Questions on the new Mad Max movie

UberGott

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Marxie said:
Yes, it was Russian, they left it unchanged in translation. Pretty bad and butchered Russian, which helps the scene work in translation, but hell if I know where you could hear something like this. "On them Wastelands", I guess.
They left it as-is? Interesting. Thanks for confirming it though.

Also - fuck me this captcha of yours is weird.
The Escapist catchpa is sentient. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

The horror wears off, but the suspicion that Archon has already sold us out to Skynet never quite goes away.
 

Angelblaze

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UberGott said:
Zhukov said:
I've lived in the Australian outback. It's, err... really not that colour, except maybe during a particularly good sunset. (If you like, do youtube search for on-set or B-roll footage. I guarantee you'll see a massive difference.)
They shot this one in Africa rather than Australia.
Not all of Africa is a neverending wasteland, though. Thought I'd point that out sheerly because I'm a bit tired of hearing it.
 

rorychief

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The movie features a powerful co-protagonist whose motivations power most of the plot. None of the scenes making her powerful seemed contrived, all of her many crowning moments of awesome occurred naturally within set piece battles and served to create more spectacular scenes. I never for a moment thought 'Max could be doing this, why are they giving some supporting character all the good scenes?' because what everyone was doing at any one time just flowed naturally. It's difficult to describe without spoilers, but in short the film doesn't come across as trying too hard to empower Furiosa. It meshes incredibly well with telling Max's arch and add stakes and attachments the movie with max alone would lack.

There is a line 'who do you think killed the world?' implying it was men and so men are not to be trusted. But it comes from a wasteland scavenger who has spent her life shooting every man she has met, and has as little idea as everyone else as to how the apocalypse came about. Her viewpoint is skewed and colored by her place in the world. It tells more about her, her experience of competing with violent savage men in a wasteland, and her progress in the form of finally coming to trust a man, than it does about the movie's message. Her opinion is not delivered as an author filibuster or wink to the audience or indignant preach sister mike drop. Her people suffered greatly for their no men stance. They ultimately benefit from dropping their no men stance. In a way you could say then that the film rewards co-operation and parity with men.

Avoiding a movie because it has a misandrist character would be as silly as avoiding a film because it has a misogynist character. The real world contains both, their inclusion as aspects to a multi faceted universe does not entail endorsing their views.
 

DementedSheep

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Well I though it was a bit too much like men= bad, women = good but to be fair the plot of a guys harem making break for it is obviously going to have a lot of women on the "good" side. The harem girls role is to be mothers and sex slaves so they are sheltered and not trained as warriors and killers so it makes sense that they aren't as ruthless as most are. Since Immortan Joe is using most the girls for breeding and milk (yuck) there aren't going to be many girls among his mooks. I don't think it was an intentional gender politics thing. It's true the movie isn't really about Max, he is just caught up in it but that isn't unusual for stories like this. He doesn't have many lines but not for lack of screen time, his character isn't talkative. Most of Furiosas lines are just giving instructions to the others.

The fight with Furiosa and Max wasn't just between them, she was getting helped by the other girls who kept grabbing his chain and pulling him back and she was still getting beaten. The only scene which can really taken as her being better than Max is him missing a shot twice and her taking the gun and making the 3rd but he was trying to shoot without support (she used his shoulders), it's her rifle, the target was closer and shortly after there is a scene where he walks off and comes back having killed all of that group and taken their supplies to the amazement of everyone else. There was no "rawr, that's what you get for underestimating the woman" scene.

The harem girls help a little bit when they can but they never randomly become badass or suddenly know how to shoot (they can't even reload a gun in a timely manner) so that's not being played up as "girl power"

The war boys themselves aren't ever really portrayed as particularly bad. They're just brainwashed to see Joe as a god and high on that Valhalla bullshit.

I don't know where people getting that the movie was implying men (as in the male gender in general rather than people like Joe) destroyed the world.

Nux is the most sympathetic of the characters in the movie.

The bad guy isn't just bad because he keeps women as breeders or has a harem. He is bad because of what he dose to the guys as well and because of how he cruel he is with the water supply. The message the harem girls left for him was something like "our sons will not be warlords" so it's not just about them. It doesn't hit you over the head with trying to make him look bad by how he treats woman or anything like that.

When Nux joins them he seems know just as much about keeping Furiosas rig going as she dose, if not more.

