Mad Max: Fury Road was a complex movie. Or at least it stirred a lot of complex thoughts in me. I’d heard a lot about how it was ‘really feminist’, and/or ‘much more feminist than the original’. I was curious to see how this panned out, as I’d never seen the original (aside from scattered memories of desert movie scenes when I was very young, and the Thunderdome at Burning Man). This will be a number of scattered thoughts.

I’d recently watched the Fallout4 trailer, which had stirred some of the sadness of the post-apocalyptic situation, and I think that carried over into watching this movie. So much of it felt like needless fighting and grandstanding, when they really should have been working together (but I guess that was the point, that when you have a warlord culture, it all becomes about penis size, instead of actually solving problems).

In a literal and figurative sense, it felt somewhat like watching a car wreck. You know that there will be at least some small part of hope at the end, but you know that there will be a lot of death on the way, of people on the side of helping others dying to try to purge some of the madness. (The Postman (the novel) had some of this.)

That being said, the film was quite engaging, and I actually enjoyed it a lot. (It made me think, so it was def. worth it from that perspective. 🙂 )

It even passed the Bechdel test, even with the small amount of talking in the movie. I found the conversation about, and then the passing of the seeds very touching, but then again, I might be a druid. I also liked how the main character was a badass woman who was 10x as badass with her artificial limb.

It’s been said about the movie that it’s really about women finding their own way, and carving out what they actually want in a mad/male dominated world. What would the movie have been like without Max? If Furiosa had solved it on her own, or perhaps with one of her companions finding more of her voice along the way. But then it wouldn’t have been a Mad Max movie, and might have been much more difficult to sell…

Anyways, protagonists. The movie was billed as being about Max, even named after him, but he was really an active character for very few points in the movie. The protagonist was clearly Furiosa, who had a very specific thing she wanted. Oddly, both Furiosa and Max were antiheroes, with her discovering more bravery and him discovering his selflessness by the end of the movie.

Also, his madness was really only an issue at the beginning, but perhaps that’s because he’d gotten back on track.

It says something about Hollywood that they didn’t think that Charlize Theron could carry her own movie (even though she did), and only half/kinda named the movie after her character, and gave her second billing.

Thinking about this some more, there is actually a bunch of hope at the end of the movie, with some (more) sensible people now in charge of the main resources

Other things:
– I liked how even when everything was going sideways, with all the cars mired in well, the mire, the drummers were still going. This shows a dedication to music that is important to a culture. 😀 Also, the fire-shooting guitar rig was totally in canon, as that’s what you’d expect from a showboating warlord not so sure of himself.
– There were a lot of nice tying things together, such as the gift of blood transfusion after being a ‘blood bag’ for the first third of the film
– Speaking of that, I found the first third of the film difficult to watch, with Max being a passive character, then being not sympathetic at all.
– I found it sad how much science had decayed in the film, but perhaps there was a kept caste of scientists to keep the green and windmills going…
– Susana Polo at Polygon said that the avoidance of gore and objectification made for a stronger movie, the former because it allowed for more audience reaction when it dd happen, the latter because it made for a stronger movie, where the female characters could actually be conscious and active actors.

Some inconsistencies:
– How did society decay that fast, so that Max who was a cop before the apocalypse would be 40 or less? There would have been barely enough time to grow a generation up in the new religion that had formed.
– Is there anywhere in the world that you can drive for 160 days and not hit ocean? Even going from Kamchatka to Lisbon is only 9427km, which is a leisurely pace of <60km/day. Those must be some slow motorbikes. (Also, there's no way you could carry enough to sustain you for 160 days on a motorbike.) You could almost walk across Australia in 160 days. At 5 hours/day at 5km/hour, you could do the 4000km in 160 days. Maybe they meant 16 days? - How did no one ever run out of gas in that movie? - If the huddled masses are fighting over that much water, how often must it be released? (Also, what a waste, to throw it down into the dirt, rather than handing it out...Perhaps the warlord had just come into his power?) - How did they do the test for blood type? (Thinking about it, it's a pretty simple coagulation test.) - How would a warlord not leave any defenses? Relying on fear that much?

I had always seen Clue (1985) as Tim Curry’s ‘other movie’. That it really showcased him doing what he did best, which was being totally outlandish, and truly owning a part with incredible energy. Sadly, even he could not save the movie.

The movie starts slow, with uncomfortable moments between him and Col. Mustard, and doesn’t really get going until about two thirds of the way through, when Curry zanies it up.

It feels like the movie never really knew what it wanted to be…It wasn’t really a ‘Plot’, even with the third ending, with Wadsworth as Mr Boddy being the protagonist. Half of the jokes were jokes were British wordplay, the other half were dog poop and boob jokes. Some reviews have commented that the film was saved by its excellent actors. Their reaction shots to each other, in caricature (rather than in character) showed a great attention to detail on their part, or perhaps the director’s.

