Mad Max (1979 - Present)

RichardTheBruce

Mathis1 wrote: »

Creasy47 wrote: »

Mathis1 wrote: »

Creasy47 wrote: »

I've been rewatching the series while awaiting Furiosa and I honestly don't know how I always seem to forget just how brilliant The Road Warrior is. The first is another favorite of mine, pacing issues aside, but its sequel is a great template for how to do so successfully.

Thunderdome though? Still bad.

First half of 'Thunderdome' is not bad, but as soon as all those bloody kids appear!......
Still rate 'Mad Max 2' as the best of the lot!

It's fine up to that point but the introduction of the kids is when it all really comes down. Even the train bit at the end is like an afterthought, like they forgot they needed to do a chase sequence and injected it in in the waning moments.

Its not even a good chase, pales in comparison to the Max 2 finale!

Giving up the symphonic score undercuts the film. And directors George Miller and George Ogilvie took took the Max character too far too fast.

Can't know for sure if the late producer Byron Kennedy's presence would have resulted in a film that remained more true. At the same time who could have predicted that Mad Max could return as he did 30 years on?

talos7

I still think they should have revealed Tom Hardy’s “ Max” to be the Feral Child from Road Warrior, there are clues, and had Mel return as the authentic Max. That would have been epic.

Who knows, had Mel not the derailed his career…

Mathis1

RichardTheBruce wrote: »

Mathis1 wrote: »

Creasy47 wrote: »

Mathis1 wrote: »

Creasy47 wrote: »

I've been rewatching the series while awaiting Furiosa and I honestly don't know how I always seem to forget just how brilliant The Road Warrior is. The first is another favorite of mine, pacing issues aside, but its sequel is a great template for how to do so successfully.

Thunderdome though? Still bad.

First half of 'Thunderdome' is not bad, but as soon as all those bloody kids appear!......
Still rate 'Mad Max 2' as the best of the lot!

It's fine up to that point but the introduction of the kids is when it all really comes down. Even the train bit at the end is like an afterthought, like they forgot they needed to do a chase sequence and injected it in in the waning moments.

Its not even a good chase, pales in comparison to the Max 2 finale!

Giving up the symphonic score undercuts the film. And directors George Miller and George Ogilvie took took the Max character too far too fast.

Can't know for sure if the late producer Byron Kennedy's presence would have resulted in a film that remained more true. At the same time who could have predicted that Mad Max could return as he did 30 years on?

Well Miller had been saying for years that he was going to make another Max movie, it was stuck in development hell for a very long time!

RichardTheBruce

‘Furiosa’ First Reactions Say It’s a Stunning
Powerhouse (But No ‘Fury Road’)

George Miller's action-packed 'Mad Max 5' is drawing very strong early praise, with some qualifications. Will it jumpstart this summer's box office?
May 6, 2024 8:09pm
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/furiosa-first-reactions-critics-1235891965/

The first reactions are here for George Miller’s latest venture into the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The embargo broke for social media reactions to Furiosa, the eagerly anticipated prequel to the 2015 stunner Mad Max: Fury Road.

This new entry has Anya Taylor-Joy as Imperator Furiosa (taking over for Charlize Theron) and Chris Hemsworth as a devious warlord in a story that takes place 15 years before the previous film.

Early social reactions (below) can sometimes be a bit different (typically more enthusiastic) than official critic reviews, and surely there are many more to come soon. But based on the first batch Monday evening, Furiosa is a visual stunner with “ferocious, wild and unrelenting” action and a story that “spans decades” and boosts strong performances from the two leads.

The question going into the movie’s Memorial Day weekend launch is whether Miller’s epic can jump start the Hollywood box office after a sluggish few months, with disappointing returns from broad-appeal titles such as The Fall Guy and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Furiosa is eyeing a $45-50 million opening in early tracking.