The matriarchal utopia crashed anyway and was probably not a utopia to start with (it just had greenery). The little you hear about it is from someone who was taken from there as a child.

The first you see of the female group is an obvious trap to lure people in so presumably if it hadn't been Furiosa they would killed them and taken their stuff just like everyone else and some of them talk gleefully about head-shots so they aren't nice, moral superior or non-violent.

They're kick ass fighters but so is every other wasteland group and they don't come across as more skilled than everyone else.

The women in this certainly aren't immune to nasty and/or comical deaths
 

Zhukov

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UberGott said:
Zhukov said:
I've lived in the Australian outback. It's, err... really not that colour, except maybe during a particularly good sunset. (If you like, do youtube search for on-set or B-roll footage. I guarantee you'll see a massive difference.)
They shot this one in Africa rather than Australia.
Huh. So they did. I could have sworn I read something saying it was filmed in the outback.

Ah well, I stand corrected.

However, having taken my own advice on looking up some B-roll footage, I stand by my assertion that the film is heavily edited for colour. (While reiterating that I have no problem with this. Observation, not criticism.)
 

Ogoid

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UberGott said:
Complaints about Max himself being a secondary character strike me as likely coming from people who haven't watched The Road Warrior in a while (or ever). He was ALWAYS on the sidelines, trying to avoid getting involved in the squabbles of either side, and his involvement here isn't much different than it was in the film everyone remembers as "the good one". He was a bit more prominent in Beyond Thunderdome, but... I haven't watched Beyond Thunderdome in about 15 years. There's a reason for that.
Well, I have precious little interest in this installment, but as someone who regularly re-watches Road Warrior, I can't agree with this assessment.

From the time the movie starts, we watch Max fighting and scavenging, finding his way into Papagallo's compound; when he leaves it, we leave it with him - twice. While he does share the spotlight with other characters on the oil tanker and in the compound, the focus of the story is him - his reluctant but ultimate acceptance of his own lost humanity and empathy for his fellow man.

Only as it ends, I'd argue it shifts into the fate of the compound's inhabitants, presumably because the Narrator didn't know what happened to him after that.
 

Vault101

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This is the Classic Action packed minimal CGI action film people have been crying for ever since 2007 AND its been critically acclaimed

if those people are gonna avoid it just because they got a whiff of the dreaded F word...well theyre the ones shooting themselves in the foot

Zhukov said:
[
Huh. So they did. I could have sworn I read something saying it was filmed in the outback.
they were going too but then it rained for the first time in 15 years

...and you know I'm not sure mad max hitting a pelican with his car would have been consistent with the overall aesthetic
 

Fox12

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WhiteNachos said:
So I've seen someone on the internet predict that the new Mad Max movie was going to shove Mad Max to the sideline, to focus on a female lead and shove a feminist lecture down people's throats. I wouldn't think much of it but I've seen one reviewer say that the film acts like it was men that wrecked the world which gave me pause for thought.

So if anyone's seen the film, is any of this accurate? Does it try to lecture the audience? Does it act like women are all virtuous and men are savages? One thing I can't stand are those "girl power" movies that have to remind the audience over and over and over that 'girls are just as capable as guys' with all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion.

I don't mind female leads, I like Kill Bill and the main character doesn't exist to remind the audience that girls can kick ass, she just does.
Well, yes, Max gets pushed to the side lines. He has, like, six lines of dialogue in the whole film. Most of his communication consisted of grunting and pointing at things. I haven't seen the other films, so I don't know if that's normal, but it honestly feels like he could have been cut from the film if he wasn't so good at killing things.

But do I think it's a "girl power" movie? Honestly, I never thought of it, but no. In fact, I got the impression that feminists would hate that movie. All the women are sex slaves, prostitutes, or milking machines (gross). The men are either bred to be soldiers, or are milked for blood. It's true that the vast majority of the "good guys" were women, but the film was never preachy, and I never felt like the men were being demonized.

If you go into the film looking for some kind of feminist agenda, then I suppose you could find one. But, for the most part, it's just a big dumb action movie. Don't let politics ruin one of the best action romps of the decade. The cinematography is gorgeous, and the action is great. You owe it to yourself to see the film.
 

Dizchu

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I thought Fury Road was amazing, one of the best films I've seen in years. I don't understand the paranoid people that think it's a vehicle for feminist infiltration or promotion. Calm the hell down.

