 May 21, 2015 - 7:15am | I loved the Mad Max series but I'm not sure any more. First of all with this franchise each movie was a different story. Not normal for an action adventure franchise. Most successful movies more or less rehash the first movie in the sequel with a replay of the same gags and jokes that got laughs the first time. Even in the recent Star Trek movies JJ Abrams repeated what he called the hero moment in both movies with the Enterprise coming up out of the clouds though both times had completely different set ups. 1. Mad Max was his descent into madness, with the world going to hell he represented an attempt to maintain some kind of civilization and in the end he went over to the dark side. He is an anti-hero 2. Road Warrior (or known by its Aussie name: Mad Max 2) This is a story about hope but not for Max. He's only out for himself and only does good if there is something in it for him. He is a reluctant hero 3. Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome. This is a story about redemption. He takes a job to kill a man. Murder for hire is evil and this would be a permenant stain on his soul but he can't complete it when he realizes that the man is mentally disabled and he goes back on the deal. Which gave us the great line, "Bust a Deal, Face the Wheel." Ultimately he is saved by and must save a group of children and in doing this he willingly sacrifices himself for them. He finds his humanity again but is left behind in the wasteland. He is the tragic hero. Now we get Fury Road which is a high octane petal to the metal thrill ride but a mash up of Road Warrior and Thunder Dome. It has very few slow moments where the audience can catch their breath and no comic relief what so ever. It amps you up and leaves you tense and when its over you few like you need to go sit and listen to the ocean. It simply took a bunch of things from the two previous movies mashed them together and since there was a bigger budget they buffed and polished them to be over the top and off the hook. however we've seen it all before. a vehicle with a prisoner strapped to the front but upright and leaning forward: that was Road Warrior but Fury Road does this with Max. Crazy bad guy wearing a mask, tractor and tanker in a road chase, both Road Warrior and Fury Road. dysfunctional outpost of civilization, and "innocents" that need to be saved: Thunder Dome and Fury Road. Even the Warboy in Fury Road who gets a few seconds in the trailers is reminescent of Screw Loose in Thunder Dome. in fact the scene in thunder dome where Max's hair is cut off and a small child takes the clips is completely repeated in Fury Road. Really- this was a cool scene that we needed to see again? Max gets a violent hair cut and a small child takes the hair- big deal. What was good about Fury Road: I did like the character that who is missing her left hand and wears a post apocalyptic/steam punk prosthetic claw hand. I thought she was well drawn and defined and the moments when she took off the claw and it was just a stump she seemed genuinely vulnerable. Secondly they were smart about not letting us get a good view of the actor's face playing Max- half the movie his face is obscured and by the time you get a really good look at it its cemented in your mind that this is Max. You never really have time in the beginning to compare the new Max to Mel Gibson and I give kudos to the director for managing this. (though I dont think it was a problem really that it wasn't Mel in this picture- i simply noticed what he did and took note of it). What was real stupid: the geriatric woman biker gang who used to live in a "green place" that got took over by the desert/waste land lingering in that wasteland for years nursing some shoots of plants in small containers in a leather doctor's bag. Only when Max shows up do they even get the idea to go find someplace else to live. They didn't even get the detail right about Max's dead child changing the sex and age in the scenes where he is haunted by her ghost. I'm sure that writer would say that this movie was about Max putting his ghosts to rest but I found the dead daughter distracting since I knew that it was suppose to be a boy of a much younger age. They leave us with Max walking away from civlization at the end of Fury Road which was about rebooting the Franchise. I suppose that they intentionally did a mash up of the previous 2 movies to be a reboot and now will begin "thrilling" us with new intallments: Fast and Furious Max 26. As far as reboots go this one kind of sucks. If you've seen Road Warrior and Thunder Dome then you dont really need to see this movie. In fact I recommend just going and re-watching Road Warrior and Thunder Dome instead of this movie. They are far better stories and better crafted movies. The humor in the scene with the can of dog food and the gyro-copter pilot chained to the tree is fantastic and carried by the actor's face acting without anything being said. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 May 21, 2015 - 12:25pm | I'm on the fence about this one. One one hand it looks to have all the action of the Road Warrior and more. On the other all that action is CG enhanced. But my biggest hang-up, assuming this is still the same apocalyptic wasteland where gas is incredibly rare, is the fact that there is a major representation of vehicles boasting large engines. In Mad Max the Interceptor was "the last of the V-8s". In Fury Road it appears to be the first. One of the vehicles has a pair of blowers poking through the hood. The monster 4x4 certainly isn't powered by a Smart car motor. No miser could possibly turn the rear wheels of that Siamese twin Cadillac. The mobile drum machine is another major consumer (and for the sole purpose of providing music?). Chasing a lone vehicle down in the desert won't yield enough gas to get them halfway back to where they started the chase from let alone their home base. |
May 21, 2015 - 5:03pm | @ Shadow: [spoiler alert dont read further if you dont want me so spoil some of the stupid details] Well... concerning gas.... at the beginning the tanker is being sent out on a mission to "Gas Town" towing a fuel pod. The tanker itself has a crawl space through it from back to front and it also holds water and human breast milk- yes I said breast milk as the bad guy likes to drink it though why he would send a supply out into the desert on an unrefrigerated truck??? damiffiknow. The bad guy has a room full of fat women having their breast pumped. Besides "Gas Town" there is another place called the "Bullet Farm". When the bad guys realize that Furiousa (driver with the steam punk prosthetic) smuggled the "wives/baby incubators" of the bad guy onto the tanker they go in chase and summon re-inforcements from Gas Town and Bullet Farm by exploding rocket flare. Thus the hell bent for leather chase into the desert. you are right it has all the action and more of the Road Warrior chase scenes but again I think your better off waiting to see this when it hits the TV or net flicks or not at all. I just rewatched Road Warrior and Thunder Dome and these are far better stories and movies. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 May 23, 2015 - 5:17pm | This here is a neat insight to the Fury Road. http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2015/05/This-MAD-MAX-FURY-ROAD-Theory-will-Blow-Your-Mind Time flies when your having rum. Im a government employee, I dont goof-off. I constructively abuse my time. |
