Mad Max: Fury Road

With some directors saying they can finally make the movie they wanted to thanks to today's technology it makes me wonder if they even know why their earlier films were such a success.

Bryancd said:
Come on guys, Thunderdome was a lot of fun when we all saw it on the 80's, I liked it.
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Thunderdome has a lot of good moments it's just very uneven and those damn kids just won't shut the hell up.:(
 
cayman shen said:
I don't find Thunderdome utterly without merit, but following the other two...it just isn't even in the same league. If I'm in a Max mood, I'll still watch it, and I definitely enjoyed it as a kid. But I still think it's generally pretty bad. I think if it didn't have to compare with the first two, I'd be much more forgiving of its quirks.
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That's about where I come out on it. It's not so much that it's intrinsically bad, but that it suffers when compared to the other two, and doesn't have the "tone" of a sequel to those films. That's also not to say that the first two films have an identical tone to them, either. They clearly don't. But the two tones they strike (one of a slow-burning revenge thriller, and the other as a full-speed-ahead action flick) aren't as incongruous as the more comedic, kid-friendly tone of Thunderdome.


Regardless, I think it's time we all just get beyond Thunderdome.





:D
 
Laspector said:
What year did Thunderdome come out? Wasn't it in that era where EVERY movie had to have kids in it?
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1985.

And it wasn't that EVERY movie had kids in it, but you had other action films like Commando that featured a kid prominently, and you had The Goonies, and some other stuff.
 
cayman shen said:
Temple of Doom...which I loved except the whole "save the children" dreck. It's still my fave Indy though :D
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TOD is '84, though. It was certainly a theme in the early 80s to "save the children" but I think it may not have been as widespread as you might think. Regardless, the kid aspect of Thunderdome weakens it. The rest of it is decent enough, aside from a bit too much slapstick humor with Ironbar.
 
I'm not sure where you guys get the opinion that Thunderdome didn't fit with the rest of the series.

The series progressed steadily from civilization coming apart, to a bloody mess, to civilization starting to reform. IMO the only incongruous thing is that Max wasn't getting much older. Everything else about the storyline suggests that MM#1 and #3 are taking place generations apart. IMO if any of the original movies is an outlier then it's #1.



IMO this is like Indy#4 - we may not like where they went with it, but I'm not sure there was any better possible direction for the veteran original filmmakers to go with it. Going back to cheap & quick & dirty isn't very realistic. Artists develop over time and they don't go backward very well.

The old "look" of MM will not impress kids today. They will just think it's cheap without thinking it's creative. They've grown up with MM ripoffs for decades and the average TV series reflects more expense than the early MM movies today.

Kids today can turn on Youtube and watch clips of low-budget stuntmen taking wild risks & breaking vehicles all day long for free. And if the movie stunts did stuff more impressively risky then the audience will just assume it's CGI tricks, whether it really is or not. Gritty low-budget post-apocalyptic stunt shows won't sell in 2015, even when it's George Miller doing it. The world has changed. The original MM movies helped change it.


So . . . if they can't go small & cheap this time . . . and they don't want to go medium/low again (which would please absolutely nobody these days if they did it, not even the old MM fans) . . . then what other direction does that leave? Going huge.
 
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batguy said:
I'm not sure where you guys get the opinion that Thunderdome didn't fit with the rest of the series.

The series progressed steadily from civilization coming apart, to a bloody mess, to civilization starting to reform. IMO the only incongruous thing is that Max wasn't getting much older. Everything else about the storyline suggests that MM#1 and #3 are taking place generations apart. IMO if any of the original movies is an outlier then it's #1.



IMO this is like Indy#4 - we may not like where they went with it, but I'm not sure there was any better possible direction for the veteran original filmmakers to go with it. Going back to cheap & quick & dirty isn't very realistic. Artists develop over time and they don't go backward very well.

