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.
No comments:
Post a Comment