Mad Max: Fury Road

I liked the use of the song personally, although as one member pointed out it does almost make it seem satirical. But maybe that's okay; these movies aren't comedies, but they shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Frankly I don't really know why everybody is disowning this film so much and calling it "not Mad Max". Have you even watched the trailer? LOL

The characters and vehicles seem really authentic to me. Did we all forget about how completely insane the Road Warrior's and Thunderdome's cast were? We had BDSM lovers and Tina Turner as villains!
My favorite part of the whole thing is the looney shouting "what a lovely day!" and the quick editing of him gunning the throttle, that little sequence had me really looking forward to watching this. Almost gave me a Scott Pilgrim/Hot Fuzz vibe, which I get some would argue that that's "disgraceful to the source material", but I really think that style works in this universe since everything is so CrZay!

I don't know man, I'm pretty stoked for this :cool
 
Lutso said:
I liked the use of the song personally, although as one member pointed out it does almost make it seem satirical. But maybe that's okay; these movies aren't comedies, but they shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Frankly I don't really know why everybody is disowning this film so much and calling it "not Mad Max". Have you even watched the trailer? LOL

The characters and vehicles seem really authentic to me. Did we all forget about how completely insane the Road Warrior's and Thunderdome's cast were? We had BDSM lovers and Tina Turner as villains!
My favorite part of the whole thing is the looney shouting "what a lovely day!" and the quick editing of him gunning the throttle, that little sequence had me really looking forward to watching this. Almost gave me a Scott Pilgrim/Hot Fuzz vibe, which I get some would argue that that's "disgraceful to the source material", but I really think that style works in this universe since everything is so CrZay!

I don't know man, I'm pretty stoked for this :cool
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The bulk of the "not Mad Max" vibe that I get has to do with three things, basically.

1. Too big a budget.

2. Too much (read: any) CGI instead of practical F/X and real-world stunt work.

3. The color timing of the film. It's WAY more "intense" in its colors than the previous two films. Granted, some of that is just how modern films are made, but a radical shift in color timing can really change the look of a film. In this case, the colors look cartoonishly garish rather than natural.
 
I like all three of those changes myself.

GM was going very over-the-top with the tools he had to work with at the time of the old movies.


We all love the practical ships of the early SW movies. George Lucas didn't. Even at the time he investigated doing them with early CGI.

I see the look of this new MM being farther out than the originals, but not necessarily so far removed from the mindset that produced them. The reliance on practical stunts & low budget props 30 years ago is well-loved by the fans, especially in hindsight. But I imagine it was largely a concession to budget constraints at the time. George Miller seemed to take the MM universe wilder & farther-out each time they wrote him a bigger check to work with.
 
...to disastrous results. The first is still the best, I think, BECAUSE it's so grounded. The second goes in a new direction, and is still exemplary, one of the best action films ever made. But I don't think it's as good as MM. I BELIEVED every second of MM. The third is like a parody of the second. Money is poison to so many artists.
 
let's be honest here and stop beating around the bush.

The film looks too colourful, too clean (most likely since they are filming in digital) and just looks way too polished and glorified and seems to be trying too hard to please.

It should have been back to basics, little to no CGI.

It really looks like George Miller has lost the plot!
 
batguy said:
I like all three of those changes myself.

GM was going very over-the-top with the tools he had to work with at the time of the old movies.


We all love the practical ships of the early SW movies. George Lucas didn't. Even at the time he investigated doing them with early CGI.

I see the look of this new MM being farther out than the originals, but not necessarily so far removed from the mindset that produced them. The reliance on practical stunts & low budget props 30 years ago is well-loved by the fans, especially in hindsight. But I imagine it was largely a concession to budget constraints at the time. George Miller seemed to take the MM universe wilder & farther-out each time they wrote him a bigger check to work with.
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I don't begrudge you your enjoyment of the new aesthetic. But I'd like to make a point about bigger and bigger budgets.

One of the things that makes for some of the absolute best art is the limitations one must surmount in its creation. This, I find, is especially true with film. People have to get creative, ruthless, and very focused on telling the ESSENTIAL story they're trying to put forth when they're limited by things like budget, time, etc. Obviously, you need a big enough budget so that your film doesn't look cheap or "you can see the string" and such, and you need to be able to pay a decent editor to make it as coherent and well-paced as possible. But as budgets increase, I find that you get less bang for your buck, and more self-indulgent excess instead.


I'm not saying that this film is going to be bad because it's not what the last films were. I don't think anyone ever fully believed we'd be getting the last films again. But one of the things that makes those films work as well as they do is the fact that they couldn't indulge in a ton of big f/x, huge sets, etc. Everything seems cobbled together and very makeshift, and that fits the post-apocalyptic feel perfectly. The world isn't garishly colored, either; it's far more muted and arid-looking, or run-down and falling apart, which, again, fits the post-apocalyptic (or near-apocalyptic in the first film) setting perfectly. Thus, the limitations that the filmmakers faced actually made their story better because it made their world seem more real. The practical f/x and stunt work -- necessary because they couldn't use things like CGI -- made the stunts seem visceral and harrowing, rather than "Whatever. This is obviously green screened and the guy's on wires." When a bike gets crushed by an 18-wheeler, you really believe that the green-mohawked guy has met his end. Why? Simple. They really did crush the friggin' bike and a believable dummy. And the effective use of undercranking in those shots, while kind of an obvious camera trick, actually adds to the frenetic feel of the action sequences far more than, say, the obligatory slow-mo CGI fireballs we get today.

