Indeed in the second movie they turned Max into the archtype mythological hero and even in this movie that remains intact.
Mad Max: Fury Road
- Thread starter Professor Zoom
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Indeed in the second movie they turned Max into the archtype mythological hero and even in this movie that remains intact.
Mad Max: Fury Road
My Grade: .... Er, indeterminate. .... C+? B-?
Usually I grade I on an odd scale. For me giving a movie a grade in the C's is usually pretty damming and has to be fairly poor to get there. It takes quite a bit to knock me down to a C. But, here, my grading scale doesn't quite "work." Because the B's don't quite fit but my C's seem too harsh. So I may land on a genuine C+ in how it's usually thought of when it comes to letter grades.
I don't mean to say this is an "average" movie or even a "bad" one, I really enjoyed it! But at the same time I think the movie is being raved about a bit too much and, really, I don't quite get the hype and excitement around it.
But I've not seen the original Mad Max movie since around after high-school and the sequels I'm not sure I could put a time-frame on. Probably only saw Thunderdome once when it first came out on tape and the family rented it.
The movie takes place sometime in the... past's future. Where society has collapsed into something of a social apocalypse and everyone seems to have gone completely insane. Even though most of the middle-aged and older adults in the movie should remember when there was some semblance of society to live in since that's what society was like in the first Mad Max movie. Society wasn't completely gone but it was certainly hanging on a thread.
A road warrior -Max- is captured and taken to enclave ruled by mad-man who holds onto and rules his people with an iron fist. Max is captured and is determined to have Type-O blood and is used as a live blood-transfusion bag for a deathly ill man, who's part of a corp of road warriors who go out on runs for this f'd-up society. A woman is sent out with a convoy on a supply run to a nearby city when she diverts off course, we find out she's carrying the "wives" of the compound's ruler who're beautiful women, one of whom is pregnant. Another convoy is sent out to recover the tanker and wives, Max along serving his role, and he manages to secure his escape and get involved with this group of people to help them escape the mad-man after them.
And, well a lot of action scenes happen along the way.
To the movie's credit the action sequences are very well done, unique, cool-looking and really are a spectacle. But I can't say it makes a whole lot of sense. It's all just nonsense. We're not given a whole lot of reasons to care about the characters or their goals they're all pretty much MacGuffins to allow for an excuse for there to be over-the-top action scenes.
A lot these days is said about extended action sequences in movies being there to just pound the audience in the head with nonsense but not giving them reason to care. Like in the Transformer movies. Then we got the Marvel movies where there's characters, plot and such and then extended action sequences where there's a bit more to care about since we've got a story.
But, somehow, here it manages to be both. There's really no reason to care about these characters or what they're doing. We're not given much of a reason to care or really know who these people are. A touch, perhaps, but not a whole lot. So on that front we've got a Transformers-like situation. The characters aren't there for any reason other than to somehow move the "plot" towards an action piece.
But the action pieces aren't knocking you over the head and pounding on your head like the Transformer movies.
But, again, I'm not sure we're given a whole lot of a reason to care.
Tom Hardy does a good job playing Tom Cruise, Charlize Theron does a good job in her role, actually gets a bigger role and says many more lines than Max does.
The actions scenes are very unique with interesting visuals, like vehicles with long poles on them with people counterweighted by engine-blocks swinging back-and-forth like metronomes to swing over cars to drop bombs into vehicle cabs.
But, again, I'm not sure I've a whole lot of reason to want to see this movie again. Again, great visuals, but there's not a whole lot of "story" to get behind here to really care about what's going on.
Again, great visuals in the movie but, I really think there should be more there in order for a movie to be genre-redefining. And if this movie is one of those -as some say- that'll change cinema, I dunno. Maybe I won't be seeing many movies anymore in the near future?
I need more than fantastic visuals like this movie has, I need some story and characters to care about. Here? I didn't quite get that. There was no reason to care for what was going on here it was just, "when's the next action scenes?!" which is really a lot more problems than it is pluses.
Again, it was good, but for me it just wasn't something that utterly blew me away.
My Grade: .... Er, indeterminate. .... C+? B-?
Usually I grade I on an odd scale. For me giving a movie a grade in the C's is usually pretty damming and has to be fairly poor to get there. It takes quite a bit to knock me down to a C. But, here, my grading scale doesn't quite "work." Because the B's don't quite fit but my C's seem too harsh. So I may land on a genuine C+ in how it's usually thought of when it comes to letter grades.
I don't mean to say this is an "average" movie or even a "bad" one, I really enjoyed it! But at the same time I think the movie is being raved about a bit too much and, really, I don't quite get the hype and excitement around it.
But I've not seen the original Mad Max movie since around after high-school and the sequels I'm not sure I could put a time-frame on. Probably only saw Thunderdome once when it first came out on tape and the family rented it.
The movie takes place sometime in the... past's future. Where society has collapsed into something of a social apocalypse and everyone seems to have gone completely insane. Even though most of the middle-aged and older adults in the movie should remember when there was some semblance of society to live in since that's what society was like in the first Mad Max movie. Society wasn't completely gone but it was certainly hanging on a thread.
