Last Saturday I watched two movies in one day that both made me go “what the hell just happened?” One of them in an awesome way, one of them in a terrible way. They were Mad Max and Mad Max: Fury Road.
The Mad Max series has been one of those things where I went from knowing nothing to having it be everywhere in days. One day my friend Tarra texts me saying we need to talk about this new thing she’s into, and the next minute it’s the number two movie at the box office and has taken over my Facebook and Twitter with feminist accolades/angry MRAs. So I went to see Fury Road, but decided to watch the original first. I would have watched all of the predecessors, but ran out of time. (Stay tuned for my thoughts on Road Warrior and Beyond Tunderdome. I’m sure they’re coming soon.)
Holy crap. What? That’s my reaction to both movies. I’ll start with the lovefest for Fury Road. Everything you’ve heard is true. It’s beautiful.
It’s a solid plot with adrenaline junkie action out the wazoo. It’s going to destroy all the men in America by daring to create an action movie where women get to play actual characters with actual thoughts and not just objects. Charlize Theron deserves every compliment given her and then some. I could go on and on about the movie and how much I enjoyed it.
But my overwhelming thought when the movie was over was how the hell did we get here from here?
Seriously. I watched the first movie and almost didn’t go see the new one. It just struck me as so mind-bendingly bad I didn’t know what to do with myself. I have so many questions. How the hell did we get here? Why do I care about this character? Is that guy’s name really Toecutter? Did they really run over that baby? And Max’s arm? What the eff is with the weird scene-transition bird?
I’ve been trying for a week to trace how George Miller got from the strange, slightly-dilapidated world of Mad Max to the beautifully bonkers desert dystopia of Fury Road. In true Tarra fashion, my lovely friend has backed up her position that Mad Max is a movie worth watching by sending me a lot of articles about its influence. I’ve done my research, and it’s starting to make sense.
The more I read about the process of making Mad Max, the more I can see the same attention to detail and design throughout. 1979 George Miller scraping together a movie on $350,000, but still being committed enough to use practical stunts, real-speed shots, and hiring an actual biker gang doesn’t seem that far off from 2015 George Miller still using mostly practical stunts and hiring Eve Ensler to consult on how different women react to trauma. His budget just got bigger and he just got older and wiser.
And I’ve got to give George this, both movies have some pretty amazing car chases. The effects are impressive, especially considering that real people actually did all of those things. In fact, when the first movies came out, rumors went around that stunt men had died making Mad Max. They were totally false, but it is hard to watch all that metal carnage and believe everyone walked away.
Speaking of the carnage, the other piece of common DNA that struck me was the violence. I enjoyed the heck out of Fury Road, but I also found myself watching the moving and wondering what it says about our culture that our entertainment is this bloodthirsty. It actually reminded me of my favorite quote from a review of the first movie; Phillip Adams saying that the movie had “all the emotional uplift of Mein Kampf” and would be “a special favourite of rapists, sadists, child murderers and incipient [Charles] Mansons.” I think the world has changed a lot, and we’re no longer surprised by movies with high body counts and lots of ‘spolsions. But both films have a couple of intimate moments where real fear and violence creep in and become truly unsettling.
I can see in the bookends of the Mad Max series a director of incredible vision trying to entertain us and make us think. I’m also immensely grateful for Mad Max, terrible Power Point style screen transitions and all, because it lead us here.
Nerd Academy 