Mad Max: Fury Road - Part 1

[Schlosser85]

Did he say anything about Hardy, Theron, etc.?

 

[chamber-music]

I watched Locke and Tom Hardy was awesome. Tom Hardy's Welsh Richard Burton style accent was surprisingly good.

 

[biolumen]

Did he say anything about Hardy, Theron, etc.?

Not much, really. A few more quotes.

Cast are great although Hardy's unpredictable. He won't be for everyone.

Particularly with Hardy's performance, where I couldn't tell whether he was playing it for laughs or not sometimes. He looks the part for sure, but don't know if he's enough to center the movie. Not going to lie, found myself wondering what the movie would have been like with Mel on board. It's really Furiosa's story, all told. Max joins that story.

Please understand - and it's extremely difficult to do this without going into spoilers - it's a big movie with a lot of concepts and ideas and visuals. Overwhelmingly so, in places. Yes, to the luddites out there, there's quite a bit of CG in here, but as far as I could tell, it's more landscape manipulation then anything else.

If anything, even with some reservations, I'm glad Miller let loose for this. It's certainly something very, very unique and special.

 

[Schlosser85]

Hardy is an unpredictable, honestly kind of strange actor. I'm a fan but he likes throwing random affectations into his roles (deciding to base Bane's voice on Bartley Gorman, or randomly deciding he's Welsh in Locke).

I hope people take to whatever he does with Max. This could really boost his stardom, or hurt him if people don't like him in it.

 

[Rowsdower!]

Interesting that the reviewer says that it's Furiosa's story. That's kinda what I gathered from the trailer.

 

[Octoberist]

Well most drifter type stories (Yojimbo/Man with no Name, and the two Max sequels) have the troupe of dropping them into another person's story anyway. They're just there by happenstance.

 

[Rowsdower!]

Yeah, that's true. Though I hope it doesn't seem like Max is short-changed.

 

[Schlosser85]

Yeah, that's true. Though I hope it doesn't seem like Max is short-changed.

This is my concern as well. Max just kind of stumbling into the plot is pretty much the standard formula for the Mad Max sequels, but I hope he isn't just kind of "there". I read a couple comments from people who didn't feel like he really did much, and the trailer doesn't show much of him.

 

[dark_b]

Max's story in the first act is in the trailer

-long hair long beard
-attack on Max
-car gets destroyed .
-Max gets a haircut and a tattoo.
-Max gets chained on the car
-the car is part of a group who is chasing Theron and her girls
-during the chase they get in the middle of a sand storm/tornado
-Max gets off the chains and fights a guy on the back of the car
-Max gets down and inside Theron's truck. there is an image where Max with his metal mask is pointing a gun at Furiosa.

its so simple and yet so good. no problem here. oldschoool Max

 

[DarthDorranceBane]

So where in the original trilogy will this actually take place?

 

[henry_9305]

It is sad to see the V8 interceptor crash again. I love that car.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

So where in the original trilogy will this actually take place?

No where.

 

[Octoberist]

This is my concern as well. Max just kind of stumbling into the plot is pretty much the standard formula for the Mad Max sequels, but I hope he isn't just kind of "there". I read a couple comments from people who didn't feel like he really did much, and the trailer doesn't show much of him.

It depends on the context of how each person who saw the film, IF they are even familiar with the series in the first place.

You can easily say that Max in The Road Warrior was selfish and didnt do a whole lot till the end since he just had nothing to lose at that point (in the story) and was involved too deep anyway. He changed his tune late in the game. And he only had 20 lines of dialogue.

 

[Cain]

So where in the original trilogy will this actually take place?

This series doesn't follow a set continuity. It's like the Man with No Name trilogy in that regard. Every movie functions perfectly well as a stand alone. It''s almost like 3 different tellings of the same urban legend. This movie seems to keep with that tradition.

 

[biolumen]

Miller reveals more of his world-building in this interview. Gives you a glimpse of how....unusual.....it all is. The guy I spoke to who went to the screening summed up the experience like this....."WTF did I just watch". He doesn't think the general audiences are going to go for it because it's so far out there. We'll see.

The 2015 action film's dystopian future leads to a new antihero and intimidating old-school technology.

Brian Truitt, USA TODAY 6:09 p.m. EDT August 1, 2014

Mad Max, George Miller's 1979 directorial debut, introduced Mel Gibson to the world via his no-nonsense leather-clad hero as well as created a high bar for post-apocalyptic dystopias and action films of the time.

Revising that grimy future world couldn't be better for Miller, the Australian filmmaker who's now redefining the chase movie in a visually spectacular fashion with Mad Max: Fury Road (in theaters May 15, 2015).

More in line with the 1981 sequel The Road Warrior than the original, Fury Road casts Tom Hardy as dangerous loner Max Rockatansky, who gets embroiled in the high-stakes four-wheeled drama of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) racing to keep a group of women out of the clutches of the masked warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, aka Toecutter in the original Mad Max), the War Boys — including the bald-headed Nux (Nicholas Hoult) — and a fleet of souped-up, weaponized old hot rods.

All of it, however, stems from Miller creating certain ground rules for this redone "Mad Max" world of vicious sandstorms and warrior gangs.

Things go very end-of-the-world when "all the bad things we hear in the news all happen at once, and we end up with a wasteland in the middle of a continent like Australia," says Miller, director, producer and co-writer of the upcoming film. "People migrate there and basically survive in a very medieval construct. There's no rule of law, no honor, no money — just pure surviving by bartering or killing."