The old "look" of MM will not impress kids today. They will just think it's cheap without thinking it's creative. They've grown up with MM ripoffs for decades and the average TV series reflects more expense than the early MM movies today.

Kids today can turn on Youtube and watch clips of low-budget stuntmen taking wild risks & breaking vehicles all day long for free. And if the movie stunts did stuff more impressively risky then the audience will just assume it's CGI tricks, whether it really is or not. Gritty low-budget post-apocalyptic stunt shows won't sell in 2015, even when it's George Miller doing it. The world has changed. The original MM movies helped change it.


So . . . if they can't go small & cheap this time . . . and they don't want to go medium/low again (which would please absolutely nobody these days if they did it, not even the old MM fans) . . . then what other direction does that leave? Going huge.
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I teach film class to high schoolers, and I can tell you that kids today absolutely will enjoy a good story if you can get their butts to sit down for ten minutes to get into it. I've had kids rave about Psycho, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Seven Samurai (A 3.5 hour black and white subtitled movie!), The Graduate, Robocop...looking old or outdated effects are in no way an impediment to young people enjoying a quality movie if you as a parent or mentor encourage them to watch. I mean, assuming they're not dumb or shallow (and not all kids are despite what many grumpy adults believe!). Mad Max is well done, and I know gobs of young people who would eat it up.
 
I teach film class to high schoolers, and I can tell you that kids today absolutely will enjoy a good story if you can get their butts to sit down for ten minutes to get into it. I've had kids rave about Psycho, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Seven Samurai (A 3.5 hour black and white subtitled movie!), The Graduate, Robocop...looking old or outdated effects are in no way an impediment to young people enjoying a quality movie if you as a parent or mentor encourage them to watch. I mean, assuming they're not dumb or shallow (and not all kids are despite what many grumpy adults believe!). Mad Max is well done, and I know gobs of young people who would eat it up.
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I agree, a number of 15-18yo kids would eat up MM#1 or #2 if given a setup to watch it.

But I don't think that translates to big numbers of 13yo kids choosing to buy the tickets to a new old-style MM movie at the theater.

Just the knowledge that a movie was made decades ago makes people forgive a cheaper-looking production. And they forgive things being slower-paced. Older age also lends the stunts a degree of credibility that (even the same) stunts won't get now.
 
batguy said:
Older age also lends the stunts a degree of credibility that (even the same) stunts won't get now.
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In the case of MM, I think the old stunts had MORE credibility though, because of the flagrant disregard for performers' safety :lol There's probably some law now against abusing stuntmen for our excitement the way Miller used to...
 
I think RW and Thunderdome at least aesthetically look like the same universe. MM is the one that seems out of place even though it precedes them. The world seems a bit too together still to end up at RW.
 
To be fair, the budget for RW must have been a packet of rollo's and two days lunch money. And that's an Aussie lunch too...:lol
 
While I really don't like Thunderdome, I will have to agree it is the first one that is the one that seems out of place as far as visually. It seems like there really needs to be a movie in between MM and RW. I know the prologue tells you what happened but it seems like a bit of a stretch. I mean why exactly did he go out into the wasteland? His wife was alive at the end of MM. I guess we can assume she died, so does he go out on the road and then the world goes blooey or did the war happen and then he became the lone guy? There could be a good story there. Maybe that's the movie they ought to make.
 
I can't say I like the first one and while I like Thunderdome those damned kids annoy the hell out of me. Couldn't have been a village of people slightly older and less annoying with a backstory that made more sense?
 
The Road Warrior worked as a complete stand alone film and NOT just a sequel. Its the rare instance where a "sequel" toppled the original.

Thunderdome was 80's fluff pure and simple. Max had wing tip boots and a mullet!

Fury Road again plays with Max and the surroundings. Things are more tactical and modern if that makes any sense. That is unfortunate as its also removing the films prior look and feel by updating it. If were talking a sense of every prior MM film being different then this in theory will fit in. I just cant get over it not being a MM film.
 
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