Mad Max: Fury Road

Stone Deaf 4evr

Just out of it. What a sensory overload. An amazing movie. how they created such an incredible spectacle for 150M is beyond me. It HAS to be seen in the cinema though.

rossc007

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

To be that pedantic guy: Max wasn't 'mad' as in mentally disturbed in the first film, but 'mad' as in 'furious and vengeful'

Doesn't one of the chicks say to him "I thought you weren't insane anymore" ?

Adamantium

I'm going to see this tomorrow, this is set chronologically between the first and 2nd one (Road Warrior) isn't it?

Skerries

as it turns out I met the writer about 23 years ago in Forbidden Planet Dublin when I was in secondary and I still have somewhere a signed doodle i asked him to do of Dredd when I really wanted him to do me one of CHOPPER but got confuzzled when it was my turn

Optimalprimerib

Went to see this on my own last night as I had a feeling none of my friends would enjoy it and drag down the experience. From looking at the crowd in the cinema, I was not the only one that felt that way.

I loved how the story was told visually rather than through dialog. there was very little exposition yet you knew the motives of every character. It endeared each one to you so that their outcome in the battle scenes meant more, making them a lot more tense and exciting.

Best film so far this year, without question. might even make my top ten list of all time.

Reggie.

The vehicles were unreal in it

Fluorosilisic Frank

First time I've ever walked out of a cinema mid film. Just couldn't watch any more of this ridiculous she-ite.....I dunno what the hell yer on about with this sensory overload nonsense, you could say the same about Transformers.

No story, didn't care one bit about any of the characters, and why the f@#k does charlize have an annoying American accent when everyone else had some kind of a british/aussie hybrid!! She's not even American ffs.

Don't even get me started on Gene Simmons strapped to the front truck.

80 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

e_e

What's this thing of calling films with very tight and economical narratives plotless? Did we really need scenes of characters expositing endlessly over their goals and backstories? I'd argue that the fault of most blockbusters is if anything too much plot, which funnily enough goes for the Transformers series.

Reggie.

e_e wrote: »

What's this thing of calling films with very tight and economical narratives plotless? Did we really need scenes of characters expositing endlessly over their goals and backstories? I'd argue that the fault of most blockbusters is if anything too much plot, which funnily enough goes for the Transformers series.

I liked the film as it was a straight up action road chase for the guts of 100 mins. Really only about 15 to 20 mins of conversation in it which suited me fine

jpm4

Twas very good but.....the hype built up impossible expectations for me. Was only in the last 20 mins (the race to the Citadel) that I was really blown away, and for the rest of the film I was wondering when all that was going to kick off.

One area where I think the Road Warrior was superior is the sense of menace from the protagonists - the scene where the Humungus has the prisoners crucified for example, scared the hell out of me when I was younger.

Reggie.

jpm4 wrote: »

Twas very good but.....the hype built up impossible expectations for me. Was only in the last 20 mins (the race to the Citadel) that I was really blown away, and for the rest of the film I was wondering when all that was going to kick off.

One area where I think the Road Warrior was superior is the sense of menace from the protagonists - the scene where the Humungus has the prisoners crucified for example, scared the hell out of me when I was younger.

I think most films this weather are made for the wider audience for the cash. If it was made true to the first saga then it would be classed as 18

Mickeroo

Reggie. wrote: »

I think most films this weather are made for the wider audience for the cash. If it was made true to the first saga then it would be classed as 18

The original films wouldn't be 18s by today's standards at all.

RDM_83 again

jpm4 wrote: »

Twas very good but.....the hype built up impossible expectations for me. Was only in the last 20 mins (the race to the Citadel) that I was really blown away, and for the rest of the film I was wondering when all that was going to kick off.
.

