This is a masterpiece. I can’t wait to see what hulk has to say about this. It has climbed quite high up on my favourite movie list, close to Speed Racer.
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I think it’s two things – first, that I like to explore the details. So when everything’s mentioned, but only glossed over, I want to know more. So why are the warboys all white? Why do they need to milk women for sustenance? It’s not that everything needs to be explained, but nothing seemed to be explained.
And second, I want to know more details when things are incongruous. So why do they use flamethrowers when they have to make (presumably dangerous) runs for gasoline? They’re able to keep a bunch of trucks running, but no one has a radio, so they need to communicate solely through flares and a dude playing guitar? Now, I can make up reasons that some of these things happen – maybe there’s a natural vent of gas that for some reason won’t work in cars – but if I’m stretching so much to make it work, why am I watching a movie? I can just make up things on my own, and not pay $20 for the privilege. Far from asking for spoon-feeding, it feels like lazy storytelling to throw out a bunch of details that don’t fit together and say “it’s your job to make the world work”.
That’s the thing though, movies are not natively supposed to be storytelling, but rather storyshowing. Where most movies fail is in being little more than recorded plays, with narrative driven by dialog. Also, even when evaluated purely in verbal terms, the tendency for movies to offer explanations which obvious exist only for the viewer makes little in-story sense. It detracts from their verisimilitude, because IRL people tend to not crowbar exposition of the world they take for granted in their exchanges with each other. Explanations take me out of the movie, compared to the realistic necessity of me accepting the ambivalence of not being sure if I understand my surroundings.
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A lack of impossible acrobatics? Then what were all those Cirque-type acrobats doing swaying atop poles and snatching people out of vehicles? Or the hopping from one vehicle to another, or crawling underneath a speeding truck to do maintenance, or the bikers leaping their vehicles over the truck to hurl grenades down upon it? As for female objectification, I guess the author missed the one slave girl’s nipples jutting through her wet t-shirt, or the watchwoman atop the tower, who’d taken her clothes off and was manning her post naked for no apparent reason.
Lots of action, to be sure, but this was one of the dumbest flicks I’ve ever seen. Plot-wise, it makes your typical Marvel Comics romp look like Citizen Kane.
I haven’t seen the movie, actually I’m unlikely to anytime soon for a variety of reasons, but this actually has a somewhat reasonable explanation. Assuming the fuel is being processed from a source of crude, only a percentage of the result will be usable as fuel for vehicles. Today we have a lot of additives that makes a higher percent usable. Some of this would still be usable if you didn’t care so much about damaging your engine, but the upshot is that you are left with quite a lot of flammable gunk that can’t be used as engine fuel.
OK, all that aside, those sorts of world scenarios often have lots of holes – who’s making the gaskets, ECMs, hoses, and other parts that wear out or go bad on a regular basis. Even with a lot of tinkering on the vehicles, the fuel supply is hardly the most limiting factor. (Although this whole thing could be seen as just the last gasp of the lingering old technology.)
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I hear what you’re saying, it just isn’t that type of movie. IMHO there is waaaaayyyy too much unnatural chatter in films explaining the plot that the two characters would never actually do.
As someone said, it is a “show me”, not “tell me” movie. They admitted the plot was just basically one long scene. The story is simple - and that is ok. Yes we don’t know all the inner workings how how they bartered, why they needed or wanted a guy with guitar and a flame thrower (probably because who doesn’t like music on road trips?). But on the flip side you can get bogged down in the details like the fucking Star Wars prequels. (OMG stop talking about trade federations!)
The character motivations are pretty clear. All the dressing and the nuances are open to interpretation. Which I think is cool. And while you and I are probably both the curious kind, eager to see what is under the sheet, a lot of people take it face value and go alone for the ride.
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These two specific things appeared to me as pretty obvious display of power and wealth. They have slaves whose only purpose is to tread the wheel that lifts their leader. And in a world where what little remaining gas is so precious, what’s more opulent than being able to burn it just for show? It made a lot of sense to me.
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I could be wrong, but I always took objectification to mean treating or viewing another being as a prop (for personal satisfaction or whatever) instead of a living complex being with their own agency. And that agency may include being naked, or wet, or scarified, or covered head to toe in plastic, or covered in engine grease, or cutting holes in your blazer for nipple clamps that match your nose covering.
I actually read that water scene as a tongue-and-cheek subversion to the ‘male fantasy’, in that actuality it was the first time those women had NOT been sex slaves or cooking in between engines in the desert and they were enjoying their freedom and cooling off. I doubt that Zoe Kravitz’s natural reaction to being wet and chilled was the conceptual point of that scene, or even scripted.
As for the The Valkyrie in the tower, that was actually the one thing that was explained in the movie, not to mention via one of Max’s few lines that weren’t grunts: “That’s bait”. She was there to catch raiders who were looking for easy-pickings, so the rest of the group could ambush them. Sure, she could have been clothed, but her nudity made sense in the context. I guess whether or not it’s objectification or not depends on the ‘gaze’ of the particular audience member, but in that case, I guess they would have fallen for that trap and found a well placed bullet in the back of the head thanks to the “Keeper of the Seeds”.
