Franchise Chronicles: Mad Max: Fury Road

 By Edward O'Hare

 

Our first film saga reaches its culmination today on “The Franchise Chronicles,” with Mad Max: Fury Road (1985). Most film series crash and burn at the end but this may be the one exception where the best was saved for last. After taking a break for three decades to work on some serious dramas like Lorenzo’s Oil and family fair like the Babe and Happy Feet films, George Miller was ready to take us back to the world of Max. After two failed attempts to get the film off the ground with Mel Gibson, Miller eventually recast Tom Hardy in the title role and gave us a film that reached a new pinnacle for special effects and serves as one of the decade’s prime examples of imaginative storytelling.

Each Mad Max installment has had a bigger and bigger budget. Well it doesn’t get much bigger than Fury Road. Every new locale is bursting with imagination from the caves of the Citadel to the pounding sun of the road to the mist of the quagmire. The costumes and vehicles are more outrageous than ever. Basically, it’s awesome! I don’t know what else to tell you! Like most other stand-out contemporary action pictures, it employs CGI effects but does not overuse them. Almost all of the stunts are practical and this makes them feel more effective because you can sense the danger.

The main knock against Beyond Thunderdome was the disjointed narrative. Miller and co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris avoid that mistake here by simplifying the story and providing more developed characters. The nuts and bolts of the plot bear much resemblance to The Road Warrior, just instead of protecting a town from armored maniacs, Max finds himself helping a small group of women escape from a town full of armored maniacs. Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) is a souped-up evolution of Humungus so full of power it is making him rot.

Once again Max is a mostly passive character at the start, getting captured and turned into a “blood bag” for Joe’s radiation riddled minions. His previous experiences have taken their toll. Max is haunted by the voices of those he could not save. This element seems to fade away part-way through the story and I wish they played it up more. In true Max fashion, he is initially out for himself and tries to leave every chance he gets, until he realizes that the right thing to do is help the women and even go as far as to liberate the entire Citadel from Joe’s tyranny. Once the day is saved, Max does not take a bow or settle down. As always, he fades into the crowd and presumably back to the road, where the next adventure awaits.

Of course, I am burying the lead. I can hear you screaming at me for taking this long to mention Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa. Well, slow your roll. I love her just as much as you do. I’m just doing a thing here. I had to talk about the evolution stuff before I got to the cool new elements: the new characters. Max was always a passive character but this is the first time since Jim Goose in the first Mad Max that another character becomes the main focus of the film. An argument can be made that this is more Furiosa’s movie than Max’s. Her arc is more developed and quite compelling.

Attention should also be paid to Nicholas Hoult’s turn as Nux. His dark past and path to redemption are haunting and tragic. He is the saddest example of what happens to children born into this world after the Apocalypse. A warped extension of the Feral Kid, Nux’s disillusionment comes too late and he sacrifices himself in the hope that the others can find freedom in this living hell.

There have been rumblings that George Miller has another Mad Max planned that would include Furiosa. Theron has said she wants to return and Hardy is also up for it. As of this writing there has been no official announcement and Miller has found himself in legal battles with Warner Bros. concerning Fury Road’s financials. There can never be enough Mad Max in the world, but if this is the last film, it is a fitting ending that serves as a perfect crescendo for Miller’s vision.

So ends the first chapter in “The Franchise Chronicles.” I won’t spoil our next conquest yet. Let’s just say it’s going to be “spooky.”

The Franchise Chronicles: Mad Max: BEYOND THUNDERDOME

 By Edward O'Hare

It’s dying time this week on the Franchise Chronicles as we step into Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), George Miller’s third venture into the crazy world of Max. Once again Miller ups the ante visually but the story gets a little muddled. This movie may not be as impressive as The Road Warrior (few films can be), but I feel like it has been unfairly made the whipping boy of this franchise and overall it is still a great accomplishment that people should see.

The stakes gets raised again in this film and the world-building continues. If Road Warrior had a big Australian budget, Thunderdome got the big Hollywood budget and an American star to boot in Tina Turner as Aunty Entity. All of the green pastures have now become desert wastelands. Yet each new locale has its own specific look and feel. Bartertown is a horrible, mud-filled mill. The Waiting Ones’ forest camp has a Neverland vibe. The harsh yellows of the road feel more unforgiving than ever. My personal favorite is the night desert Max wanders in and how the cool blue moonlight beams off the white sand creating images that look almost painterly.

It's never too hot for chain mail.

The only aesthetic element that does not seem to jive with this series is the heavy use of the Saxophone in the first act. If you remember, Max’s wife played the Sax in the first film but its use here does not feel like a conscious reference to that moment and this world has become so “metal” that R&B feels out of place. Of course, I realize that Turner is an R& B singer and headlines the soundtrack. This may be one of the first clear compromises that Miller had to make. Maybe he was just a fan? Who knows?