I felt the same about not being blown away by this and I had semi-deliberately been avoiding anything about the film (apart from one guardian article about positive portrayal of female characters) so I had no idea this film was quite so hyped and positively received as it is.
To be honest when this is being praised as a return to simple action films it just makes me feel old and sad, while the CGI is better done than a lot of films and some scenes blew me away particularly the storm sequence I just couldn't quite invest in it and never had the visceral risk feeling the high speed sequences of the Dark Knight for example (probably because of the constantly changing frame rates).

jpm4 wrote: »

One area where I think the Road Warrior was superior is the sense of menace from the protagonists - the scene where the Humungus has the prisoners crucified for example, scared the hell out of me when I was younger

+1
There is a lot of commentary how we are desensitized to violence and that ratings have got lower but I would argue that this is one of those films that perfectly illustrates how we don't do grim and nasty in action films.
Take Mad Max 2, towards the start of this film he sits back and watches through binoculars a couple get raped and murdered without doing anything, at the end of Mad Max 1 he

gives toecutter a saw and gives him the choice

. In this one everything is much more sanitized and upliftingly PC.

People have talked about how the bad guys are interesting but compare immortal joe with Toecutter or the Lord Humungous and they don't have any real sense of threat, if you can ignore the low budgetness of this scene just he how much more threatening he is, also for the depths/social issues thing how he responds to his henchmans (2.10) loss to me is a lot more interesting than some heavy handed guff about seeds and anti-seeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfL4xKQeSfo

tldr: its a pretty good film but its still very much a modern comic book film, there is some good ideas like the way the warboys are handled (possibly more should have been made of them), I see this film in maybe a couple of years being realistically reassessed as a 7.5 out of 10.

ps anybody get a real Wastelands (the game) feel of the film?

The guy that did the theme is Junkie XL (also known as JXL), who is also the guy that remixed that Elvis song a few years back.

Fysh

Just out of seeing it and I had an absolute blast with it; best action film I've seen in the cinema since The Raid 2, to quote someone earlier in this thread. Despite a fairly minimal narrative, the excellent visual design and inventive choreography kept me glued to the screen throughout, where films like Avengers 2 left me cold and had me checking my watch.

More films with this much energy and inventiveness, please

Thargor

Mickeroo wrote: »

The original films wouldn't be 18s by today's standards at all.

What about the rape and murder at the start of Road Warrior? That would do it I think.

MakeEmLaugh

Thargor wrote: »

What about the rape and murder at the start of Road Warrior? That would do it I think.

The Road Warrior has been re-classified from an '18' to a '15'. It's all on the British Board of Film Classification's website.

Here:

e_e

I admire too how in Fury Road they didn't even have too show anything like that happening in a really hollow "Ooh aren't these guys bad and look at the poor helpless women!" way. This film does such a great job implying what his happening through a brief setup alone. Shows how much it respects both its audience and its characters, not to mention how strongly it's directed with small images speaking volumes.

Thargor

MakeEmLaugh wrote: »

The Road Warrior has been re-classified from an '18' to a '15'. It's all on the British Board of Film Classification's website.

Here:


[IMG][/img]

Interesting thanks, strange how the censor really seems to make light of it in the comments, "Very brief sight of a bandit lying on top of her" is not how I remember it anyway! Its always been one of the more shocking scenes in my cinema memory, he also stands up and shoots her between her breasts with a crossbow afterwards. Maybe it just had more effect on me as a kid but I would have bet everything I had on that getting an 18s rating if it was released today.

Banjaxed82

Great visuals and great energy can't make up for its weak story and weaker characters.

Another in a long line of action films were the director probably spent 3 times as long storyboarding his shots than writing the script.

Nothing new here.

Fysh

Banjaxed82 wrote: »

Great visuals and great energy can't make up for its weak story and weaker characters.

Another in a long line of action films were the director probably spent 3 times as long storyboarding his shots than writing the script.

Nothing new here.

I'm not really sure what kind of info-dense story you can reasonably have expected from a new Mad Max film made by the same director as previous Mad Max films...

"Story" is a dense and loaded term to use in the way you have done above, IMO. Story is not just about a sequence of events but how that sequence of events is told.

Sure, there's not a lot of narrative flab in the tale being told here - but there's exactly as much as is needed. I don't think that convenient pauses for backstory sequences would have helped the film, for example, not least because one of the thematic points of the film is that at the start of it, the world has been reduced to extremely short-term survival as the only concern - with the past and the future both irrelevant luxuries that nobody can afford. Other themes in the film are present and alluded to in the way that characters in that setting would do realistically, rather than stopping to have a 20-minute exposition-laden chat about them.

I thought that the story and storytelling on display was great in practical terms - there's a lot of frenetic action in the film, but I never found myself confused or unable to follow events on-screen. There's also some good use of body language and non-verbal communication between characters that is clearly presented without having to be spelled out for the audience.

