Mad Max: Fury Road - Part 1

[Rowsdower!]

I need Hardy warbling Tiny Dancer in Bane voice.

https://twitter.com/EltonBane

 

[Schlosser85]

Honestly Hardy's a little hard to understand IRL sometimes, so I'm pretty sure it's just how he talks.

 

[Simo]

A fellow Mad Max fan messaged me yesterday who attended the screening and we spent a good portion of the night talking about the movie. This is what he had to say regarding the film and some of the misinformation that came from others who attended:

"To clarify, most of the audience was there because they just happened to get a flyer handed to them a few days ago outside a major movie theater in Burbank. So they were basically local moviegoers. This wasn't a bunch of industry people, or cast and crew, or Mad Max fans. Yes, there were a few studio people in the audience, and definitely some Mad Max fans (who they got the flyers from friends, etc.) and a few industry people (who maybe write about movies online or who work in the business) who happened to get hooked up with flyers from friends. But this was basically a "real" crowd. There weren't a bunch of press there or anything.

The audience applauded at the end of one of the early action sequences. And there was significant applause at the end of the movie. The applause was cut off quickly only because the lights came on right away and the guy who was sort of in charge of the screening started talking and people wanted to hear him.

George Miller was there. He had a friendly conversation with some enthusiastic fans outside the theater afterwards. And at least one person was able to get a photo with him (lucky for George, none of the rest of us could do it because we had all left our phones in our cars, as instructed).

THE MOVIE IS F'ING AWESOME.

It does not need reshoots. It does not need further editing. It has unfinished fx shots and raw sound. And I'm sure they will refine some things in the edit because they always do. But it is a ground-breaking action blockbuster AS IS. The person who tweeted that it needs serious recutting and reshoots is either a liar, a moron, or just someone who doesn't understand filmmaking and has never seen a pre-release, unfinished film before and had a hard time looking at unfinished shots. But let me say again, they have everything they need for this movie to be incredible. There are one or two things they could tweak at the end just to make things a little smoother, but none of it is all that important.

Tom Hardy does NOT use the Bane voice in the movie. Whoever said that has probably never seen a Tom Hardy movie besides The Dark Knight Rises and just thinks anytime Tom Hardy does a deep, gritty voice, he sounds like Bane. Does he sound a TINY bit like Bane? Well yeah, but only because he's the same bloody actor. Again, the guy who said that is just a moron and trying to stir **** up. What was Tom Hardy's accent in the movie? I know my accents pretty well, and even I'm not sure. It was subtle whatever it was. Vaguely American, a tiny bit British here and there, maybe a little Aussie. NOT BANE.

It's a fantastic ensemble cast. Tom Hardy is really good as Max. As in the Road Warrior, Max is a man of very few words in this movie, especially for the first 2/3rds of it. He doesn't play the character exactly the same as Mel played it. In some ways, he's a bit of a different character. And as I said before, this film is more of an ensemble piece with several characters all working together toward a goal. In the original trilogy, Mel was sort of like Clint Eastwood in the Man With No Name westerns. He had a clear goal and we followed him as he sought that goal. That aspect is not quite as strong in this film. That may bother some people, but it didn't bother me.

Charlize Theron is great too and has a really cool look with her shaved head and sporting a mechanical arm. Nicholas Hoult was pretty great to, although almost completely unrecognizable.

There were some serious die-hard Mad Max fans in the audience and they all loved it. The consensus was that it was worth the 30 year wait and that they didn't care that it was very different from the early films.

It does NOT take place anywhere in the timeline of the other films. Not really. I feel like the person who said that only said that because Max is driving the Black on Black V8 Interceptor at the beginning (sorry if that's a mild spoiler). But basically everything else about this movie is different. But there are little nods to the other films all over. I wouldn't even say this takes place in the same world as the other films. It's a different post-apocalyptic world. Max is even a different character in some ways. It's actually easier to describe the few things that are the same in this film as the other trilogy than to try and describe all the things that are different (it didn't matter, the fans loved it anyway).

I'm not even sure I'd call this a reboot. I'm not sure what to call it. The new Star Trek movies are a reboot. They are WAY closer to their source material than Fury Road is to the other Mad Max movies. Why should George Miller do a remake of Road Warrior? Road Warrior is already a perfect movie. I'm glad he did something fresh and new.

As far as putting it in the timeline, when George was talking to people after the movie, he specifically said this movie was NOT in the timeline. He said trying to get it to fit between films was just too complicated and would have held the story back from the bigger, crazier world they wanted to show. And he didn't want to just tell one of the same stories over again. That's why Fury Road is just it's own movie with some "connections" as he called them (like having Hugh Keyes-Burne play the bad guy). Little nods to the fan audience. That's all.

Running time was about two hours. I really hope they don't shorten it.

The screening was listed as being for between ages 13-54 (they didn't want people older than that because, well, the movie industry figures old people don't pay to see action movies anyway). But this was not a PG-13 movie. They'll have to cut some stuff. There were a lot of nudity (but they were in context, as you'll see) and blood, and mayhem (bodies being run over etc.). I suspect the studio will NOT want to release this rated R, so it's a shame that some of what we saw will probably be cut from the film.

The costumes, makeup, art direction… all of the work in this movie is just so detailed and creative. It's going to blow people away. I do expect it to get some Oscar nominations in the technical categories. (But it will probably get snubbed for big awards. This movie is just too much of an intense, contemporary, punch in the nuts for the older Academy voters to understand it).

