#Mad max film series movie#

#Mad max film series movie#

Hollywood has given up on original ideas, but in order for a reboot to work, the movie has to make you fall in love with its characters again. The writers are trading on his reputation from the previous movies, but since Mel Gibson is too old and too antisemitic to be in a major motion picture, the audience has to feign loyalty. He is unimportant, unlikable, and bizarrely inarticulate. The first problem with the movie is that Max is a superfluous character. The plot must serve its purpose in the genre.

Once everyone is safe Max leaves, even though he claims that his only concern is survival and this newly liberated Alopecia is the best and safest place to live within 160 days of travel. They do so and the Norse albino alopecia sufferers greet them as liberators. The plucky group eventually escapes to a salt desert, meets Furiosa’s many grandmothers, and then decides that, because they have even fewer resources this time, and because the motorcycles they are now driving are terrible weapons against the Mack trucks they must battle, they will drive back the way they came and liberate the masses. As one reviewer remarked, every women’s prison movie must have a shower scene Fury Road is no exception. But Max catches up with the beautiful women because they stop to hose themselves off, moisten their thin muslin bikinis, and rinse the sand off of their feet, despite standing in a desert and running for their lives. This is a world without gasoline or water, despite the desert mud. Pretty subtle, huh? But again, the albinos are definitely, absolutely, not allegorically Muslim in any way shape or form.) (Quagmire? Do you get it? You know, like Iraq and Afghanistan. The Norse Alopecians and their leader Bane, team up with another gang to give chase, but they all get stuck in the desert mud, prompting the well-dressed leader to condemn Bane for wasting their resources and getting them stuck in a quagmire. She has hidden these lanky waifs in her gasoline tanker and tricked the Alopecians into allowing her to turn left, instead of following the single straight road in the entire region. While the Norse albinos are focused on keeping Max contained, they don’t notice that Furiosa, the only woman in the community who has marketable skills, has stolen their supermodel breeders. The albino fanatics, who never sunburn despite living in a cloudless desert, live in a gender-segregated world and dream of becoming suicide bombers, proclaiming that killing others will open the gates of the afterlife. There is no reason why this one had to be so bad.įury Road joins Max as he is captured by albino alopecia sufferers who dream of dying and going to Valhalla, an afterlife they believe in solely to avoid any accusation that the movie’s writer is anti-Muslim. The first two Mad Max films were both well written and interesting. The best escapism is good escapism and there is no reason why entertainment should not be as well-made as all the other things we need to have a truly valuable human experience.

“It’s just a fun movie,” they’ll say, or “Mad Max, is just a living comic book.” But giving up the ghost at the outset is inexcusable. I recognize that many will reject plot as irrelevant in a Mad Max film. These are not the only requirements for a good movie, of course-acting and cinematography are tremendously important, too-but plot is complicated enough of a subject for one blog post. I’m going to focus on four criteria: the plot must serve its purpose in the genre, be consistent in the world it sets up, be well-crafted, and respect its characters.

Ultimately then, what I offer here is a meditation on what makes a defensible movie plot. There is an important difference between good and popular, and while I can’t argue that this film won’t make lots of money, I can explore its lack of quality. The female characters are neither strong nor feminist, and the story makes no sense, even on its own terms. It is a video game disguised as a movie, a terrible, terrible movie that doesn’t meet the minimal standards of science fiction. They are going to exclaim that it is an action-movie game changer that gives filmmakers permission to revel in the art of car chases and non-CGI stunts. People are going to tell you that Mad Max: Fury Road is a non-stop adrenaline thrill-ride with strong female characters and an excellent reboot of a beloved franchise whose time has come again.