Mad Max: Fury Road

Good point on that last one!

So this movie was on TV, and I wound up watching it with my parents since there wasn't much else to do that evening.

"This is completely ridiculous!" — my mother on the Doof Warrior^note in a good way, mind you

edited 11th Feb '17 8:30:48 PM by SantosLHalper

So here in Sweden they've got this big national event where people build floats/rigs.

I'm in a team.

We're building the Doof Wagon.

WITNESSS!

I demand it to have real flames and for it to blow up all the other floats.

We're working on the former, but don't know about the latter.

We already have a shiny and chrome (well, more silver, really) spray to put on our mouths. It's a food condiment.

The Doof Wagon didn't do any destruction itself, IIRC, so not doing so in the parade isn't out of character (so to speak).

However, it had better be REALLY FUCKING LOUD, the way you'd expect of a sound truck designed to be heard by all of a convoy traveling at highway speeds, especially given that in the film they weren't particularly concentrated.

So recently I watched The Fate of the Furious.

It has Charlize Theron as the main villain and holy crap, I couldn't stop thinking about how she's a corrupted, cyberpunk version of Furiosa.

Also, one scene has a character that threatens people by pretending to set fire on the car's gas with a flare, while wearing the similar mask of a War Boy (I think?) that stabbed Furiosa.

Worst of all, in the most intense moments, I kept on playing Brother in Arms in my head.

The previews I've seen of Fate of the Furious makes it look like a modern-day, pre apocalypse Fury Road.

I've never seen this until now...

I finally see the connection between George Miller's movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojY3BiYl870

Seriously, I can't get over the fact that it was the guy behind both Babe Pig In The City and Happy Feet that made this film. Talk about a contrast.

A closer comparison than you might think.

edited 9th May '17 12:15:01 PM by Tuckerscreator

....It's actually scary how well it matches up.

Holy crap. I thought it was a movie about tap dancing.

I would've thought it was a movie about wombo combos if I didn't remember trailers from my childhood.

Fury Road finally gets its Funko Pops.

The faceless Immortan Joe Funko got me for some reason. And I really love the Doof Warrior one. May consider getting one.

I love this movie to death. Watched it today, and scenes such as inside the sandstorm and facing the Rock Riders still are so much fun to watch.

edited 10th Sep '17 8:05:15 PM by jameygamer

So apparently, the new Mission Impossible film is being favorably compared to this film as one of the greatest action films of the decade. Makes me wonder how George Miller would tackle an MI film.

Having just seen Mission Impossible Fallout, at the risk of sounding heretical, I think that Fury Road's stunt and camera work has been blown out of the water by the former.

At the very least, they are both tied in terms of top tier action films imo. Your thoughts?

Edited by LDragon2 on Jul 30th 2018 at 10:02:32 AM

George Miller Isn't Sure Whether Furiosa Would Stay a Hero or Turn Tyrant After Mad Max: Fury Road

That is intersting, and in fact quite predictable given is a post apocaliptic story.

Granted I wonder if furiosa position as feminism hero will clash well with that.

I mean, there are still ways to work it.

Not EVERY story has to be "Hero -> Tyrant -> Overthown by New Hero". We can instead have a Hero's Journey to Villainy and explore her growing into a Tyrant only to succeed in her struggle and not become the Tyrant.

I give Campbell credit but I do think his philosophy tends to make people think things *have* to be in line with those trends. And that gets boring. You can't tell new stories while following old molds.

We could also have a Dystopia Justifies the Means and have her turn tyrant and that... being the right thing. That would be pretty unique, I suppose.

It's more of an issue with how Campbell is taught, really. He wasn't writing a how-to book, but about patterns he'd observed, stories that maybe had a natural resonance for people and cultures as a whole. Patterns that stories tended to naturally fall into, a default, but not necessarily a way stories should be written. In knowing the pattern you can exploit it, and that will resonate with a wide audience, but you can also manipulate it, and use that to build and explore in other directions.

There's nothing new under the sun, sure, but everything old is new again. If you know what's come before and can read that into the works you're familiar with, you, as a writer, can use that to do something that at the very least you haven't seen before.

Campbell also had a big misogynistic disregard for women as heroes, having been quoted as saying women don't need the hero's journey, so using his ideology as the template for women heroes has its share of disagreement.

I've got this pet theory that the Mad Max movies aren't actually sequels to each other. Rather, they're the same story re-told many times, the legend changing as it's passed down from generation to generation in this post-apocalyptic society (which would explain why Max remains a relatively young man even as the setting shifts from the original film's pre-apocalypse to Fury Road, where the elderly only have hazy, distorted memories of life before the bombs).

Under this theory, Furiosa and Auntie Entity from Beyond Thunderdome are the same character, just as Toecutter, Lord Humongous, Master Blaster, and Immortan Joe are the same villain, renamed and reworked over time. Beyond Thunderdome is where a previously unrelated legend of a woman who rose to power is combined with the legend of Max vs. Musclebound Lord of Berserkers, done with the intention of painting her as the true enemy (like how Prince John got inserted into the Robin Hood legend). Fury Road is the product of the same civilization some generations on, which now has a more positive view of this legendary female conqueror, elevating her to culture hero status, and reworking the story so she's an unambiguous opponent of tyranny, rather than a tyrant in her own right, and making her an ally of Max instead of an enemy.