Yeah, I’d be curious to hear olaf’s complaints too, if he’s willing to run that gauntlet.
Man I just thought it sucked. I don’t know how to frame it beyond that. I thought the direction was action for the sake of action and while there was dialogue, it was minimal and mostly bad. I thought Tom Hardy stole the show (aside from the setting) in The Revenant. In this movie, his performance was anything but memorable, as the main character it could have been anyone or no one.
Well, for one thing, Max isn’t the protagonist, just the marketing title & point of view.
And the POV is disputed across the movie, coming and going(we are not always with Max, and the scene he takes off in the night is one moment when we do see him from outside his perspective -the scene is about the women changing their perception of him, and we are with the women there-). He does work as an audience surrogate for a lot of the movie, but this also comes and goes.
I think you wanted a different movie than the one that was made.
I’m fully open to the idea of considering opinions different from my own, but the reasons you give here are pretty MEDIOCRE.
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Why is action an inherently bad thing? I don’t like your implied assertion that “action for the sake of action” is not inherently valuable when considering the merit to a film.
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You also seem to imply that the dialog of a movie is where its true merit lies, so if the dialog is minimal (and “bad”), then it’s impossible for it to be a good movie.
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As others pointed out, Tom Hardy is not the main character. Furiosa is the closest, but the real main characters are the elaborately crafted and perfectly orchestrated set pieces and action sequences.
The Doof Warrior is obviously the main character of the movie.
I like to compare it to a story Max would tell someone else. I understand that’s not how the movie is actually structured—we leave his perspective a few times—but as far as reconciling the title to his importance to the story, it makes sense.
He’s had a crazy life, and if he started recounting it to someone, some stories would be about things he was mostly responsible for, and some things would be about the crazy things he saw and people he met. Fury Road is an example of the latter, and is not weaker or less important for it.
Yeah man I don’t know what to tell you. You liked it, I didn’t.
You’ve not really been all that descriptive about what you did not like about it though.
I like to compare it to a story Max would tell someone else.
So, three words long?
“Hey, Max! Tell us the epic tale of the time you were captured by The War Boys and Immortan Joe!”
“I got away.”
“Hey Max! Thought you were dead!”
“Nope.”
“What do I call you? What’s your name?”
“Does it matter?”
This exchange is a perfect example of why I feel Fury Road is a well written movie. Not only does it do a brilliant job with exposition – there isn’t any! – and worldbuilding – there’s loads of it! – but it also knows how to resist temptation. And it knows enough to make room for other characters. In any other movie, Max would have said his name as this point.
-Tom
Yeah, I love the way they just skip exposition, but the people I’ve talked to who hated it seemed to mainly hate it for that reason. Not for everybody, I guess.
Fury Road was fucking amazing. I can’t even remember the last time I was a in a theater, getting “jesus christ this is without a doubt one of the best movies I have ever seen” chills.
When was the last time for you, Tom?
…and, of course, it’s bookended with a scene at the end to deliver an additional pay off.
Oh, I see enough movies, and I have specific enough tastes that I’m lucky enough to get that feeling every few years or so. :) But, yeah, the last time for me was also Mad Max: Fury Road. Before that, maybe Assassination of Jesse James? I’d say Under the Skin is an absolute masterpiece. United 93. The Fountain. Maybe Dark Knight, but largely from being blindsided by a comic book movie being framed as a Greek tragedy. Otherwise, some of those are pretty high-falutin’ picks. But I have no problem putting Fury Road alongside those movies. I’m delighted to see it getting so much recognition from similarly high-falutin’ corners, and although I couldn’t care less about the Academy Awards, I’d love to see it beat out even The Revenant, which was a great great movie with amazing cinematography, but to my mind not as much of an accomplishment as Fury Road. Who would have guessed a past-his-sell-by-date director like George “Happy Feet” Miller could do so much with a post-apocalyptic car chase?
-Tom
I gotta see Under the Skin. I remember liking United 93, but wow.
I got the chills from Fury Road too. If it had come out in a year other than It Follows I would be saying “I can’t recall off-hand the last time a movie blew me away like this”. As it stands I get to say that I got completely blown away twice in the theater in 2015 and that’s pretty great. Joe vs the Volcano just showed up on rotation on HBO out of nowhere so of course I h ad to give it a watch (and typically put it on in the background whilst doing other things). I love the bit on the boat journey where Ryan mentions what her father said about most people going through their lives asleep. But that a few people aren’t and they live in a state of constant and total amazement. That’s what watching both of these movies was like for me, tapping into that particular sort of nirvana. I may change my mind about It Follows once I see it again and decide that it was “merely great”. But I’ve now seen Fury Road several times and it is absolutely this sort of film. It’s the rare film that makes me seriously pine for a swanky home theater setup.
To me, the question of whether Mad Max: Fury Road is really “a Mad Max movie” is irrelevant because (1) it’s fucking awesome (2) Max is expertly portrayed by Tom Hardy - who does most of his talking with his eyes and body language and that furious desperate filing - and the character is both faithful to the lore and somehow grown/added to and the question of whether he’s a main character or not seems so small next to something so large (3) seriously, it’s an amazing movie (4) of course Immortan Joe has a dude playing guitar on top of a modified war rig that has huge speakers on it this makes the most sense ever (5) Theron (6) I have to go back to the middle/late aughts to find a book that did world building this good (The Name of the Wind) and I can’t recall a movie anywhere close right now.
I think it’s positively delightful that Fury Road did all of this while being like 80-90% action. It should win best picture (It Follows should have gotten a nomination, but then the Academy Awards haven’t precisely been about recognizing the best works), even though it won’t.