Mad Max: Fury Road
The weekend was rainy on and off, not nearly as productive as I might have intended, and ended on an annoying note with late calls from work. Whee. But Sunday I did get myself out to watch Mad Max: Fury Road. It never sounded to me like anything that great, but the reviews are very positive, so hey...
The Road Warrior is pretty classic, and follows a pattern not unlike Westerns - morally ambiguous stranger shows up and helps save tormented townsfolk. The original Mad Max always struck me as very different and less genre-defining - more a revenge-filled descent from sanity and normalcy that mirrors the slide of the world into the "post-apocalyptic" without really being there yet. Beyond Thunderdome was a little bit cutified in some ways, though came out at a time when I didn't mind that so much.
Fury Road is... strange. There are a lot of things I can point to as negatives.
The setting alone is still based on a very odd view of scarcity in which gas is precious, but gangs drive around in vehicles all day long. The vehicles are so overengineered that they may look a little bit rough, but any consideration reveals there's a lot of technical skill that goes into combining three or four car bodies in a way that actually works decently, much less through rough off-road use. There are people living in conditions they probably shouldn't be able to. And in this world of scarcity, people take time to make a massive drum and guitar truck? Wrrf. There's a lot here that's so ridiculous it's really easy to pick apart.
And that doesn't get into the finer details of Max being essentially a skittish animal for the first half of the movie and having pretty darn few lines after that. The whole movie is, essentially, a two-hour car chase - there are a few breaks in the action, but that's really all it is. There isn't much in the way of a moral or lesson I can pull from it all. There are all sorts of reasons Fury Road shouldn't be as good as it is (or even be at all).
And yet...
While I would normally expect all of that to tear at my suspension of disbelief, it didn't. I was peripherally aware of it all, but it didn't ruin the experience. I was reasonably drawn into the move and the bottom line is I enjoyed it. It takes some sort of craftsmanship and luck to take what should, by all rights, be an absolute mess and produce something that's genuinely entertaining. That leaves me a little awe-struck and unclear on what to think about the whole thing.
The Road Warrior is pretty classic, and follows a pattern not unlike Westerns - morally ambiguous stranger shows up and helps save tormented townsfolk. The original Mad Max always struck me as very different and less genre-defining - more a revenge-filled descent from sanity and normalcy that mirrors the slide of the world into the "post-apocalyptic" without really being there yet. Beyond Thunderdome was a little bit cutified in some ways, though came out at a time when I didn't mind that so much.
Fury Road is... strange. There are a lot of things I can point to as negatives.
The setting alone is still based on a very odd view of scarcity in which gas is precious, but gangs drive around in vehicles all day long. The vehicles are so overengineered that they may look a little bit rough, but any consideration reveals there's a lot of technical skill that goes into combining three or four car bodies in a way that actually works decently, much less through rough off-road use. There are people living in conditions they probably shouldn't be able to. And in this world of scarcity, people take time to make a massive drum and guitar truck? Wrrf. There's a lot here that's so ridiculous it's really easy to pick apart.
And that doesn't get into the finer details of Max being essentially a skittish animal for the first half of the movie and having pretty darn few lines after that. The whole movie is, essentially, a two-hour car chase - there are a few breaks in the action, but that's really all it is. There isn't much in the way of a moral or lesson I can pull from it all. There are all sorts of reasons Fury Road shouldn't be as good as it is (or even be at all).
And yet...
While I would normally expect all of that to tear at my suspension of disbelief, it didn't. I was peripherally aware of it all, but it didn't ruin the experience. I was reasonably drawn into the move and the bottom line is I enjoyed it. It takes some sort of craftsmanship and luck to take what should, by all rights, be an absolute mess and produce something that's genuinely entertaining. That leaves me a little awe-struck and unclear on what to think about the whole thing.
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