The Jugger-not.

Max is not the only character to carry over from the last film. Bruce Spence returns as the Gyro Captain, who not only gets promoted to an airplane pilot, but also gets a first name: Jedediah. Jedediah has a young assistant he calls Junior that looks suspiciously like the Feral Kid but is played by a different actor (Adam Cockburn). However the narration at the end of Road Warrior makes clear that the Feral Kid never met Max again. Do they not recognize Max? Are they completely different characters? In the end it does not really matter. Miller continues in the spirit of the franchise by only revealing what’s necessary and does not get bogged down in exposition. He trusts the viewer to figure it out for themselves.

I stated before that I felt the story got muddled and I mean that literally. It seems as if Miller took two separate Mad Max stories and mashed them together. The first is Bartertown. Max winds up in a backwards town run by a power-hungry debutante, takes down a big dumb guy and rescues a small smart guy. The second is the Waiting Ones. Max encounters a group of children who believe him to be their savior, gets tempted with authority, leaves some behind and leads the others to a so-called promised land. Either one of those stories would be compelling on their own. Put together, they feel disjointed.

Best Substitute teacher, ever.

The first act is both a condensed and amped up version of the last film. All of the set pieces are there. The vehicles are crazier and the action is just as powerful. The second act has a very different vibe. I wonder if fans in 1985 treated the Waiting Ones the way Star Wars fans treated the Ewoks. From a certain point-of-view it feels like the filmmakers went “Well they loved one feral kid. Let’s throw in a whole pack of them!” For some reason these scenes reminded me of the weird TV movies the Disney Channel pumped out in the 1990s. That is not a knock. Everyone thinks of Disney as squeaky clean but many of their properties have a dark underbelly to them. These aspects make the film feel more family friendly (or as family friendly as a post-apocalyptic action movie can be). Watching this it started to make sense to me that George Miller would move on from here to the Babe and Happy Feet movies.

I also noticed that the third act tones down the carnage a bit and some of the deaths are not as grizzly as they might have been in the first two installments. This may have been because kids were involved or it might have been Warner Bros. trying to soften the film a bit for American audiences. This is the only film in the series rated PG-13 instead of R and that definitely takes away some of the classic Mad Max edge.

While this film is not perfect it is definitely still Mad Max. It takes the franchise in a different direction and many of the choices are questionable but I guarantee this film will leave you thinking about it for a long time afterwards. Next week we jump ahead 30 years to a new pinnacle for this franchise on the “Fury Road.”


Edward O’Hare, nickname TBD, has been poking around the deep caverns of pop culture for some years now. His hobbies include making Starfleet org charts and badgering people who haven’t seen the Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial from 1941. He one day dreams of teaching Bill Simmons that superheroes and pro athletes are not all that different.

The Franchise Chronicles: THE ROAD WARRIOR

By Edward O'Hare

 The Franchise Chronicles moves into high gear today. Last week, I reviewed the first Mad Max installment and today I am going to blaze through The Road Warrior (1981) or Mad Max 2 if you saw this outside of America, directed by George Miller. My goal for this series is to examine how a franchise evolves over time and since this is the first sequel I am covering, I feel like it is the first real test for this mission. The two things that really hit home with me during this viewing were the filmmakers’ success at world-building and raising the stakes.

The only real reference to the events of the previous film comes in the form of a prologue montage of scenes mixed with smoky filters, stock footage and voice-over from some guy we don’t know yet. It paints the film in a very different light. The narrator goes into detail about how World War 3 ravaged the planet and led to an oil shortage that threw society into chaos. This is all new information. Some of it was implied in Mad Max but none of it was spelled out (it didn’t have to be). I have to applaud the restraint used in this opening. It is just enough connective tissue to link both films but still allows each of them to stand on their own.

Once the movie starts in earnest, we can immediately tell that a fair amount of time has passed and the world has gotten much crazier. The production and costume design are taken to the next level. Everything looks like a bunch of bikers took aspects of steampunk aesthetic and made it look cool. We have dune buggies, a gyrocopter, flamethrowers the size of spotlights and hairstyles I only ever thought existed in ‘80s cartoons. It’s as if Mad Max was a pilot presentation George Miller put out saying “Look how insane I can be with no money. Imagine what I could do if I had an actual budget.” Then he got that budget and made Road Warrior.

It is also worth noting that Miller did not let all of his new toys distract him from telling a compelling story. We meet a bunch of new characters like the Feral Kid and the Gyro Captain. It’s funny how this is the kind of movie where you don’t really need to bother learning anyone’s names. It’s perfect for anyone’s Grandpa with a terrible memory. Max himself is once again reserved and passive for most of the film, only entering the fray once it is advantageous for him and he does not attack the marauders until after they have mangled his car and killed his dog.

