Mad Max: Fury Road--A Welcome Return to Awesomeness

I was watching The Blues Brothers the other day and about halfway through I thought to myself, “Why aren't movies this good any more?”  Crazy, hectic, inventive, packed with one good scene after another, entertaining pretty much from the first frame to the last.  I'll freely admit to a personal bias, but I feel like movies used to be much more awesome and now, with the most advanced technology in the history of the world at the disposal of any production company that can afford it, I find my attention wandering even during the big highlight moments, when you're supposed to be glued to the screen and committing to memory images you're intended to discuss at length with your friends days later.  Does anyone still do that?  Maybe—I probably don't get out enough to know.  Sure, every now and then something special comes along:  The Lord of the Rings trilogy, even if it did get weak by the third movie; The Dark Knight; Gravity, which, though people seem to be fond of dumping on it for its inaccuracies, is destined to become a cult classic for its breakneck pace alone; Ip Man, Ong Bak 2, maybe District 9.  I'm not saying there isn't anything new that's good, it just seems to happen so much less often these days.

Part of the reason I feel this way is because I'm middle aged.  The older you get, the harder you are to impress, but I was plenty impressed while rewatching The Blues Brothers, a movie from my favorite movie decade, the Eighties.  The Shining, The Thing, Robocop, The Terminator, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark—a lot of my all time favorite movies came out of that decade, partly because most of my adolescence happened then, but also because—and I really believe this—movies were just better then in many ways.  They were more real, they were more solid, they were much less bland.  The reliance on CGI today means more movies that look flat, lack a genuine depth of field, look more like cartoons than live action, and all seem to blend together.

Among my favorites from the Eighties is The Road Warrior, the Mel Gibson/George Miller classic that redefined action on four wheels.  It invented an alternate universe of aftermath, a world forged out of the remains of a dead one that informs pretty much every post-apocalyptic film you see today.  It was fresh then, often imitated but never equaled.

 

Well, until now.  George Miller is back with his fourth venture into the Mad Max universe, and he has thoroughly, outrageously, and quite insanely outdone himself.  Mad Max: Fury Road is just that, mad and furious to the core, the most savage iteration of Miller's post-apocalypse, as brutal as a baseball bat to the teeth.  The level of inventiveness taking place here is beyond rare;  after all this time, I've gotten used to never expecting it.  Every few minutes there's a weird visual idea or sight gag, enough to fill ten other movies:  cars rigged with buzzsaws, bullets for teeth, breast-milk farms, pole vaulting punk rock car pirates, weird mutants, war trucks built out of several other vehicles, a sightless metal guitarist on bungie cords.  Miller has created a believable, plausible, fully realized fictional world, a culture cobbled together from the bits and pieces left over after whatever global catastrophe that wiped out civilization took place.

Mel Gibson's a bit old for this kind of thing (not to mention a bit unpopular), and Tom Hardy in the title role is a good replacement.  His Max is a natural progression for the character, half-wild and crazy, plagued by memories of the past and the daughter he couldn't save (more than once the movie refers to events from the first Mad Max, even inserting a few frames from a death scene in that film, making Fury Road feel more like a direct sequel to it than the two that came after).  Interestingly, the movie isn't really about him.  Charlize Theron's character, the one-armed Imperator Furiosa, has at least as much screen time, and it's her story that we find ourselves more invested in.  Max is just trying to survive, reluctantly lending a hand (not unlike in The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome) to help a group of women escape the control of the heinous Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, the villain from the original Mad Max) and a life of forced breeding. 

The story is simplicity itself, because why should it be anything else?  Mad Max movies are car chase movies, and man do you get a ton of that.  Crashes and explosions dance around the screen like whirling dervishes on fire, at such a rate and degree of cinematic mastery that you can only shake your head at the technical expertise and level of production design unfolding in front of your eyes.  And most of it, truly the vast majority of it, is real.  There are CGI shots here and there, but the preponderance of the demolition shown is accomplished live to camera.  Compare that to the video game cars of the Fast and the Furious movies and their phony digital physics, or the unengaging overwrought nonsense of 300.   Nothing beats the real thing, and I hope Fury Road acts as an object lesson to Hollywood that CGI, while it has its place, just doesn't cut it when it comes to making lasting entertainment.  When a movie makes you think, “How did they keep those stunt people from getting killed?”, you know you're seeing something great.

This is the best of all the Mad Max films.  That's not an exaggeration, it's a fact.  Miller had access to a great cast and production team, and he used them to their fullest potential.  That Fury Road took so long to get made—I remember reading about Miller's struggles to get it produced years ago—says a great deal about the infuriating imbecility of the movie industry.  Man of Steel had a sequel greenlit as soon as it was in theaters, but this took forever?  Jesus.              

Avengers: Age of Ultron and Related Rambling

I read a review of Avengers 2 on the EW website a couple of days before seeing it and the reviewer made a big deal out of how Marvel movies are all starting to look the same. No surprise there—this and the previous Avengers movie were directed by Joss Whedon, Jon Favreau did the first two Iron Man movies (followed by a third not done by him that nevertheless looks like it was), and Captain America: The Winter Soldier was clearly designed to fit an overall aesthetic dictated by those earlier Marvel installments. Marvel has made it clear they want everything in the MCU, barring the Netflix Daredevil series, to fit pretty much the same style and tone, even to the point that they rejected Edgar Wright's treatment of Ant-Man allegedly because it didn't fit with that vision (I'm very curious to see how that movie turns out—the ads make it look a lot like the plot is almost identical to the first Iron Man, complete with a villain who wears a supersuit like the hero and fights him using similar powers).