A road warrior -Max- is captured and taken to enclave ruled by mad-man who holds onto and rules his people with an iron fist. Max is captured and is determined to have Type-O blood and is used as a live blood-transfusion bag for a deathly ill man, who's part of a corp of road warriors who go out on runs for this f'd-up society. A woman is sent out with a convoy on a supply run to a nearby city when she diverts off course, we find out she's carrying the "wives" of the compound's ruler who're beautiful women, one of whom is pregnant. Another convoy is sent out to recover the tanker and wives, Max along serving his role, and he manages to secure his escape and get involved with this group of people to help them escape the mad-man after them.
And, well a lot of action scenes happen along the way.
To the movie's credit the action sequences are very well done, unique, cool-looking and really are a spectacle. But I can't say it makes a whole lot of sense. It's all just nonsense. We're not given a whole lot of reasons to care about the characters or their goals they're all pretty much MacGuffins to allow for an excuse for there to be over-the-top action scenes.
A lot these days is said about extended action sequences in movies being there to just pound the audience in the head with nonsense but not giving them reason to care. Like in the Transformer movies. Then we got the Marvel movies where there's characters, plot and such and then extended action sequences where there's a bit more to care about since we've got a story.
But, somehow, here it manages to be both. There's really no reason to care about these characters or what they're doing. We're not given much of a reason to care or really know who these people are. A touch, perhaps, but not a whole lot. So on that front we've got a Transformers-like situation. The characters aren't there for any reason other than to somehow move the "plot" towards an action piece.
But the action pieces aren't knocking you over the head and pounding on your head like the Transformer movies.
But, again, I'm not sure we're given a whole lot of a reason to care.
Tom Hardy does a good job playing Tom Cruise, Charlize Theron does a good job in her role, actually gets a bigger role and says many more lines than Max does.
The actions scenes are very unique with interesting visuals, like vehicles with long poles on them with people counterweighted by engine-blocks swinging back-and-forth like metronomes to swing over cars to drop bombs into vehicle cabs.
But, again, I'm not sure I've a whole lot of reason to want to see this movie again. Again, great visuals, but there's not a whole lot of "story" to get behind here to really care about what's going on.
Again, great visuals in the movie but, I really think there should be more there in order for a movie to be genre-redefining. And if this movie is one of those -as some say- that'll change cinema, I dunno. Maybe I won't be seeing many movies anymore in the near future?
I need more than fantastic visuals like this movie has, I need some story and characters to care about. Here? I didn't quite get that. There was no reason to care for what was going on here it was just, "when's the next action scenes?!" which is really a lot more problems than it is pluses.
Again, it was good, but for me it just wasn't something that utterly blew me away.
This is a new continuity. You can't really quote from the original series when discussing this film.
And also, just wow to your review. I feel like you and I watched completely different movies. You keep talking about how their was no reason to care about the characters...I thought they were developed well enough. Yes, the movie doesn't beat you over the head with exposition of motivations...it shows you instead. Something a lot of movies haven't done in a long time.
As for your complaints about Max, I'll keep saying what I've been saying, he's the classic Western character. Loner who rides into town (this time kidnapped) and gets involved with the protagonists, and then rides off after the day is saved. This is exactly who I feel Max should be, and to make a movie that revolves around him, or gives him pages of dialogue would feel a bit disingenuous to the character. After all, Gibson only had 14 lines of dialogue in 'Mad Max 2.'
I enjoyed the movie a lot more than you, but I have to agree the lack of much of a story and a reason to really care (beyond just wanting to see Max and Furiosa kick a bunch of ass) keeps this from being some great, genre-redefining masterpiece in my mind.
Ultimately, like the recent Dredd or John Wick, it's a really cool action movie that I'll want to rewatch now and then... but it's not much more than that. It's no new Star Wars or Robocop or Raiders.
Help me out here. The societies that Max encounters in his travels could not have arisen overnight. Their infrastructures and belief systems (though primitive) are massive. And only the very old seem to remember the past world at all.
Yet Max was a police officer before the world went to shit, and he doesn't appear to be older than 40. Thoughts?
Yet Max was a police officer before the world went to shit, and he doesn't appear to be older than 40. Thoughts?
Well, the world wasn't exactly all sunshine and roses in the first movie. Civilization still existed, sure, but things were teetering on the edge of collapse. But it does seem like once the collapse fully happened things went to hell pretty damn quick. The insanity we see in this movie I think would take the better part of a century to occur, at least a couple generations. Virtually everyone alive who isn't a child should remember society, order, and structure in some form.
As silly and over-the-top as it was the drummers and rock-guy on one of the vehicles can *almost* make sense if you think of them as serving the role of a drummer boy in Civil War-era armies.
It's too much to say I didn't enjoy the movie, I had a blast! It did have some great visuals and action scenes. All very well done, the sequence in the dust-storm, all of the chases. Looked very cool and very well done.
The only problem is, I'm not given much of a reason to carry about anyone or their goals, nor am I entirely even a hint of why I *should* care beyond, "women in sexual slavery is bad." Which, granted, is a good start but if I'm not given enough with these characters there's still not a lot for me to go on on caring and getting emotionally invested in the characters.