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That’s what made those stunts so fun: they were real stunts, not CGI cartoons. No doubt there were safety rigs that had to be painted out in post, but Miller sez 90% of the stunts in the movie were real, actual people doing exactly what it looked like they were doing. The acrobatics weren’t “impossible” because people were actually doing them.
One pair of nipples bothers you? As for the woman on the tower, sure, she may have been up there as “bait” as Max assumes, which would be reason enough, but she’s also up there by herself on a warm, sunny day. For all we know, hanging out up there naked isn’t all that unpleasant. In any case, she got dressed as soon as she descended, and you never saw a shot of her that would have earned more than a PG rating. Hardly salacious leering in either instance.
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Oh give me a break on the nipples through a wet shirt. Jesus. The People Eater had pierced nipples poking through cut out in his suit.
And the woman on the tower was naked and screaming AS BAIT. She wasn’t there as a look out. Max even said, “It’s a trap.” It was a trap. If they hadn’t known Furiosa they would have ambushed them. And yet the viewer didn’t get any gratuidous boob shots.
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I saw it in 3D, and it was great. But I think it’d be equally great in 2D. There were a few moments where the 3D was a bit too flat, as if it was added later, rather than filmed from the start with a double camera.
It’s not the best 3D in the world, but it’s okay. The 3D of The Hobbit was far better. Everything else, though, Fury Road was better.
No, I’m pretty sure it was just spray paint. One part huffing, one part death ritual. Immortan Joe even said something to Nux about arriving “shiny and chrome” in Valhalla. All part of the bizarre religion he built up around himself to control his War Boys.
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A pair of nipples don’t bother me in the least. What I don’t like are mindless commentaries that ignore the obvious. The writer seems to be someone who condemns so-called “objectification” in other movies but somehow doesn’t see it in this one because Charlize Theron plays a butch role. But a nekkid chick in a tower is still a nekkid chick in a tower - having a cheesy rational doesn’t change that.
And even live stunts use a considerably amount of fakery - none of that stuff was physically possible at the speeds and situations shown. So it’s still impossible acrobatics. Not that there’s a problem with that per se, I’m just calling out the reviewer for exulting over things that clearly are not true.
Besides, it was still a spectacularly dumb movie.
Are you kidding me? That’s actually a thing in the movie? It sounds like the result of an adolescent brainstorming session.
Is it possible to double a “meh”, or does that “un-meh” it and move it into the realm of “dislike”? Oh heck, I’ll just admit it. I didn’t like it. Beautifully shot, but if you’re in the middle of an action sequence and you start noticing the cinematography…
I just found it boring with too many details that didn’t make sense, as mentioned in previous posts. Lazy storytelling.
The sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing.
I don’t think a wet shirt equal objectification. Nor did I find the girl used as bait cheesy. Sounds like a good plan to me.
Sorry you didn’t like it. I don’t think it was dumb in any way, but everyone has their own tastes.
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I’m not sure you understand what “objectification” is.
Objectified does not mean naked or scantily clad. Objectified means treating a person as an object.
A naked women in a movie who exists for no reason but to provide titillation is objectified. A naked women who is a fully fleshed out character, naked for a reason consistent for that character and that world is (probably) not.
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“The story races onward, unfattened by weightless videogame CGI or Campbell-inspired plot lard.”
It’s pretty much a Campbell-inspired hero’s journey, with Furiosa as the hero in need/search of redemption. That Max gets his redemption as well makes it double-good as a story. All of the journey’s markers are there - the passage into the special world through the stone gateway, into the pits of hell in the firestorm, through the dead place and into the total loss of hope - the figurative death of the hero. Then back through the gateway with the boon to save her people, and - redemption!
What makes this so cool (for me) is that Miller flipped the Hero’s Journey paradigm where the (unwilling) hero is usually male and finds the compassion he needs to decide to help his people because of the ministrations of a female character. (Which has been crudely rendered as ‘the love interest’ in many stories.) Max and Furiosa also play the role of mentor in each other’s journey.
It could also be argued that the female sex slaves are symbols of Furiosa’s feminine character which was stolen from her, so she is rescuing her inner self from her past.
Lots of plot lard here, IMO, and better for it!
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I think the suggestion is that there is, by the time of the movie, a gasoline surplus for the tiny population that remains after most of civilization bites it. Basically, they have an entire refinery, and, presumably, operating oilfields around it.
Pump jacks cough up all sorts of crap that’s flammable but not really refinable, too. The world of mad max is a world soaked in decrepit, low-efficiency energy and water production.
I find the world quite convincing: gasoline as almost ridiculously abundant, but availability on a famine-or-feast basis for those who aren’t working for the warlords.
Likewise with Immortan Joe and water. The outputs are huge and obviously not constructed by him. Whatever it is an outlet for (an aquifer-fed reservoir?) there’s perhaps so much water that the scarcity is artificially-maintained–if only as far as his population size is concerned. In other words, what is a catastophic shortfall for 20m australians might have found ecological equilibrium when only 200,000 of them are left.
But in general I like how little is sketched. The tech isn’t teched, it’s just there to tell a story.
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What I really mean by “campbell-inspired plot lard” is the second-hand presentation of campbell (a descriptive work) as a proscriptive approach to structure. A proverbial perfect plot, or inventory of essential components no story is complete without.
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