Mad Max: Fury Road (15.)
Directed by George Miller.
Starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz and Riley Keogh. 120 mins.
It is not my duty to drum up business for the Brothers Warners, but if you could all refrain from downloading but instead go out and buy or rent a copy of the summer's most exhilarating movie, I would be most awfully grateful. With a final take at the global box office of $371 million, Fury Road is currently sitting in the shunned row of box office wallflowers, alongside under appreciated gems like Ant-Man and Edge of Tomorrow. It even made less than Terminator Geneysis; how's that for ignominy? So if you want to see another Max film, or another big budget George Miller film it may be time to start putting hands in pockets.
A new Mad Max film, three decades on, without Mel but with Miller, always seemed like the year's most intriguing but perilous project. Miller going back after years making drama and kids films: would it be like George Lucas returning to make the prequels? Miller’s film is as Mad and as Max as you could possibly want it to be. The film opens with the revving of engines and it never lets up.
In the early eighties, Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior in the US), along with Spielberg's Raiders of The Lost Ark, invented the modern action movie as we know it. Prior to those two, we had absolutely no idea films were allowed to be that exciting. They were fast and furious like the show reel of movie good bits that spun through our heads, but also smarter and wittier than we could imagine.
Even so Miller returning to his first born was very far from a sure thing. The third installment Beyond Thunderdome was slack and since then he hasn't touched action cinema, making dramas The Witches Of Eastwick and Lorenzo's Oil, and children's films Happy Feet and the Babe sequel. The obvious comparison was George Lucas returning to make the prequels.
Fury Road doesn’t merely suggest that he hasn’t lost its touch, it’s an object lesson to the rest of Hollywood about how these things should be done. The spur for the movie is simple: make a whole film like the final chase sequence in Mad Max 2 but do it using all the modern technology. And yes, there is plenty of CGI in Fury Road but there are also plenty of real stunts. The blending of the two isn't always seamless, but it never holds it back. Most CGI action sequences are a series of pretty pictures for you to sit and admire; the sequences in Fury Road will have you bouncing in your seat with excitement. You couldn’t be more involved in the action if you had money on it.
The technological advances have enabled him to let his imagination run wild and it has run very wild. Fury Road is like Circle Du Soleil performing their interpretation of The Hills Have Eyes, on wheels We have gained very little practical benefit from the second Gulf War – the mother of all overblown ill advised sequels that failed to recapture what it was people liked in the original – but it feels like it provided the inspiration for Miller to go to the effort to resurrect Max. It isn't just the shots of oil tankers careering through barren desert terrain, or the suicidal warriors who believe that martyrdom beckons, it's more the nihilistic sense that the way the world is now everything is permissible, nothing is too extreme. Exploitation is the big theme here – in this post apocalyptic future everything has a price and everyone is property. Max starts out as human blood bag.
Hardy in the lead: he is definitely mad enough, but would he be Max enough? Hardy's actually a rather underwhelming Max, - a grunting, uncharismatic brute, too much Shell Of A and not enough Man. He's has some nice moments though - the awkward thumbs up he gives to another character after she'd narrowly avoided death. Mostly though I think he hasn't really got the character or quite grasped what it means to be a leading man. So I'm going to come out and say it – it would've been an even better film with Mel Gibson in the lead, and probably not much more of a financial disappointment
Mad Max: Fury Road (15.)
Directed by George Miller.
Starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz and Riley Keogh. 120 mins.
It is not my duty to drum up business for the Brothers Warners, but if you could all refrain from downloading but instead go out and buy or rent a copy of the summer's most exhilarating movie, I would be most awfully grateful. With a final take at the global box office of $371 million, Fury Road is currently sitting in the shunned row of box office wallflowers, alongside under appreciated gems like Ant-Man and Edge of Tomorrow. It even made less than Terminator Geneysis; how's that for ignominy? So if you want to see another Max film, or another big budget George Miller film it may be time to start putting hands in pockets.
A new Mad Max film, three decades on, without Mel but with Miller, always seemed like the year's most intriguing but perilous project. Miller going back after years making drama and kids films: would it be like George Lucas returning to make the prequels? Miller’s film is as Mad and as Max as you could possibly want it to be. The film opens with the revving of engines and it never lets up.
In the early eighties, Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior in the US), along with Spielberg's Raiders of The Lost Ark, invented the modern action movie as we know it. Prior to those two, we had absolutely no idea films were allowed to be that exciting. They were fast and furious like the show reel of movie good bits that spun through our heads, but also smarter and wittier than we could imagine.
Even so Miller returning to his first born was very far from a sure thing. The third installment Beyond Thunderdome was slack and since then he hasn't touched action cinema, making dramas The Witches Of Eastwick and Lorenzo's Oil, and children's films Happy Feet and the Babe sequel. The obvious comparison was George Lucas returning to make the prequels.
Fury Road doesn’t merely suggest that he hasn’t lost its touch, it’s an object lesson to the rest of Hollywood about how these things should be done. The spur for the movie is simple: make a whole film like the final chase sequence in Mad Max 2 but do it using all the modern technology. And yes, there is plenty of CGI in Fury Road but there are also plenty of real stunts. The blending of the two isn't always seamless, but it never holds it back. Most CGI action sequences are a series of pretty pictures for you to sit and admire; the sequences in Fury Road will have you bouncing in your seat with excitement. You couldn’t be more involved in the action if you had money on it.
The technological advances have enabled him to let his imagination run wild and it has run very wild. Fury Road is like Circle Du Soleil performing their interpretation of The Hills Have Eyes, on wheels We have gained very little practical benefit from the second Gulf War – the mother of all overblown ill advised sequels that failed to recapture what it was people liked in the original – but it feels like it provided the inspiration for Miller to go to the effort to resurrect Max. It isn't just the shots of oil tankers careering through barren desert terrain, or the suicidal warriors who believe that martyrdom beckons, it's more the nihilistic sense that the way the world is now everything is permissible, nothing is too extreme. Exploitation is the big theme here – in this post apocalyptic future everything has a price and everyone is property. Max starts out as human blood bag.
Hardy in the lead: he is definitely mad enough, but would he be Max enough? Hardy's actually a rather underwhelming Max, - a grunting, uncharismatic brute, too much Shell Of A and not enough Man. He's has some nice moments though - the awkward thumbs up he gives to another character after she'd narrowly avoided death. Mostly though I think he hasn't really got the character or quite grasped what it means to be a leading man. So I'm going to come out and say it – it would've been an even better film with Mel Gibson in the lead, and probably not much more of a financial disappointment