The real issue with any of this stuff is whether you have fun while you're watching it, and whether you'll later go back to see it again. I've watched the first Avengers twice, would happily see it a couple more times in the space of the next year or so. Same with The Winter Soldier, a fast-paced and witty combination of James Bond and superheroes that is maybe among the most memorable giant-budget Hollywood extravaganzas in recent memory (I'd certainly watch it before sitting through the Hobbit movies again). Really, Marvel has done something absolutely remarkable with the slew of movies they've released since 2008. They've found a nearly perfect balance of humor, suspense, and drama (with some missteps—the two Thor movies, though still pretty diverting, leave a lot to be desired), they make movies that are fun and colorful instead of dark and “gritty”—a lesson the makers of the upcoming DC films would do well to learn from, especially in regards to how they handle a classically light and fun character like Superman—and they come together into a total intra-narrative arc that for the most part works and makes sense, as long as you suspend some disbelief about how Thor or the Hulk don't help out Captain America in his movie, or why not even Black Widow or Hawkeye lend Iron Man a hand in the third installment in his series.

So what does all that mean for Avengers: Age of Ultron? It means I'm looking forward to seeing what they do in future films based on what they've done here. It's not great, but it's definitely good. There's a ton of stuff going on in this movie; they pile one character on top of another, even introducing a new hero, The Vision, in the last act. Most critics will tell you this is bad storytelling; anyone who's read Marvel comics knows they loved to pack tons of characters into their stories, sometimes into two or three connected panels, and that Age of Ultron is just staying true to the feel of its source material. I'm not the world's biggest comics guy, so I'm no purist, but I get the impression that what happens in this movie is pretty friendly to long-time fans.

My only gripe is there isn't enough Hulk. Apart from the Fantastic Four, it was early Hulk comics that I had the most familiarity with in my childhood, and the two stand-alone Hulk movies weren't much (though I don't hate the second one). I've heard some people say that the Hulk doesn't translate well into solo films—after all, he's a grunting monster with no vocabulary who does little more than wreck things. Actually, there have been many versions of the Hulk over the years, including some with the mind of Bruce Banner intact, or with a fully formed, non-Bruce Banner personality that is nonetheless articulate and cunning. How hard would it be to make that possible in the MCU? I know the real reason they're not going to do a stand-alone Hulk any time soon is because Universal owns the rights to those (I'm assuming Universal has a deal with Marvel Studios similar to the one Marvel just hammered out with Sony in order to bring Spiderman into the Avengers and thus save the character from being made forever lame in one lackluster Sony production after another), but there appears to be a great deal of fretting about how to handle the Hulk if the possibility of a stand-alone film ever arises. Again, I don't see why. I kept expecting Scarlet Witch to zap the Hulk with some kind of telepathic magic and make him lucid—it would have been an easy way to bring a new quality out in the character, add some interest, and probably wouldn't have interfered with the upcoming story arcs Marvel has planned for its next films. But maybe having a dumb Hulk provides a little balance; every other member of the Avengers is a machine gun of funny quips, and a non-witty Hulk is a decent counterpoint to that. Still, a good Hulk movie is more than doable, and as a fan of the character I'd like to see one.

The filmmakers are also doing a great job of giving the individual Avengers a passable dramatic progression. There's a relationship between Banner and Black Widow, the kernel of discord between Captain America and Iron Man that is no doubt intended to lead us into the story for Captain America 3, a family for Hawkeye (not to mention several nods to fans pointing out how funny it is to have a guy whose only power is being really good at shooting arrows on a team with people sporting immeasurable strength, the gift of flight, and unbeatable martial arts skill), and the rebirth of S.H.I.E.L.D. Yeah, it all speeds by in a blur, but you can't say this movie gives you a chance to be bored, something you definitely can't say about all Hollywood blockbusters. Also, James Spader's voice work as Ultron is fantastic; nuanced, funny, sarcastic, and fresh for a character of this type, who in the past would have spoken in clichéd, doom-filled declarations (you know the kind I mean: “Really, Stark, do you think you and your team of do-gooders can stop me?!).

That's probably the greatest achievement of the MCU. They've altered the expectations for superhero movies. The Dark Knight did a lot as well (even if that trilogy is responsible for the dreary look of Man of Steel and, if the current ad is any indication, its sequel), but Marvel has really raised the bar. Superhero movies have to be smart now, they have to appeal to well-read, educated fans as well as the usual movie-going dimwits, they have to have respect for the history of the comics they're adapting. That never used to be the case—remember Tim Burton's Batman films? Or Joel Schumacher's? Or Superman III and IV? Superheroes were treated as trash for children, with no respect for the fact that many of the fans were adults who had not only grown up with the characters, but were reading comics that had grown up with them. That has changed now, pretty much for the better. Although eventually, this superhero movie fad will burn out. What will replace it is a complete mystery, but until then, we'll very likely end up with even more good to go along with the bad. Most of the good, its safe to say, will probably be the product of Marvel.