And critics who compared the film to Fury Road (which set a franchise record by earning $380 million at the box office), did so with a bit of qualification. Furiosa is in “a different gear” and “won’t match Fury Road‘s splendor” in a way that “might frustrate” some audiences. One critic said Furiosa felt more like the first two Mad Max films (which is interesting, because when Fury Road was released some initially griped that the film wasn’t enough like the first two Mad Max films).

Different than is not necessarily bad, however, and this might be a case of viewers having a tough time shaking off their expectations when going into the theater (the Furiosa trailers, after all, sell the new film as being rather exactly like Fury Road). In any case, many consider Fury Road one of the best action films ever made — certainly one of the best this century — so any comparison, even one where Furiosa comes up a notch or two short, is still highly complimentary.

Check out some of the first reactions below. Tickets go on sale Wednesday. Furiosa opens in theaters May 24.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/furiosa-first-reactions-critics-1235891965/

RichardTheBruce

FURIOSA : A MAD MAX SAGA | Tickets on Sale Trailer (1:30)

chrisisall

Furiosa will be a smash hit, the biggest in the Mad Max movie world history! I will see it ASAP, and probably more than once.
OmG, I just jinxed it. Sorry, if I look forward to a movie it usually flops...

RichardTheBruce

I expected audiences in theaters plus later on video went to Bond school with CR. And business would be over the top unbelievable for QOS. But it did about the same box office.

Furiosa will be a great hit no doubt. Let's see how big.


Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) - U.S. TV Spot ('want') (0:30)

RichardTheBruce

George Miller explains what his live-
action Furiosa kept from the anime
version

https://www.polygon.com/24152155/furiosa-anime-vs-movie-george-miller-explains

Mad Max: Fury Road was meant to be paired with an anime prequel, but plans changed
By Rosie Knight May 8, 2024, 2:35pm EDT 12 Comments / 12 New

In a stylized character-poster image for Furiosa, the wasteland warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) stands against a blue-and-orange background, arms extended wide, a saw-bladed weapon in one hand, and a battered teddy bear strapped to his chest.

Image: Warner Bros.

For more than a decade, reports have been circulating about the original version of the upcoming action movie Furiosa — an anime series that director George Miller and writer Mahiro Maeda were working on at the same time they were developing Mad Max: Fury Road. At a Q&A after a recent press screening for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga at IMAX Headquarters outside of Los Angeles, Miller revealed that while the anime series eventually evolved into a live-action film, one small element survived from the defunct project, taken from early character sketches by Fury Road concept artist and anime stalwart Maeda.

Miller revealed that the script for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was finished before he even filmed Fury Road. “In order to tell that story cohesively, we had to know everything that happened in the time before [the movie started],” he said. “So we wrote a story about Furiosa from the time she was taken as a child, as she refers to in Fury Road, until she became the Imperator Furiosa. That ended up as a full screenplay, with concept art and so on. And the actors, the designers, and all the crew got the screenplay of that before shooting Fury Road.”

That unusual production route led to the supplementary screenplay being considered as an anime project, with Fury Road concept artist Maeda — best known for his work on Evangelion 3.0 and Kill Bill — creating designs for the series. His art has been shared online since 2015, when the film version of Furiosa was believed to be just as dead as the anime project. “We were thinking of making it as an anime, and that’s part of why it was so well-developed,” Miller said. “But then Fury Road was delayed, so there was no point in making an anime.”

The only element taken from that concept art that actually made it into the final Furiosa film: an unexpected accessory worn by Chris Hemsworth’s villainous wasteland warlord, Dementus. The imposing figure wears a teddy bear chained to his body, and places it on his vehicle dashboard as he rides around in his war motorcade. After being exposed to the elements of the Wasteland, it’s a pretty beat-up bear, but it’s a key part of his look. We won’t get into the teddy bear’s origin — that’s best experienced by watching Furiosa — but we can say its positioning highlights its importance.

“That teddy bear — [Maeda] started doing some illustrations and put that bear in,” Miller said at the post-screening Q&A. “And then that became a part of the story. So that was already there before Fury Road.”

The warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, in red-dyed beard and hair, with a long red cape and metal chestplate somewhat reminiscent of his MCU Thor costume, plus a teddy bear strapped to his chest) stands on a battlefield with an explosion behind him in the
Image: Warner Bros./YouTube

Juxtaposing the cuteness of the golden plush toy with Dementus’ chains-and-oiled-muscles dynamic feels very much like the kind of cartoony, comedic element an anime series would bring to these characters. It brings an unexpectedly cute element to the brutality of Furiosa’s war-torn landscape. The film’s aesthetic sensibilities also lean heavily into anime influences, from the characters’ dramatic action poses on the posters to the hyper-stylized desert-steampunk costuming.

The teddy bear isn’t just a stylistic flourish, either. It’s deeply connected to Dementus — and ultimately, to his relationship with Furiosa and the 18-year narrative the Furiosa movie lays out. It’ll all be clearer when you see how Hemsworth’s rough-and-ready teddy plays into the film’s post-apocalyptic action epic, when Furiosa hits theaters on May 24.

RichardTheBruce

Mad Max - 1950's Super Panavision 70 (1:07)

DeathToSpies84

I recently watched the original Mad Max. And it still holds up as a low budget gem.

Creasy47

DeathToSpies84 wrote: »

I recently watched the original Mad Max. And it still holds up as a low budget gem.

It really doesn't get going until the last 15-20 minutes but I do really, really enjoy it still. It's nice getting a taste of that world before it all truly crumbled and went to hell.

Mathis1

Creasy47 wrote: »

DeathToSpies84 wrote: »

I recently watched the original Mad Max. And it still holds up as a low budget gem.

It really doesn't get going until the last 15-20 minutes but I do really, really enjoy it still. It's nice getting a taste of that world before it all truly crumbled and went to hell.

But it does have a brillant opening action sequence which is nearly as good as anything in Max 2!

Creasy47

Mathis1 wrote: »

Creasy47 wrote: »

DeathToSpies84 wrote: »

I recently watched the original Mad Max. And it still holds up as a low budget gem.

It really doesn't get going until the last 15-20 minutes but I do really, really enjoy it still. It's nice getting a taste of that world before it all truly crumbled and went to hell.

But it does have a brillant opening action sequence which is nearly as good as anything in Max 2!

That opening is sublime, and while it does slow down after that, I've personally always enjoyed the human factor of it all, the family dynamic for Max, the bouts of hysteria and nerves that start infecting his fellow officers. It's really great on the drama front.

RichardTheBruce

‘Furiosa’ debuts in Cannes, giving Anya
Taylor-Joy a megawatt movie-star
moment
https://apnews.com/article/furiosa-cannes-film-festival-e4a5e418e729be231b6f4c39b8a9c592

‘Furiosa’ Fires Up Cannes With
6-Minute Standing Ovation for Anya
Taylor-Joy and Teary Chris
Hemsworth
https://variety.com/2024/film/festivals/anya-taylor-joy-furiosa-cannes-standing-ovation-mad-max-1235999808/

Chris Hemsworth gets emotional
during 6-minute standing ovation for
Furiosa at Cannes
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/mad-max-furiosa-cannes-chris-hemsworth-ovation-b2545804.html

Cannes: ‘Furiosa’ World Premiere Greeted With
7-Minute Standing Ovation
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/furiosa-world-premiere-cannes-standing-ovation-1235899745/

‘Furiosa’ Gets Nearly 8-Minute Standing Ovation
After Its Cannes World Premiere
https://deadline.com/2024/05/furiosa-reactions-world-premiere-ovation-cannes-1235916996/

chrisisall

Creasy47 wrote: »

Mathis1 wrote: »

Creasy47 wrote: »

DeathToSpies84 wrote: »

I recently watched the original Mad Max. And it still holds up as a low budget gem.

It really doesn't get going until the last 15-20 minutes but I do really, really enjoy it still. It's nice getting a taste of that world before it all truly crumbled and went to hell.

But it does have a brillant opening action sequence which is nearly as good as anything in Max 2!