People seem to have a lot of problems with Furiosa being the co-lead in this film despite it being called "Mad Max". Well I hate to break it to you, but "Mad Max" is a franchise. It'd be unreasonable for executives to produce and market a film of this magnitude with a property as risky as Mad Max with full confidence in audiences to realise it is set in the Mad Max universe without it being called "Mad Max".

If you have a problem with it being called "Mad Max" despite the titular Max not being the focus for the entirety of the film, you might as well shit on any Star Wars product that doesn't prominently feature a war happening amongst the stars.

UberGott said:
Complaints about Max himself being a secondary character strike me as likely coming from people who haven't watched The Road Warrior in a while (or ever). He was ALWAYS on the sidelines, trying to avoid getting involved in the squabbles of either side, and his involvement here isn't much different than it was in the film everyone remembers as "the good one". He was a bit more prominent in Beyond Thunderdome, but... I haven't watched Beyond Thunderdome in about 15 years. There's a reason for that.
Ogoid said:
Well, I have precious little interest in this installment, but as someone who regularly re-watches Road Warrior, I can't agree with this assessment.

From the time the movie starts, we watch Max fighting and scavenging, finding his way into Papagallo's compound; when he leaves it, we leave it with him - twice. While he does share the spotlight with other characters on the oil tanker and in the compound, the focus of the story is him - his reluctant but ultimate acceptance of his own lost humanity and empathy for his fellow man.
Ehh, I both agree and disagree. Max isn't so much the central character (apart from the first film) as he is the audience's surrogate. What I mean by this is that the plot does not revolve around him, he's just the wrench in the machine that disrupts the status quo. He's the guy the audience relates to, but his story is rather minor compared to the other characters he encounters. Yeah his wife and kid died, but that's not particularly extraordinary in a world where Lord Humungus, Master Blaster and Aunty Entity exist.

But even then, I find the argument that Max is a secondary character in Fury Road to be uncompelling. The story is told through his experiences, the only scenes where he is not present are those that introduce Furiosa's character (whose actions are the basis of the plot of the film) and cutaways to the villains. We learn about Furiosa's character through Max's encounters with her. Max is as secondary a character in Fury Road as Ripley is in Aliens.

Also, Furiosa's a badass. I could watch a whole film about her, easily.
 

UberGott

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To clarify a bit: While Max in The Road Warrior arguably isn't the character who "does" much, he is the POV character for the audience to identify with, and whom the narrative sticks with. When Max doesn't know something's up, the audience doesn't, either. He may be a largely silent, underdeveloped character, but the film still goes to great lengths to make us empathize with him. That didn't happen much in Fury Road, to the point where Max - though the literal narrator and introductory character - falls by the wayside once act two kicks in, and stays a supporting player until more or less the end.

It does feel a bit weird, don't get me wrong. I just feel like so many people complaining that he had virtually no dialogue are forgetting how damned little Mel ever had to say in the first 30 minutes of Thunderdome, or the entirety of Road Warrior. Maybe that was the point, too? Maybe Miller's bored of Max, and wants to make a series of films about Furiosa and used the marquee value to justify getting that started. Hard to blame him, if so.

The only problem with that is, well...

Tom Hardy is likely playing an entirely new character who shares the name and profession of Gibson's "Max". The visions of a little girl and an old man who haunt him aren't ringing any bells from Thunder Dome, and even if they were, Hardy looks younger and less physically damaged than Gibson did by the end of even the original film. I had hoped WHO Tom Hardy was playing would be a mystery solved by the end of it - maybe he's Mel's son, or maybe he's the child of one of the villagers who grew up, hearing the legends of the Road Warrior? Who knows. I feel like that was explained at one point, and wound up being cut from release. Only time will tell, I suppose...

The character development in Fury Road is by far its weakest link. But it does everything else it sets out to do so perfectly that honestly, I don't really care. The film is a white-knuckle chase movie with literally no time to spare on memories or feelings, and I respect it for what it is, even if it's a shame it didn't try just a little harder to be what it isn't.
 

BreakfastMan

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DizzyChuggernaut said:
UberGott said:
Complaints about Max himself being a secondary character strike me as likely coming from people who haven't watched The Road Warrior in a while (or ever). He was ALWAYS on the sidelines, trying to avoid getting involved in the squabbles of either side, and his involvement here isn't much different than it was in the film everyone remembers as "the good one". He was a bit more prominent in Beyond Thunderdome, but... I haven't watched Beyond Thunderdome in about 15 years. There's a reason for that.
Ogoid said:
Well, I have precious little interest in this installment, but as someone who regularly re-watches Road Warrior, I can't agree with this assessment.

