Name: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
IMDb: link to Mad Max: Fury Road page
Genres: Action Country of origin: AU, US
Cast:
Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, Hugh Keays-Byrne as Immortan Joe, John Howard as The People Eater, Richard Carter as The Bullet Farmer, Nicholas Hoult as Nux.
Directed by: George Miller. Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris (screenplay).
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| Max, Furiosa |
The initial tableaux:
Max gets caught by a colony (the Citadel) which exists in a desert of heat and nothing. The colony has water, and produces edible food. It trades with the Bullet Farm, which has lead and gun technology, and Gas Town, which has petrol and the like.
Imperator Furiosa decides to take a new direction. She leads a run to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm, but takes five young women capable of breeding with her instead of produce. She gets off the usual routes. Her home colony sends warriors against her, and gets reinforcements from the Bullet Farm and Gas Town.
There is a long fight.
Delineation of conflicts:
Furiosa wants the young women to be free and not breeding slaves. Everyone else disagrees. There is a large scale fight in which perhaps 20% of all the resources of the three towns is destroyed. Brilliant. No one cares about that; winning is everything, even if it means cutting your own carotid artery.
Max starts as a portable supply of untainted O-negative blood. Max would like to free himself of his nightmares; he did not save his wife and child from all this badness. Max eventually joins Furiosa as a badly treated slave. He would like to be free.
Furiosa heads into a giant sandstorm and more or less escapes for a while. The pursuit is far from over. What will end this nonsensical behaviour?
Resolution: There is change in leadership after many deaths, the loss of much water, petrol, food, and mechanisms that still work.
One line summary: Visually engaging, logically stupid.
Statistics:
Cinematography: 2/10 Ugly, garish, ridiculous. Absurd camera filters, vile makeup, stupid closeups. Some of the 3D effects were just plain terrible as well as terribly stupid.
Sound: 2/10 Ugly, garish, pointless, irritating, jarring. It sucked. Electric guitars on a road trip? These stupid sods don't have enough resources for such extended displays of conspicuous waste.
Acting: 2/10 Were there actors? I read somewhere that Charlize Theron was in this, but she reputedly is a better actor than any of the women I saw in this POS.
Screenplay: 2/10 Pointless absurd dystopian crap. Much of the fight choreography was too embarrassing to be performed by the Keystone Kops.
The opening is in voiceover with irrelevant inter-titles. That is always a bad sign.
This whole abomination is set against strong politics of scarcity: water, food, oil, petrol, steel replacement parts for vehicles clearly too old and decrepit to run at all, and medicine, and so on. Despite this, everywhere the leads go, the local people have enough food, water, gasoline, bullets, and, when needed, brand new motorcycles with just the right equipment. But of course, they do not. The entire film is infeasible, even though it's not supposed to be a fantasy.
There is practically no dialog in this steaming pile of dung. What dialog there is entirely stupid.
Final Rating: 2/10 I would recommend this film to no one, unless I wanted their IQ to drop. I felt disgusted by the director's hatred of reason and of viewers.
Of course, if one is just looking for a popcorn movie, this one is fine. Many people die. Huge amounts of precious scarce resources are lost without any goal being achieved. Brand new hardware shows up out of nowhere (around 15 brand new motorbikes in perfect condition in just one scene). It's like a sort-of realistic Transformers movie. That is, it is complete and utter bullshit.
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