiar and cliche? Is this really a movie you would be excited to see if it weren’t for the spectacle of it all? Fireworks are great, but what is left after the show?
I think you are right on. The director/studio spent too much time worrying about how Fury Road looked, rather than how it made you feel.
Mad Max and Road Warrior are on cable all the time, we see them frequently. Thunderdome showed on a crappy early spring Saturday this year, and we watched it. I hadn’t seen it since it hit HBO a million years ago. I must say, I completely agree with you. That movie was terrible. It gave me grave doubts about Fury Road. Thunderdome fits the universe Miller has been developing with each successive film, but it was just so damned cheesy. Normally, I wouldn’t advocate directors mucking about “fixing” their older works, but in this case, given opportunity I would beg Miller to re-examine Thunderdome.
All that said, I finally just watched Fury Road this past Saturday, greatly enjoyed it and will be looking to buy it Thanksgiving week so I can watch it a few hundred more times. Back OT, yes, please, more fan made re-enactments!
Needs more of this guy;
I agree with some of your sentiment; sometimes I appreciated the austerity of it, other times I thought it was perhaps too simple. The minimalist dialog had a quality all its own, but sometimes put too much importance on what dialog was left, which sometimes made it incredibly corny. Overall I’d say I liked it not loved it, but would watch it again to see if that style grows on me.
Well, if it didn’t work for you, it didn’t work for you. I’ve loved The Road Warrior unreservedly since I was a kid, but I love Fury Road even more, and for many of the same reasons.
I did say I was entertained by it, but the movie is nowhere near faultless, especially to the point of garnering a 98% and seeing new blog entries on Fury Road on a daily basis now???
Like yourself, I loved Road Warrior when I was young… desolation, heat, grit, desperation, the madness, I could imagine the smell of the machines, taste the desert, and feel the pressure of making a living on a knife’s edge in an uninhabitable world. Did you also have these tangible feelings watching Road Warrior? And do you still feel those same feelings with the saturated sunsets, the desaturated machines, the super models, and the heavy handed CGI environments of Fury Road?
But I’m also confused as to why there are over a dozen Fast and Furious movies now, so I quickly confess that the mainstream Hollywood movies are not my style.
Well, keep in mind that a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes does not imply that any given critic (or any group of them) thinks the movie is 98% perfect. It just means that 98% of the reviews are generally positive. If 98 out of 100 critics gave it a “Meh” level B- or C+, and nobody gave it more than, say, three stars, it would still get a 98% on the Tomatometer.
And yeah, I really did have at least as much of a positive visceral reaction to Fury Road as I did to The Road Warrior. I liked the saturated color, and I don’t believe the CGI employed in Fury Road was anywhere near heavy-handed. A great deal of the stunts were practical, and I thought the CG augmentations were appropriate, for the most part.
One thing I noticed was that every single Mad Max movie has progressively stepped further and further away from a plausible future descended from our own reality, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m also not bothered by the relative beauty of the brides. Immortan Joe was an autocratic tyrant, and it follows that he’d select and protect (for a given value of “protect”) the finest specimens of feminine pulchritude he could scrounge up. They’re essentially a sultan’s harem, so why wouldn’t they look better than anyone else in the movie?
If I were going to nitpick the logic of the movie, I’d have plenty of fodder to choose from. Look at the crowds assembled at the Citadel. Where do all those people normally sleep? What do they eat? Why are they trying to catch their ration of water in spill-prone bowls and cupped hands? Why aren’t there more dead people? Where the hell did all those War Boys come from? In a postapocalyptic wasteland, who had the time, energy, and resources to weld together that big-ass chain-driven elevator? And how does a gigantic geyser/spring of fresh water spew forth from holes carved into the side of a really tall mesa, probably hundreds of feet above the water table in a desert?
Doesn’t matter. “Bartertown” didn’t make any more sense than the Citadel, Gas Town, or the Bullet Farm, and barely less sense than the refinery in The Road Warrior. Whereas the original Mad Max takes place barely in the future, the mythology surrounding Max and his environs grows by leaps and bounds with each successive movie. The Road Warrior, in fact, is framed from the outset as the childhood memories of the Feral Kid, remembering that lone man in black leather who allowed his friends and family to escape the refinery, survive the Humungous’ gang, and make a new life up north. Of course that tale was going to be larger than life; you imagine him telling the story to his grandchildren.
In that vein, Fury Road is another myth of the postapocalypse, perhaps told by an aged Furiosa to her own grandchildren. Who knows?
At any rate, the new movie touched me deeply on many levels, and I found it the single most entertaining movie I’ve seen in a decade.
Yeah, but you haven’t seen Super.
One of these days I’m gonna break down and see it, and it’s prolly gonna suck, and you guys will point and laugh all Nelson Muntz-like.