From the time the movie starts, we watch Max fighting and scavenging, finding his way into Papagallo's compound; when he leaves it, we leave it with him - twice. While he does share the spotlight with other characters on the oil tanker and in the compound, the focus of the story is him - his reluctant but ultimate acceptance of his own lost humanity and empathy for his fellow man.
Ehh, I both agree and disagree. Max isn't so much the central character (apart from the first film) as he is the audience's surrogate. What I mean by this is that the plot does not revolve around him, he's just the wrench in the machine that disrupts the status quo. He's the guy the audience relates to, but his story is rather minor compared to the other characters he encounters. Yeah his wife and kid died, but that's not particularly extraordinary in a world where Lord Humungus, Master Blaster and Aunty Entity exist.
Yeah, most of the Mad Max films so far are essentially westerns (in terms of story structure), with Mad Max acting as the archetypal "Man With No Name" character (the fact that he is called that in Beyond Thunderdome is not a coincidence). He comes in to a place that has a problem, helps people (usually by killing a lot of bad people), then rides off into the sunset.
 

BaronVH

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Disagree that Max is a secondary character. He is the central figure driving (pun not necessarily intended) the entire narrative from beginning to end. It would have been a shitty movie if he had tons of dialog. The fact is that everything about the film, whether you liked it or not, was very fleshed out. The villains, victims, and all in between. When watching the previews, it almost sells it as another stupid action film. While 80% of it is action, and it may be even higher than that, every bit has purpose, unlike Transformers just fighting on and on, or Ultron coming to life and wanting to blow up the earth like Marvin the Martian. If they make sequels, and I hope to Valhalla they do, I see no reason to make Max any less of a loner.
 

Ihateregistering1

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BaronVH said:
Disagree that Max is a secondary character. He is the central figure driving (pun not necessarily intended) the entire narrative from beginning to end. It would have been a shitty movie if he had tons of dialog. The fact is that everything about the film, whether you liked it or not, was very fleshed out. The villains, victims, and all in between. When watching the previews, it almost sells it as another stupid action film. While 80% of it is action, and it may be even higher than that, every bit has purpose, unlike Transformers just fighting on and on, or Ultron coming to life and wanting to blow up the earth like Marvin the Martian. If they make sequels, and I hope to Valhalla they do, I see no reason to make Max any less of a loner.
I disagree slightly. I'm not sure if I'd go as far as to call him a secondary character, but I also don't think you can call him THE central figure. If he were the central figure, he would have been rescuing the brides, or would be running bartertown, or would have simply kicked the crap out of the Humongous and his Army. He's always someone who gets involved in things that only slightly have anything to do with him, beginning with "I'm just doing this for myself and I don't care about any of you", and eventually evolving into "I care about you and am willing to put my survival on the line to help, because buried somewhere in there this loner is still a good person".

In other words, as someone already mentioned, he's just about every protagonist from every western ever, right down to the only talking when necessary parts. And that's not an accident.

But damned if it doesn't work, and it works really well in this movie also.

From what I've heard, they've already greenlit at least one sequel that will focus on Furiosa, and I know Hardy is signed on for more. I'm really hoping they get him back in his traditional car: that was honestly my one criticism of the movie.
 

Souplex

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BreakfastMan said:
The movie is much more pro-anarchy than pro-feminist, imo. Basically, without spoiling a whole lot, there are 3 main groups in the movie (besides the heroes) that each represent powerful institutions: religion, business, and the military. The main struggle of all the characters is to escape being captured and enslaved by these groups, the women wanting to avoid being sex slaves, the two main men wanting to avoid being either mindless soldiers or part of a machine. There is also some stuff about the environment in there as well, a little.

Also the movie is spectacular. Go see it, dammit!
It's far more communist and anarchist.
When they take over the citadel, they're doing it as a new power that will distribute water fairly and treating citizens more equally.
You can't be anarchist by definition if you make a power-grab.
 
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I'll be totally honest: I'm one of those cunts that hates it when movies try to be political. Whenever they lecture or put shit in purely for the sake of "saying something" I cringe and usually dislike the movie.

For my money, Fury Road did none of that. It didn't pander, it didn't try to have an agenda, it just does its thing and does it goddamn well.