The hellish climate Miller's put in Fury Road — which is set 45 years from current times — isn't that far off from real life. He remembers a massive dust storm rolling through Sydney and Melbourne a few years back that turned the noon soon into a red darkness.

"I'm not saying they're not exaggerated a little bit" in the movie, Miller admits, "but they're certainly there."

Hardy seemingly casts a sturdy-enough figure to walk out of any horrific climate. Like Gibson's Max, Hardy's character starts off as a damaged guy who believes the best way to exist is alone and entirely self-reliant. Otherwise, life's just too painful for the antihero.

A fourth Mad Max movie — following the first two as well as 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — has been in the works for decades, with Gibson actually wanting to return as Mad Max for a time.

When he wasn't able to the film because of age, Miller says, "Tom was the first guy who walked through the door and had that same paradoxical quality of being immediately attractive and you want to be his friend, but at the same time he had that dimension of danger — there was an unpredictability in what they do.

"In term of performances, it's like two different singers singing the same song. They're going to each interpret it their way."

Guys like Max are "full-lives," according to the director, while the War Boys, maniacal devotees to the ways of Immortan Joe, are "half-lives" who believe in the permanence of machines — Nux has an engine block scarified into his bare chest, Miller says, and "they would almost rather be machines rather than have a fragile human body."

(They also have a penchant for spraypainting their mouths — called "chroming" — as Nux is shown doing in footage Miller debuted at Comic-Con last weekend. "They talk about anything beautiful as 'chrome,' " he adds, "so he wants to be shiny and chrome as he dies in battle.")

Due to the state of the world, the technology tends toward the old school as well. Furiosa has a mechanical arm that's pretty much straight out of the 19th century, and the Frankenstein-esque monster battle rigs are dated as well, deathmobiles with humongous exhaust pipes adding to intimidating exteriors.

Any modern car with any computer chips in it or something that you can't replace, it's probably not going to survive," Miller says. "And with crash technology and stuff like that, you want a good solid vehicle. You're going to want to go to a scrap heap.

"They are a hybrid: There are some modern cars, but mainly they're the big, clunky mid to late 20th-century stuff."

Working from the inside out in terms of logic also informed the aesthetic that carries over to Fury Road's villain. Immortan Joe is an old man looking for heirs to take over for him when he dies — although he's presented himself as a demigod, he's not an immortal one since he has diseased lungs.

But Miller saw that as a way to give him both a breathing apparatus needed to keep him alive and a really cool mask.

"It needed to look formidable so it has horse's teeth," the filmmaker says. "The pipes that come off it and go back to his breathing bladder have to have an interesting look.

"He's going to make something out of it."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2014/08/01/george-miller-mad-max-fury-road-movie/13485281/

 

[DarthDorranceBane]

Working from the inside out in terms of logic also informed the aesthetic that carries over to Fury Road's villain. Immortan Joe is an old man looking for heirs to take over for him when he dies — although he's presented himself as a demigod, he's not an immortal one since he has diseased lungs.

Bane... vs Bane?

 

[Schlosser85]

Bane... vs Bane?

Well Lord Humongus was a lot like TDKR's Bane.

 

[chamber-music]

I like these new concepts to the mad Max mythology

 

[biolumen]

Someone posted an enthusiastic (with reservations) review of the test screening online. It contains minor spoilers. Not sure how SHH handles stuff like this, so I'll just provide the link rather than copy/paste text.

http://thisisinfamous.com/mad-max-fury-road-early-review/

 

[chintai80]

skimmed through that review. sounds like fury road is a winner.

also mad max 2 was on cable tv over the weekend, and i sat and watched through the whole thing. it's so good, and got me pumped for more mad max now.

 

[GremlinZilla89]

Max maybe being more of a spectator doesn't bother me because both Road Warrior and Thunderdome take that route. He's more of a outsider, a wildcard that ends up helping who the film in really about. I like the idea of Max being his own one man mythology, a drifter who just wants to be left alone but ends up getting swept up these crazy circumstances only to get chinks in his armor from time to time and acts heroic.

 

[kguillou]

So...with all this Mad Max craze I decided to check on the first one which is on Netflix now. I've been wanting to watch the Mad Max trilogy for a while now as apparently its heralded as some of the best 80's action films. Well, I just finished #1 and I.....honestly don't quite know what I watched.

I'm still processing my feelings, it wasn't the kind of movie I was expecting. It was very oddly paced and edited and if I didn't have the subtitles on I don't think I would''ve been able to understand a word anyone was saying (nothing to do with the Australian accent and everything to do with the actual words they were saying). The movie picked up considerably towards the end when the biker gang got attached Max's family, I feel like the film finally got my attention at that point; up until then I couldn't tell you what the plot of the film was.

I dunno, maybe I need to watch it again. I'm still gonna check out Road Warrior since supposedly that's the crown jewel of the series and I'm hoping its more entertaining than the first one.

 

[Octoberist]

The first one was an admirable effort but its disjointed and kinda boring. Trust me, Ive gave many chances. The Road Warrior is when the series hit its stride.

 

[CapedCrusader14]

Oh the first Mad Max really isn't that great at all, I've watched it twice now just to see if I might have been the wrong the first time I watched it but it is disjointed, lacking direction and definitely has its boring moments. The opening scene and when Max actually goes on his revenge (but way too extremely short for such a revenge story) crusade are the only scenes where the film really shines.

The Road Warrior is a masterpiece though.

 

[kguillou]

Glad to hear its not just me. Really looking forward to Road Warrior.