Mad Max Fury Road (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, May 31, 2016, 21:54 (3101 days ago) @ Kermit

Maybe it was seeing it on the small screen instead of in the theaters,

I'll change that maybe to almost definitely. It's on HBO this month and I stopped watching it after ten minutes. I'll wait until I have my PSVR faux IMAX screen.

but Mad Max Fury Road did nothing for me. It was pointless and the motivations were dumb. Even the struggles they faced (driving through the swamp, for example) were somehow fully skippable on the return trip. The action was good, and I could tell that some of the shots would have been epic feeling on a larger screen, but the whole thing felt kind of "meh" to me, in part because I really didn't give a shit about the characters at all. They could have killed Max in the first scene and it wouldn't have changed the plot at all. He was such an anti-hero that he actually didn't even need to exist.

Um, Furiosa is the hero. Duh.

I know, but she also didn't really have a journey. At the beginning of the film, she wants to help the girls get to a free land where they'll be safe. Along the way she realizes that free land is the one they started in, sans John the Immoran, but still... Her mind is made up from word one and it doesn't change at all.

I said something like this already. It's not really my kind of movie. (I like talkers, and this is an anti-talking movie.) Locke is my kind of Tom Hardy road movie, but I still think MMFR is cinema at it's best--doing what only cinema can do--especially when someone with a real creative vision is allowed to follow through. That's rare these days. MMFR is head and shoulders above any Marvel movie I've seen. I understand reacting against the hype--I'm usually in that camp, saying that the latest greatest thing isn't all that. In this case, though, I think the critics are right.

I don't mind a non-talky movie (La Jeté, or if you want something more people have actually seen, The Insider), but this was an intentionally non-thinky movie. The spectacle was great, and the art direction was great, and the world was well thought out and the characters were... boring. Really, really boring. They didn't really relate well to one another, only the one guy had anything like an arc, and the "epic" nature of it was kind of lost in the very deliberate and direct progression of the story.