That opening is sublime, and while it does slow down after that, I've personally always enjoyed the human factor of it all, the family dynamic for Max, the bouts of hysteria and nerves that start infecting his fellow officers. It's really great on the drama front.

Agreed- it's the best one in that way. Also, the cars look great and (relatively) clean.
I'm actually watering at the mouth for Furiosa. This may be his craziest film yet.

RichardTheBruce

George Miller in Cannes, France, on May 22, 2022.Violette Franchi—The New York Times/Redux

George Miller
Can’t Quit
Mad Max

By Eliana Dockterman

https://time.com/6975716/george-miller-furiosa-interview/
May 8, 2024 8:00 AM EDT

George Miller has spent more than 40 years swerving in and out of the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max. It’s an unpleasant place: dry, barren, and violent, but Miller can’t seem to stay away. And he had a compelling reason to return after 2015’s hugely successful Mad Max: Fury Road. In preparing to bring that story to the big screen, Miller wrote not just one movie, but three.

The first film was, of course, Fury Road. The film introduced a new protagonist, Furiosa, a one-armed road warrior played by Charlize Theron. She betrays the dictator she serves, a man obsessed with big muscles and bigger car engines, by smuggling his wives out of their prison. Furiosa ended up eclipsing the franchise’s titular hero, with Tom Hardy in the role made famous by Mel Gibson.

But in the nearly two-decade-long development process for Fury Road, Miller also sketched out two more films: an origin story for Furiosa and what happened to Max a year before Fury Road. Miller shared concept art for the Furiosa movie with Theron so she could better understand her character. “She said, ‘Oh, gosh, can we do the Furiosa story first?’” Miller remembers. But that train had left the station—or in the parlance of Mad Max, that war rig had left the Citadel.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga will finally debut on May 24, but with Anya Taylor-Joy replacing Theron as the solo lead—there’s no Max in this movie. The prequel chronicles 16 years of its hero’s life, from the moment she’s kidnapped as a child from her idyllic home by the henchmen of a crazed biker named Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth sporting a consciously comic prosthetic nose. (Miller’s character names, which include Rictus Erectus and Doof Warrior, are rarely subtle.) Furiosa spends the rest of the movie trying to return to her native land, though she’s occasionally distracted by fantasies of revenge.

FURIOSA
Anya Taylor-Joy in FuriosaJasin Boland—Warner Bros.

Expectations for Furiosa are sky-high after Fury Road won six Oscars and became a cultural phenomenon: its high-octane action scenes, shot largely without CGI, were so original and unrelenting that the movie left audiences dazed. Fury Road’s shoot was legendarily long and troubled—there’s an entire book chronicling the on-set feuds and chaos at the studio. Despite all that, Miller is upping the ante with Furiosa. He employed 200 stunt performers, topping Fury Road’s 150. And the new movie boasts a 15-minute sequence that took nearly nine months to shoot. “You can’t anticipate how that effort will be apprehended,” Miller says over Zoom from his native Australia. “It’s in the hands of the audience now.”

Fury Road is essentially a 120-minute extended chase sequence with almost no dialogue. Furiosa is structured more like a traditional hero’s journey. The cars sometimes stop and park. The characters occasionally have conversations. Early reactions to the trailer critiqued the film’s use of CGI. Some fans suggested Miller should have left his classic alone. But he couldn’t. The script was there. With red-tinted glasses that wouldn’t look out of place in the retrofuturistic world of Mad Max perched on his nose, Miller explains that he was determined to complete the story.

And that third film? The one that covers a year in Max’s life before the events of Fury Road? It’s tentatively titled The Wasteland, and Miller says it’s ready to go. “Depending on whether Furiosa gets traction or not, that movie is on the horizon,” he says. Will Hardy return to play Max? Miller smiles conspiratorially. “If the planets align.”