Anyway, the film may be decent as not-quite-a-Mad-Max film. To me, this film looks more like, I dunno, one of the recent Destiny commercials, at least based on the trailer. And yeah, that looks very, very cool. It just doesn't actually seem to have all that much to do with the original, aside from starring a guy named Max driving a black modified Ford Falcon GT Coupe, and running around in a cartoon version of the Aussie outback. Fine and dandy, but...not really what Mad Max is, ya know? For better or worse (in my opinion, better) the aesthetic of the Mad Max universe is already established. Stepping away from that quite so radically really just strikes me as another instance of Hollywood putting brand above all.
 
This movie is going to be an example of how CGI is ruining movies with graphics over story content, it's happened in the other movies, and it's happened in the game industry. They figure if they make it pretty enough nobody'll notice the bad writing. This is like the new coke of Mad Max, it looks like the original but in the end it'll probably be disgrace to the name just like new coke was.
 
I don't begrudge you your enjoyment of the new aesthetic. But I'd like to make a point about bigger and bigger budgets.

One of the things that makes for some of the absolute best art is the limitations one must surmount in its creation. This, I find, is especially true with film. People have to get creative, ruthless, and very focused on telling the ESSENTIAL story they're trying to put forth when they're limited by things like budget, time, etc. Obviously, you need a big enough budget so that your film doesn't look cheap or "you can see the string" and such, and you need to be able to pay a decent editor to make it as coherent and well-paced as possible. But as budgets increase, I find that you get less bang for your buck, and more self-indulgent excess instead.


I'm not saying that this film is going to be bad because it's not what the last films were. I don't think anyone ever fully believed we'd be getting the last films again. But one of the things that makes those films work as well as they do is the fact that they couldn't indulge in a ton of big f/x, huge sets, etc. Everything seems cobbled together and very makeshift, and that fits the post-apocalyptic feel perfectly. The world isn't garishly colored, either; it's far more muted and arid-looking, or run-down and falling apart, which, again, fits the post-apocalyptic (or near-apocalyptic in the first film) setting perfectly. Thus, the limitations that the filmmakers faced actually made their story better because it made their world seem more real. The practical f/x and stunt work -- necessary because they couldn't use things like CGI -- made the stunts seem visceral and harrowing, rather than "Whatever. This is obviously green screened and the guy's on wires." When a bike gets crushed by an 18-wheeler, you really believe that the green-mohawked guy has met his end. Why? Simple. They really did crush the friggin' bike and a believable dummy. And the effective use of undercranking in those shots, while kind of an obvious camera trick, actually adds to the frenetic feel of the action sequences far more than, say, the obligatory slow-mo CGI fireballs we get today.

Anyway, the film may be decent as not-quite-a-Mad-Max film. To me, this film looks more like, I dunno, one of the recent Destiny commercials, at least based on the trailer. And yeah, that looks very, very cool. It just doesn't actually seem to have all that much to do with the original, aside from starring a guy named Max driving a black modified Ford Falcon GT Coupe, and running around in a cartoon version of the Aussie outback. Fine and dandy, but...not really what Mad Max is, ya know? For better or worse (in my opinion, better) the aesthetic of the Mad Max universe is already established. Stepping away from that quite so radically really just strikes me as another instance of Hollywood putting brand above all.
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There's a big part of me that totally agrees with you here.

But I guess I never even opened myself up for the possibility of another MM movie in the old shoestring-budget (by modern standards) form.

I think I said it earlier in this thread; the old MM movies wouldn't work the same way today. If GM had done a fourth old-style movie I don't think it would have gone over nearly as well as it would have in the 1980s. Same reason Star Wars/ANH probably wouldn't be a big hit today and yet we all want our new SW movie to remind us of it. And the fact is that artists rarely equal their best early work when they try to revisit it decades later.

From the moment that I heard cameras were going to roll on MM#4 I wrote off the idea of getting the same thing again. It was only a question of what new directions they would take it. Big & stylized is what movies are better at doing in the last 30 years. So I'm fine with this move. Let's see what an over-the-top filmmaker from 30 years ago might do with those new tools. It won't be what we want. But all things considered, it might be the best thing we could possibly get from him today.

The same feelings make me glad that Ridley Scott hasn't tried to directly revisit Alien in recent years. Prometheus was arguably disappointing. But I would rather see one of these great older artists disappointing me by going "different" than disappointing me by going "not as good as before."
 