However, somehow, the play never really fit together. It felt like there was too much explanation of things happening, rather than watching the things happening, or having events lead up to them, like there were a bunch of scenes which didn’t really interact much. It was missing useful establishing shots, or something that would allow the audience to construct a mental image of what was going on overall.

Clue did innovate with the three endings, and it might have been the first movie based on a boardgame.

(Another reviewer mentioned that it felt much more like a play, with the overacting for the back of the auditorium one would expect from that.)

But fundamentally, we are never given a reason to care about the actors, or anything in the movie. Also, it has a problem many works of fiction have, in that they never use slang to talk about “nuclear physics”, or other long phrases that people probably talk about a lot.

All of this is in stark contrast to Ghostbusters (1984), another film I remembered with great fondness from my childhood. Bill Murray stole the show in this one, with his terrific improv. There also was a much better sense of pacing throughout, and the director knew much better what to put in and what to leave out. I just had a lot of heart, whether from Dan Akroyd’s Stay Puft speech to Harold Ramis’ “terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought”.

What is my takeaway? I had such fond memories of each, but I left Clue with disappointment at what it could have been, and Ghostbusters with a sense of satisfaction that it was all it could have been at the time.

So, they mentioned that they removed most of the battle droid back and forth in the phantom edits…I thought that would have missed it, but if I hadn’t known it was gone, I wouldn’t have noticed.

But on to the second (edited) episode…

For my part, I enjoyed it. I remember, the first time I saw it, the ‘adolescents who are essentialy bundles of broken glass inside’ got a little much, but with the edits removing most of that, the parts that remained seemed to be well acted and genuine. Anakin is pretty creepy, but most 18 year olds who’ve been celibate for the past 10 years would be, too. (And the creepiness is well acted, too.)

S said she had issues with the CG, especially R2D2 (who is really easy to do as a robot, or with an actor). The factory scene (what remained of it) was also superfluous. (And they edited out C-3PO’s ‘getting grafted onto a droid’ moment, which considering I didn’t really notice it was gone, was apparently a good thing.)

But all of these were really minor things for me. What really bothered me were two things: Appalling Jedi tactics and CG of mammals.

Maybe the writer was trying to make a point about the decay of Jedi society, or their self-perceived invincibility, but seriously? Taking all of the Jedi you have and leading them into a trap where two thirds of them could die? You’d think they would have found a way to have delayed the ‘execution’ for a few minutes while they waited for Yoda to get there with his *army*.

Mace Windu, you’re kind of an arrogant SOB who just gets people killed. Like how you think someone would have gone and checked on Shmi at some point during the 10 years. Maybe if Jedi are really that uncaring and not noticing the small things, perhaps it was time for someone to bring some ‘balance’.

Also, if Yoda has the power to lift a *huge* stone column, to save Anakin and Obi-Wan, you’d think that he could also just push it in the opposite direction, into Dooku’s ship. Also, even if he couldn’t have done that, you’d think he could do *something*, if only with the *army* that they had on the planet to at least try to stop a lord of the Sith from escaping.

Which brings me to the CG of mammals. Interestingly, for me, the CG in the film was reasonable, most of the time. The robots acted robotically, the parts of the factory looked like a movie impression of factory parts, even R2’s flying scene wasn’t reprehensible.

But all of the little critters, both of the mammalian monsters in the arena were horrid. That’s no castigation of the CG experts…They were doing the best they could. But there’s something about gravity, or anatomy (I’m not sure what) that just still seems unreachable with CG. Interestingly, the crab/alien-like creature was totally believable. Maybe because it only had hinges and no visible musculature, so the limitations of CG were not limitations…

It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings, where they had a bunch of CG, but they used (as I remember) in places where you wouldn’t notice it (as much) when it become dated later.

But overall, I enjoyed the film, plot holes aside. As edited, 3 stars.

This movie just has so much heart. So much. The Wikipedia page describes it as placing (top 100) in multiple categories, for love story, fantasy, etc…

But it’s difficult to pin down exactly why it’s such a cult classic. Maybe it’s a good director. There certainly aren’t any bad actors in the film. Cary Elwys is amazing, the bromance between Inigo and Fezzig is touching, and the villains are sublime.

One thing which might not be mentioned as much is how good the physical acting is in the film. Cary Elwys when he’s recovering from ‘only mostly dead’ is classic, never dropping out of character for even a second.

It’s just that you can see how much fun the actors had making the film. Their joy comes out of the screen.

The swordfight between Elwys and Patinkin was awesome, in how it portrayed their sheer joy at participating.

There are so many other things about the movie. Possibly the one unnecessary part was the ‘deadly fire swamp’, which dragged on too long, and hasn’t aged quite as well as the rest of the movie.

But there were also so many turns of phrase, little things like “get used to disappointment”,and ‘eel-infested waters’ which don’t even make the top 20 quotes from the movie, but ended up in the vernacular.

Fundamentally, I think its because the movie was just eminently quotable.

Overall, 4.5-5 stars, a true classic, 28 years later.

“We’ll never survive!”
“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”