While yes, Max is something of a secondary character, I don't get how that is any different from Road Warrior. But that's just the thing. A character like Max works best when he's this baddass juggernaut taking shit out left and right. Also yeah, he's awesome in the movie. The people saying it's all hyper-feminist seem to have not actually seen the movie since Max, with some help, beats Theron in a fight and then is in control for pretty much the whole movie. It's her story, but its his plan they go with in the end and its him that does most of the combat work.

The thing about Fury Road is, its simply astoundingly well done. No scene is ever in service of anything other than the plot, the action, the characters and the world. There's no fan service. There's no empowerment for its own sake. It's just strong characters surviving. One is Max, the other is Charlize Theron.

So in answer to your question,
WhiteNachos said:
So if anyone's seen the film, is any of this accurate? Does it try to lecture the audience? Does it act like women are all virtuous and men are savages? One thing I can't stand are those "girl power" movies that have to remind the audience over and over and over that 'girls are just as capable as guys' with all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion.
No. It really doesn't. They're all just people. They beat the shit out of each other, the work together, they all have their moments. Go see it.
 

Parasondox

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*sigh* Can't we just enjoy a movie that is insane, crazy, over the top and just damn fucking WOW, without trying to add a message that was not the intention of the director please?

Some people just need to stop over thinking things and just enjoy something. HAVE FUN!!
 

Vault101

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Sir Thomas Sean Connery said:
I'll be totally honest: I'm one of those cunts that hates it when movies try to be political. Whenever they lecture or put shit in purely for the sake of "saying something" I cringe and usually dislike the movie.

For my money, Fury Road did none of that. It didn't pander, it didn't try to have an agenda, it just does its thing and does it goddamn well.
all works are inherently "political" to varying degrees in that they [I/]often[/I] reflect a certain point of view

but there's a difference between being political and doing it poorly

actually a good example would be the environmental themes in happy feet (same director as MM:FR hilariously enough) compared to Wall-e

Happy Feet seems like a movie suffering from many abandoned plot threads and re writes. I mean you have this perfectly serviceable plot with an outcast penguin who can DANCE instead of sing cool but then after faffing around it gets weird and THE FISH ARE DYING and LETS DANCE SO THE HUMANS DON'T KILL US....wut? the power of dance causes the humans to completely re-do their fishing practices? it just felt forced

Wall-e has some pretty obvious environmental themes but its [b/]cohesive[/b] the degradation of the environment leads to the current setting, the state of the humans is funny (if not a little true) the environmental stuff provides the driving force/backbone of the plot but it doesn't overtake it

Parasondox said:
Some people just need to stop over thinking things and just enjoy something. HAVE FUN!!
I'm sorry but this really pisses me off

there's no such thing as over thinking something, this shit is real,its a relfection of our society, its in our lives and its subject to criticism/analysis

as for what the director intended...I got the impression from an interview that whatever themes present in the movie to him were just no brainers....subjecgation/warlords/power plays all universal and old themes and he said that maybe it was simply timing that this became a discussion in regards to woman in media. So no he probably didn't go in thinking "I'm going to make a feminist movie"

BUT

decisions were made along the line, decisions that resulted in what we got, and what we got was a film that is quite feminist [I/]intentionally or not[/I]
 

Casual Shinji

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Fox12 said:
Well, yes, Max gets pushed to the side lines. He has, like, six lines of dialogue in the whole film. Most of his communication consisted of grunting and pointing at things. I haven't seen the other films, so I don't know if that's normal, but it honestly feels like he could have been cut from the film if he wasn't so good at killing things.
Max is supposed to be more of a myth than a real fleshed out character -- A story the people of the wastes tell eachother around the campfire about the time when the odds were set against them, and this strange man came out of nowhere to help them and who then suddenly vanished again.

When you look at the apocalypse in this Mad Max it feels way more far gone and "evolved" than the ones in the previous movies, yet Max is still a young guy despite having been around before the world ended. In Mad Max 2 we hear that it's been so long nobody can even remember what happened. And Furiosa even mentioned she grew up in the apocalypse.

Max is kind of like Link, I guess you could say. Just this guy who shows up to (reluctantly) give a helping hand.
 

Kontarek

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The movie is fan-fucking-tastic on every level, a true masterpiece. This should be your one and only concern. It is feminist without compromising its quality in any way whatsoever; why the fuck is this a problem?