 May 23, 2015 - 5:29pm | @Shadow the promos go to great lengths to say the stunts are real and very little CGI was used except for the woman's arm. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
 May 30, 2015 - 7:01am | When they make these movies they get a bunch of scripts together and mash them together. If they are rebooting folks they always change fundamentals to "redefine" the new who ever or what ever. Frankly the post apocalyptic movies are a bit of a snap shot into what we thought back then. Thus the new ones will be missing elements or re-plot to make some point that old ones did not... oh please no more global warming, just give good old fashion anarchy, resource depletion and nuclear/bio-chemical warfare fall out... Dooms Day Clock is forgotten by the media today (something I find odd). I will wait to rent. However they do offer potential, I imagine the old style films with wacked religious cults cleansing the lands, mutations, men looking for the last fertile women, women enslaving men as punishment for the war, and even some of the more modern ones offer some ideas... you know life on a quarantined planet would be a SF Apocalyptic setting, complete with unstable reactors, gangs of roaming people, fighting over resources and so on. Working vehicles would be limited and parts a premium. Living primitive & scavenging the tech that was once common. "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
May 30, 2015 - 1:48pm | Working vehicles would be limited and parts a premium.
See, that's an issue in the new movie. Apparently vintage Cadillacs are in abundant enough supply that one can wander out into the post-apocalyptic desert and find not one but two identical models (painted the same color no less), then cut one of them in half lengthwise to make it more narrow (followed by finding someone that deals in custom glass to make you a more narrow windshield & rear window), and mating it with the second one for no apparent function or reason.  |
June 1, 2015 - 5:35pm | Also noteworthy...there's an amazing amount of matte black paint available in the post-apocalyptic future.  |
June 3, 2015 - 4:32pm | Well if reboots are a mash up of old scripts, anyone care to guess what the reboot of Ghostbusters with an all female cast starring Melissa McCarthy will be like? Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
June 3, 2015 - 9:42pm | anyone care to guess what the reboot of Ghostbusters with an all female cast starring Melissa McCarthy will be like?
Bad? I honestly can't think of a single reason to reboot a comedy, Hollywood must have run out of franchises to remake. |
June 15, 2015 - 5:56pm | No imagination... take the Disney Classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they could never make that today & god forbid if they did a remake we all know it would suck beyond suck. Do you all know Ian Fleming (that's right the James Bond Author) wrote it. No imagination anymore, just recycled movies... I pray no one touches a few of my favorite silver screen films. "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
June 15, 2015 - 7:43pm | They got cute with that live musical production of Sound of Music for TV this past year and it sucked too. the actor cast in the Christopher Plummer role was way to young and didn't work for me. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
June 15, 2015 - 8:34pm | take the Disney Classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, they could never make that today & god forbid if they did a remake we all know it would suck beyond suck.
No doubt the remake would have a Back to the Future $39,999.99 hover conversion to make it fly.  They did it in Iron Man...  |
June 16, 2015 - 4:53am | LOL yeah and all the songs RAP or Hip Hop style, they would change the little girls name too I bet you becuase someone would call it racist, and completely modernize the family, I am sure if we think about it we could come up with the Inner City version Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with a Hollywood PC theme to make it EL Sucko. Anti-Banker and Global Warming has to be in the movie. ;) "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
June 16, 2015 - 1:26pm | Shitty Shitty Bang Bang |
June 16, 2015 - 5:35pm |  "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
June 17, 2015 - 6:20am | Piles like that always amuse me, in the way that in lieu of spending all that coin on wheels, tires, & suspension that the car itself is still sporting the 70s Basic Beige color. You know, as if it wasn't already ugly enough with the modifiations... |
June 19, 2015 - 4:55am | Clearly the new Vacation movie will be set in East LA. Way to go Griswold! I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
June 19, 2015 - 8:27pm | They recycled the 80s Ferrari 308, I can think of a slew of uglier vehicles for the Family Truckster. Granted that wasn't a bad choice, but there are much better ones considering the time span. |
September 9, 2015 - 7:35am | The new Mad Max sequel... |
 September 10, 2015 - 3:09pm | I dont know about you guys, but I need to get myself a goddamn Doof Wagon! That truck would be instant win at any party! |
September 10, 2015 - 3:29pm | I dont know about you guys, but I need to get myself a goddamn Doof Wagon! That truck would be instant win at any party! . That would depend on the party I would think, I was just at a church picnic and I'm sure some of the old ladies would faint dead over that! I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
September 11, 2015 - 1:30am | I dont know about you guys, but I need to get myself a goddamn Doof Wagon! That truck would be instant win at any party! . That would depend on the party I would think, I was just at a church picnic and I'm sure some of the old ladies would faint dead over that! I would love to see some old biddies thrash it on stage, as if Sister Rosetta Tharpe gone metal. |
October 7, 2015 - 5:00pm | So I finally caught Fury Road, I already had low expectations so I wasn't disappointed. Just as I surmised earlier, the entire philosophy of "gas is rare" fell apart considering the smallest engine in the fleet was a big block V8. But the truly humorous part? When preggers girl climbs back into the War Rig using the exhaust pipe as a grab handle.  |