I think if he was going to do a reboot, then he should hav e just started with the first movie instead of Road Warrior. The problem with mad max 2 is that it leaves you no place to go...which is why Thunderdome seemed to be just floundering around for the whole movie. It didn't have the epic feel of Max 2 or the dystopian horror of Max 1. If you started with a Max 1 prequel, that would give you lots of story you could do between that and Max 2. For example, How did max join the MFP in the first place? What was the lead up to the final war like?

Why was the sparsely populated Oz affected so strongly, considering it's isolation and relative self sufficiency? Was there a 'death struggle ' between Max 1 and 2 where the government tried to 'Maintain right' and failed?

Instead, we get to see a story we've already seen done as well as it could possibly be done. Max 2 is one of few movies that doesn't need to be remade, because it's as good as is can be already. Can you say Robocop?

This is a failure of storytelling.
 
Agreed. For years I have thought the most interesting part of the MM universe left to cover is what went on between #1 and #2. Specifically the first half of that change.



They were originally calling this new movie MM#1.5.

But I have a feeling that earlier MM#1.5 idea wasn't really to explore anything different from #2 so much as just to allow for a remake of it. They were probably intending nothing more novel than to butt the end of this new movie up against the beginning of #2 in the timeline. Like with the prequel to The Thing a couple years ago.

If that's all it was going to be, then yeah, I'd rather they just free themselves up from all continuity attempts and call this new one a reboot.
 
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I think you have two really interesting periods:

1. The period before MM1 and leading up to MM1. Max joins the MFP, which goes from a basic law & order police unit to essentially Judge Dredd style "I AM THE LAW" enforcers. How and why that happened, and the toll it took on the people behind the wheel of those interceptors and pursuit units would be interesting to see.

2. The period between MM1 and MM2. MM2 is SO starkly different from MM1 that, while the opening intro "makes sense," it's clearly missing a lot of stuff. Initially, I thought this film was supposed to be either post-MM3, or in this "interquel" period. Now it seems like it's basically just its own continuity, which further calls into question "What's the point other than just cashing in on the aesthetic of the film and the brand name, now with big-budget CGI?"


I never expected the film to be exactly like its 80s counterparts. I mean, for one thing, half that crap is probably illegal now, and would be way too hard to insure for. So, a lot of the practical f/x and stunt work probably wouldn't go down the same way. But the color timing thing...that's actually something ENTIRELY under the control of the filmmakers. There is simply no reason to go with "LCD in Torch Mode on the Best Buy floor" color balances, other than to basically pander to a videogame demographic. Which, I mean, that's fine, but it's also...not really Mad Max.


So much of what seems to drive Hollywood now is the desire to launch (or more accurately, relaunch) durable franchises because branding. All day, every day, BRANDING. If you don't have a brand, you don't have a movie. Doesn't matter that the story is essentially as substantive as cotton candy. Slap a brand on it, and people will pay to see it. Again and again and again. Strip it of a brand, and you either won't get greenlit, or it dies an early death at the box office.
 
Wes R said:
This is like the new coke of Mad Max, it looks like the original but in the end it'll probably be disgrace to the name just like new coke was.
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For one thing, Max Rocketansky does NOT drive an automatic, as shown in THIS movie. Silly.
 
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Truth is, almost all cars used by stunt crews in the movies are automatics. They use mostly autos even when the car is shown to be a manual onscreen.

Stunt guys only like manuals for a few certain shots. Automatics are better suited for the majority of what they do.



But IIRC, Max's original Interceptor was indeed a 4spd stick.
 
comicguy said:
Is that a fact that the Interceptor is an automatic in this? Neither trailers show the gear box in his car.
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They had the hero car at a photo op, and pix of the inside and out are on the web...and the shifter is an obvious automatic, and there's no clutch pedal.

One of the most distinctive things that was seen in Mad Max 2 was the big manual shifter, with the big red cable control for the supercharger. I dunno if they just don't think that was important, or they are going to fake it with insert shots... but in the comments it was mentioned and the reply was the new actor can't drive a stick.
 
hamsalad said:
They had the hero car at a photo op, and pix of the inside and out are on the web...and the shifter is an obvious automatic, and there's no clutch pedal.

One of the most distinctive things that was seen in Mad Max 2 was the big manual shifter, with the big red cable control for the supercharger. I dunno if they just don't think that was important, or they are going to fake it with insert shots... but in the comments it was mentioned and the reply was the new actor can't drive a stick.
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Well that sucks. I saw some pictures online when it was displayed somewhere but not of the interior. If true about Tom Hardy not being able to drive stick you would think they could just train him. It's really NOT hard to learn. But yeah, hopefully they have some edited insert shots with a stunt version or something.
 
Actors learn to play musical instruments, do their own stunts, and Hardy can't bother to learn to operate a manual transmission like half the 15 year olds in existence?! Ugh, I really hope they DO fix it with insert shots. That's just embarrassing. Why not just give him a minivan? He can have all the bad tattoos and bracelets he wants, Hardy just lost MAJOR cool points.
 
Yeah, it does seem odd he wouldn't know or be taught, but who knows. I still can't seem to find the interior shots of the Fury Road Interceptor though. Can anyone provide a link or upload here? The only pics I find online are of these.
mad-max-Interceptor.jpg
 
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