The thrust of the story is very simple: Max needs gas and learns about a group of nice people with tons of it that need protection from a group of bad people. The magic comes from the way Miller builds on those elements and soups them up with non-visual storytelling. We get a handful of jaw-dropping set pieces, most of which involve Max getting in a vehicle and racing with Humungus and his followers.

There are two specific elements I want to focus on that I feel this film uses masterfully and I wish contemporary films used more often: Wide landscape shots and practical stunts. This movie was shot in the middle of nowhere and Miller uses that to show the scope of the action and the sparseness of this world. In one frame we can see Max staking out the refinery from the rocks AND the marauders attacking from the road AND off in the distance is nothing but green pasture for as far as the eye can see. This also helps to elevate and extend the final chase. We start with about a dozen hellfire cars racing to catch the tanker and then gradually close in until all the action rests on Max and the Feral Kid scrapping to keep control of the cab. Suddenly we move back out to see the action from the gyrocopters perspective as the villagers pull up to assist Max. Then we go back inside the cab and the scene gets a second wind before racing to the big finish.

Watching this for the first time in a few years, I can see how The Road Warrior influenced an entire generation of action movies that followed. It still holds up today and I would point to it as one of only a handful of sequels that surpasses its predecessor. Next week: THUNDERDOME!

Edward O’Hare, nickname TBD, has been poking around the deep caverns of pop culture for some years now. His hobbies include making Starfleet org charts and badgering people who haven’t seen the Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial from 1941. He one day dreams of teaching Bill Simmons that superheroes and pro athletes are not all that different.

The Franchise Chronicles: MAD MAX

By Edward O'Hare

Welcome to the first installment of The Franchise Chronicles, a new series of articles where I sit through every entry in a film franchise by myself (because Bill said thanks, but no thanks) and write down my immediate reactions for all of you to nosh on (I promise it’s all for you guys). My goal for these pieces is to get to the core of what works about these sagas and explore how they evolve over time.

First up in our journey is George Miller’s dystopic saga about a righteous man and the unforgiving road: Mad Max. The first installment is much smaller in scope than its sequels, but still packs all of the bite.

Mel Gibson’s first adventure as Max Rockatansky has very modest production values and the sparse budget works to the film’s advantage. At times is almost seems as if director George Miller just had access to a handful of friends and few muscle cars. The early scenes are a touch reminiscent of Roger Corman’s motorcycle romps of the 1970s, however, Miller’s innovative style and the acting performances take this to a whole new level. (Coincidentally, the film was distributed by American-International Pictures, who also released many Corman classics.)

The bad guys roll in fast and the starkness of the town makes them feel even more threatening. The town feels isolated, so far off in the bush that civilization has pretty much abandoned it. The police force is running so lean and pathetic that it feels like some cops join more out of vanity or glory, than actual duty.

For a large part of the film, it doesn’t even feel like Max is the main character. He looms in the distance, as Joe Goose (Steve Bisley) does some heavy lifting, dealing with Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and Johnny the Boy (Tim Burns), taking the gang’s mischief much more personally. It is this obsession that leaves Joe lying in a hospital bed, wishing he was dead.

Sure, Max establishes his prowess as a cop in the film’s opening sequence, but I did not really connect with him as a character until he saw Joe in the hospital, covered in burn marks. I also love the fact that Miller neglects to show Joe’s charred face, but instead lets the viewer imagine it based on the horror of Max’s reaction. Joe’s condition makes Max realize the futility of the police force and convinces him to take his wife and child and get out of there.

The rest of the film slowly leads Max to the conclusion that, while the cops may be useless, someone needs to step up and protect this world from the garbage. Side note: I think Max and Jessie (Joanne Samuel) are terrible parents. This is evidenced by the fact that we see plenty of moments of them enjoying the beach and their child is nowhere to be found. I like that Max wears all white during this part of the film. It is a simple way to emphasize that he thinks he is pure and free but will eventually have to don black leather again to take care of business.

The real tragedy of Max losing his family is that it almost feels necessary for the safety of this crazy world. The climax of this film happens very fast, but the journey that we have been on with Max makes us truly savor in his vengeance. The moment the credits roll, I was ready to follow Max for another 10 movies.

I hope you've enjoyed this initial trip down the franchise highway. Next week, we will find out what happens when Max needs to stop for gas.

Edward O’Hare, nickname TBD, has been poking around the deep caverns of pop culture for some years now. His hobbies include making Starfleet org charts and badgering people who haven’t seen the Adventures of Captain Marvel movie serial from 1941. He one day dreams of teaching Bill Simmons that superheroes and pro athletes are not all that different.