I need a little more from a movie than cool action sequences. It's enough to keep me entertained for 2-hours and this movie did it better than Transformers on that front (a movie franchise that is also basically an excuse to have absurd action scenes. But there we're given characters. Characters we don't care about because we hate them, but they're characters with a clear goal even if it's a MacGuffin.)
Fun movie, enjoyed it and not sorry I saw it but I've little reason to want to see it again. I need more than 2-hours if great visuals.
Well, this kind of thing is pretty common in these kinds of stories. Revolution had an entirely different North America less than 20 years after it's apocalypse. Things tend to change pretty drastically in a short time in these kinds of stories.
I have to completely disagree with you here. I actually thought they did a really good job establishing the characters, and keeping things understandable. It might not be the deepest story ever, but it was there. This is the kind of movie where you pretty much just have to accept what you're seeing and go with it.
I really think this is the kind of movie, where it's not the specific story being told here that is what's really important. It's the visuals and the world itself that make the movie so special.
You saw a different movie then. Because the movie I had had a great plot that defined all the characters and made you care about them.
You should wait for the next Transformers film, it might be more your speed.
Yeah, the Transformer movies are complete garbage.
And, I don't see how the characters in this movie were well defined and made you care about them.
George Miller about the comics
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/...-fury-road-comics-exclusive-preview/27518457/
And preview for Immortal Joe & Nux 1
https://www.scribd.com/doc/265744746/Mad-Max-Fury-Road-Exclusive-Preview
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/...-fury-road-comics-exclusive-preview/27518457/
And preview for Immortal Joe & Nux 1
https://www.scribd.com/doc/265744746/Mad-Max-Fury-Road-Exclusive-Preview
So escaping from a warlord, being recaptured by the warlord, escaping the warlord again, fighting a one-armed Amazon and pasty-faced punk at the same time, taking hostages, teaming with the hostages you just too, having shootouts and car chases, and freeing hundreds of people from the aforementioned warlord isn't enough for you?
Tough crowd.
Well yeah he was involved in a lot of the action... but I still can't say it really felt to me like his movie. It felt more like a Furiosa movie and he was just some damaged, half-crazy guy who was helping her out.
I don't need things spelled out for me but it would be nice to be given a reason to care beyond characters growling lines at one another for two minutes between protracted action scenes.
If you got fulfilled by the characters and "story" in this movie, good for you. I didn't get it because I need more of a reason to care about a character beyond "this woman is really angry because she's not home." Sorry, for me the drama wasn't there for me to be invested in the character enough to go-for her Platoon-style knee-drop when realizing her home is gone.
It's the basest and thinest of ideas, "she misses home" and that's about all an action movie really needs when it comes to character motivations and background. Doesn't mean I have to care about her because she's got angst-filled eyes for the whole movie.
And the villain wants his wives back because.... "He's evil!"
Again, don't need anything deep here in this type of movie but I need something more than what's presented. Look at the movie "Die Hard," it doesn't "spell it out" for you or anything like that but it does establish the strained marriage between John and Holly and why it's that way, and the kind of person John is (career-devoted cop) and Holly is (career-driven business woman) before we get to the action where John fights to save his wife. We're even given a level of depth to Hans Greuber beyond "he's evil and wants money." Not so much in background and such but more depth than "evil."
It's possible to have a good action movie AND to have there be, I dunno, a story or for a character to have more than about as much dialogue as the PC in "Grand Theft Auto III."
The action in this movie is very, very good. I enjoyed the movie and had fun in it. I just wasn't given much of a reason to care about the characters, their goals, or what they were going through. That is my opinion. If you want to insult me, my taste in movies, my ability to feel for characters without "having things spelled out for me" knock yourself out.
But I didn't care about these characters or what they were going through and, really, the over-the-top action sequences quite didn't buy the movie the right kind-of-leeway to buy them that kind of hand-waving like the original does. I dunno, maybe it's just because movies are generally different these days and I've gotten used to that. But I can still watch older movies with thin character motivations and care so, it seems, here something wasn't done right because I didn't give a shit about these characters or what they were doing.
I dunno, maybe I missed something or a reason to care or some character trait to latch onto with these people other than "angry, angst, brooding, grunting." Whatever was there, apparently didn't work for me. It worked for you. Congratulations.
Want to insult my taste in movies and need for things to be spelled out to me some more?
Without Max she'd never have made it, Max was ot only able to inspire Furiosa but her also gave her a home now. You should check out The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome.
I'd take one "Mad Max Fury Road" over 100 cookie-cutter, lame Marvel/comic book, Transformer, or Peter Jackson swords and wizards movies. Finally, we get something different looking, written and paced in a unique way with limited CGI crap and limited audience hand-holding exposition.
It's a total immersive adventure spectacle. Far better than anything in the same genre that has come out the last 15 years. That's why it's getting the attention it is.
It's a total immersive adventure spectacle. Far better than anything in the same genre that has come out the last 15 years. That's why it's getting the attention it is.
I thought the movie did a good job of giving us what we needed. There really is a lot of depth to the movie, but it's just not given through dialogue.
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