More importantly, in terms of mood and style I thought it quickly established a clear and distinct identity. I thought the visual design of the film and the vehicles, which amount to sets in this film, were both great; there was also some great use of sound to go along with it; on top of that there were some fantastic shots that help accentuate what's happening on screen - for example, during the chases most of the shots are close or medium shots, with the occasional longer shot to establish scale and the number of cars in pursuit. Then as they head towards the storm in the first chase, the we get a really long shot that keeps pulling back to establish the sheer scale of the storm relative to the cars, with comparative quiet to go along with it, and it's a moment of respite before the storm throws everything into even more chaos. And that's far from the only moment like that in the film - consider the haunting shot as the War Rig passes the toxic swampland fit only for the Crows, or the opening shot where Max has just nipped off in his car and we have a few seconds to wonder what he's up to before a whole load of Raiders barrel onto the screen.

All of which is to say, if you didn't like the story, that's fair enough - but I don't agree that it's a weak story

e_e

I think too many people conflate a really meaty narrative with the film just talking at you for 2 hours, with the great trap of too many movies being the film having to resort to characters in rooms standing around explaining the plot to each other. I'd argue there is so much substance to this film (just look at how milk and blood are used symbolically) while slyly never shouting it aloud in case the people in back failed to hear.

pixelburp

If there's one thing modern blockbusters are continuing to do... well, two things... is stuffing too much plot, which in turn is causing bloated running times to compensate for the narrative diarrhoea: and we're not talking smart, interwoven narratives full of layers, but needlessly labyrinthine scripts that think a sheer density of plot and stuff overlapping with other stuff is a substitute for properly drafted screenplays: Transformers, the Star Trek reboots, most YA adaptations, the Marvel films, pretty much anything written by Damon Lindelof; even the Nolan Batman films, who got by by sheer force of nature, had voluminous scripts that often made very little sense once you picked at the scabs.

Mad Max had a pleasingly simple outlook with an equally simple plot. Its world didn't need shenanigans, twists or complex backstabbings; it had a premise, characters with incentives and purpose, and a compelling setting. 90 minutes later I remembered to breath and walked out happy.

Banjaxed82

I didn't engage with the film. I watched it. It was entertaining to a point, but I didn't care about the characters so it devolved into a visual treat that wore thin the longer it went on.

When I say a lack of story and character, I'm not looking for something that has me stroking my chin, mulling over and over analysing the characters and their actions.

Is it too hard to ask for script that has some (genuine) emotional heart at its core? Something that engages you in the story, there by elevating the visuals even further than what they are.

It's obviously that nobody can accuse the direction of being lazy, but the script is lazy. My frustration lies in the obvious gulf in effort made when it comes to both aspects..

Fysh

I quite liked the way that Max is presented as a now-pathological loner, driven almost mad by solitude and guilt/grief for those who've died and who barely remembers how to talk when he first encounters other people. His grudging transition from being forced to take people with him to helping them - because for the first time in who knows how long, someone has been kind to him and not immediately tried to abuse or kill him - was an interesting hook into the character.

Thargor

Was there any explanation in the extra material that's been released for how he got another V8 Interceptor?

e_e

Banjaxed82 wrote: »

Is it too hard to ask for script that has some (genuine) emotional heart at its core?

Not at all, and it had that for me. Found the final shot genuinely moving especially in how it humbled Max as the hero. I found a lot off warmth and compassion in how the film treated people who have been granted a raw deal working towards a common goal. In a lot of blockbusters (especiall superhero) it feels like a cynical setup for more movies but here I felt the characters and where they went were really in Miller's heart.

bucketybuck

Thargor wrote: »

Was there any explanation in the extra material that's been released for how he got another V8 Interceptor?

Its not another one. Its the same one.

These films aren't historical accounts, they are wasteland myths being told by different people. They aren't supposed to be internally consistent and getting hung up on the little details is really missing the point.

If there is another Mad Max film I fully expect him to have the V8 again. And for it to be destroyed. Again.

Thargor

Ah right, did not know that.

e_e

http://screenrant.com/mad-max-fury-road-bluray-black-white-silent-version/

Black & White version on the way!