We filled out comment cards at the end. I saw a few around me. Of the five I saw (and none of these folks were fans, just regular moviegoers, probably in their 20s) there were 3 marked excellent (highest score) and 2 marked good (second highest score). (At least one of the people who wrote "good" was a young woman, for whatever that's worth). There was a 40 year old woman sitting next to me who doesn't even normally go to action movie and didn't think she'd like it, but she liked it a lot (even if I did see her covering her eyes a few times).

A LOT of people from the screening were hanging out in the lobby afterwards, all amped up and wanting to talk about the movie rather than walk to their cars. That's always a good sign.

My prediction: If Warner Bros can just resist the temptation to mess with this thing too much, this could be one of those movies that helps define a decade of filmmaking."

 

[Hurm...]

****. I hope they don't drastically alter this baby.

 

[Octoberist]

The thing is, Mad Max has always been (to me) an acquired taste, despite it's scifi post-apoc background.

 

[Schlosser85]

A higher quality version of a previous Hardy-as-Max pic, plus some comments from Charlize Theron:

“It was hard,” she says bluntly when asked about the film, due for release next May. “It was physically hard, it was logistically hard, it was long, it was tedious, it was exhausting. It was a difficult movie to make, not because of any one person, not because of the material, it just was a world that was very difficult to integrate into.”

Yet Theron believes some films just have to be like that — “I don’t know if there’s another way to make that movie, you know?” — and that her on-set experience will have little bearing on the end product.

“God no, it doesn’t take away from my belief in the material and George Miller and the cast and Tom Hardy.”

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/movies/charlize-theron-says-gruelling-mad-max-fury-road-shoot-nearly-ended-her-career/story-e6frfmw0-1226934444031

 

[kvz5]

This came out of nowhere.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/06/25/m.../?hootPostID=13286de1156d11b417612d760c6f4b70

Thirty-five years ago, George Miller re-imagined the action movie with his visceral, dystopic 1979 debut Mad Max, starring a 23-year-old Mel Gibson in one of his first movie roles. Flash forward two sequels and many decades later and the 69-year-old Miller returns with a new cast and a story that is sure to take the road chase to an entirely new realm of chaos and carnage.

In an exclusive first look at the the May 2015 film in this week’s Entertainment Weekly, we talk to Miller about what prompted his return to the beloved franchise: a story that popped into his head fully formed back in 2000 but that took more than a decade to realize. This time, Tom Hardy takes over for Gibson as the very damaged road warrior Max Rockatansky, while a shaved-headed Charlize Theron plays a bad-ass commander named Imperator Furiosa. The stars spent a harrowing seven months in the desert of Namibia to shoot the film. “It was mental in a brilliant way,” says Hardy. “You have no concrete, no coffee shops. We were in the middle of a sandpit.”

The rugged production suited Miller and his singular vision to reboot the Mad Max franchise. “I wanted to tell a linear story–a chase that starts as the movie begins and continues for 110 minutes,” says the Australian writer-director. Fury Road features few digital effects and even less dialogue, he explains. “In this crucible of very intense action, the characters are revealed.”

Also in EW’s apocalypse-themed issue, we serve up a history of end-of-days movies; offer a guide to choose your own movie cataclysm; rank the very best apocalyptic movies of all time; and report on South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s delightfully gonzo English-language debut, Snowpiercer, starring Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton as some of the earth’s last humans in the midst of a new ice age.

 

[slumcat]

Theron wont have an arm in the film?

 

[Rowsdower!]

Apparently not. She looks hot with a buzzcut though!

 

[Hurm...]

Hmmmm, a cover already? Perhaps a trailer on the way this summer?

 

[green]

7 years later and it's really coming?

Yay!

 

[Kane52630]

I still refuse this movie exist.


but damn it, Theron looks great.

 

[chamber-music]

Cool that they got Hardy for the role seeing as they continuing with Max not talking much. Hardy is great at conveying thoughts and emotions without dialogue.

Theron looks surprisingly hot with a shaved head. Robo arm is cool.

I like the look of the characters in the movie. The humanoid robot mutant look we have seen is cool. The bondage punk look probably wouldn't look to good in a modern movie.

 

[Schlosser85]

Nice to get some official notice that this movie actually exists.

Tom has his patented scowling face.

Charlize looks good, even with a shaved head and robot arm.

 

[Schlosser85]

I'm still curious to see how audiences are gonna take to a non-Gibson Max.

 

[MrMaooz]

I'm still curious to see how audiences are gonna take to a non-Gibson Max.

I don't know if many will actually care. I might definitely be wrong though.

 

[craigdbfan]

By picking Hardy they made a smart choice. He's incredibly likeable so I think it'll go over well.

 

[Elevator Man]

Theron looks like she stepped right out of Elysium. If the Mad Max title wasn't placed in the middle of the cover I'd have easily mistaken it for any other post apocalyptic movie that's released these days.

 

[P Supreme]

Theron is just a goddess

 

[the dmg]

Wow...cool cover.

 

[redhawk23]

I never saw this pic.

 

[#root]

Hardy and Theron both look great . Hope this means we'll be getting some footage soon.

 

[Sawyer]

Random as ****. I had come to assume the production was just an elaborate prank on all of the internet.

 

[chamber-music]

I'm still curious to see how audiences are gonna take to a non-Gibson Max.

I liked Mel Gibson as Mad Max but I never felt like this was a role only 'Gibson' could play. I think it is down to the fact Max doesn't talk much and he is like a traditional anti-hero roaming character from a old Western.

For example I can only see Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and it wouldn't be the same with another actor in the role but I don't feel that way about Max Rockatansky.

 

[MrMaooz]

Page bump.