Two days before the release of Mad Max: Fury Road Rotten Tomatoes had it with a five star rating and NPR was toting it as a film worth seeing almost solely based on the work and character of Charlize Theron. I was sold. I adore Theron and, especially after Monster, would watch her eat a turkey sandwich in a dark alley just to see her on screen. So, I watched.
And waited to be impressed.
Then I started laughing, often uncontrollably. Mad Max #1 and the new addition seem to both reflect the core idea of the director. George Miller’s vision and cinematographic thrust are in full view, especially in scenes featuring the herky-jerky speed-up phenomenon often associated with Evil Dead movies and not seen since the first Mad Max.
Mad Max’s world seems carved out of Viking mythology with a dusting of the truly weird stuff they used to make the 2nd and 3rd Pitch Black films. This is largely hinted at throughout earlier films but here it is hooked on steroids and slammed in your face three dimensionally where possible. Cars are the religion here. When the ‘kamikaze’ fighters prepare to die they spray paint their teeth with silver to resemble the chromed out grills of prized automobiles from the dead world. However, the film isn’t about that. It is about redemption. On a more metaphorical note (and obvious one at that) it is about the relationship between what we prize, what we weaponize, and what we want to have sex with. In other words, it is a blatant reflection of the objectification of women (and other prized possessions) and the resulting perceptions of power that come from that.
This is not put forward in the subtle way we see in Ex Machina. In fact, in one scene there is a beautiful concubine wearing a white dress with her legs spread apart to create almost a basket effect. She’s counting bullets and dropping them one by one into her crotch-basket. The camera lingers there for some time. Later, an older de-sexified woman opens her purse and in it are all the seeds of creation. Literally. She talks about it.
I’m not sure I want to talk about it anymore. I’ll say this: The film is often jaw-droppingly beautiful. I said wow and that’s beautiful multiple times and if the set designer doesn’t walk away with an award then people need to be hit. Hard.
See the movie for the beauty, for the action, but not for the story. If you don’t take it terribly seriously you;ll have a good time and you’ll laugh.
Some Thoughts:
- There are a series of books and book come TV shows that swirl around the idea of global extinction and cryogenic freezing. These stories tie into the idea of a controlled release of humanity back into a world that was originally destroyed by said humanity. I wonder if this is a niche market or becoming a growing trend in the speculative genre.
- All apologies for not posting yesterday’s blog until this morning. I’d been away from the ‘net for a while–which is something I think we all ought to do from time to time–and blogged offline. Posted it before I started righting this one.
- 1835 marked the beginning of the end of bloodletting as a thing. This happened 17 years after a group of authors supposedly held a contest to see who could right the best horror story. The authors included Lord Byron (who was in part responsible for Babbage’s Analytical Engine…), Mary and Percy Shelley, and Joh Polidori. That contest resulted in Frankenstein and the earliest vampire tales. It is strange to me how everything is even tangentially connected.