Furiosa has become an iconic action hero, up there with John McClane and Ellen Ripley. It’s hard to imagine anyone besides Theron embodying her. “With Charlize, the Venn diagram of actor and character overlapped a lot,” says Miller. He briefly considered using technology to make Theron appear younger. “But the de-aging just wasn’t working, even in the hands of really masterful filmmakers like Martin Scorsese on The Irishman and Ang Lee with Gemini Man,” he says.

Miller would have made the film sooner, but he spent years tied up in litigation with Warner Bros. over Fury Road. The director claimed the studio hadn’t paid his production company a promised bonus; the studio countersued because Miller delivered a 120-minute R-rated film instead of the 100-minute PG-13 movie he was contracted to make. (The suit went into arbitration, and Miller and WB are partnering again on Furiosa.) “By the time it came to it, we had to go with a younger actor,” Miller says.
still from FURIOSA

(L-R) Anya Taylor-Joy, Tom Burke, and Chris Hemsworth in Furiosa
Jasin Boland—Warner Bros.

Taylor-Joy is a slighter if equally mighty Furiosa. Miller asked the actor to send him an audition tape and let her choose from three monologues, including Peter Finch’s famous speech from Network in which he unravels on air. Taylor-Joy recorded the anchor’s ravings directly to camera. Though she would speak very few lines in Furiosa, she conjured the intensity needed to convey the mentality of a survivor living in a depraved world.

It may seem bold that this franchise, defined by monster trucks and machismo, now has a female hero at its center. Fans spent years arguing about the message behind Fury Road. “There was a cohort of males who said, ‘Oh, you can’t have a female action hero,’” says Miller. “There was a cohort of feminists who said, ‘Why does she need Max at all?’”

But for Miller, choosing to make Furiosa the hero of a Mad Max movie was a practical decision, not an ideological one. “When you tell a story, you don’t say the story is going to be about this particular theme,” he says. He conceived Fury Road during a dream on a transpacific flight. But he needed characters to put inside the cars.

“In the case of Fury Road, I thought, ‘What if the MacGuffin, the thing everyone is chasing, were human?’ And that led to the wives being stolen from the warlord. And it couldn’t be a man taking the wives because that would be a different story. It would have to be a woman.” And so Furiosa was born.

Miller has always been a visual filmmaker. If Furiosa was conceived because Miller needed a hero to drive the war rig of his dreams, Max was born from grisly images Miller saw in real life. Before he became a filmmaker, Miller was an ER doctor who treated the victims of car accidents in rural Queensland where, in the 1970s, driving laws were lax and the consequences horrific. That gore inspired 1979’s Mad Max. Made on a shoestring budget, the production couldn’t afford a photocopy machine for the storyboard pictures. “I wrote out descriptions of every scene and every camera move for everyone working on the movie,” says Miller. “The screenplay was 274 pages long for a 90-minute movie.”

The film became a sensation. The original Mad Max held the Guinness World Record for most profitable movie of all time. Miller completed a trilogy with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985. He took a detour into children’s films, including scripting the classic Babe and directing its sequel, Babe: Pig in the City.
Everett Collection (3); Warner Brothers

When he was ready to turn to Fury Road, a series of calamities delayed shooting, from 9/11—and Miller’s decision in its aftermath to pivot to the Oscar-winning animated film Happy Feet—to a rainstorm that turned the barren desert where Miller had planned to shoot into a flowering oasis. The cast and crew filmed for 138 grueling days in the desert. Theron and Hardy have both said it was a frustrating and stressful experience: Theron has said they had no script, just pictures, and Miller responded to any direct questions about the plot with thesis-length answers. (During our interview he apologized multiple times for his lengthy, discursive responses.)

Miller describes Fury Road as an “anthropological documentary.” The audience catches glimpses of specific behavior, like soldiers called War Boys spraying chrome paint into their mouths. “We get the sense that the spray paint has a meaning to the boys,” says Miller. “But you have to pick up on the run because we never stop to explain.”

Furiosa fills in the blanks of Fury Road. And Fury Road, a movie with famously few lines of dialogue, left a lot of blanks. How did Furiosa lose her arm? You’ll find out. How was her war rig built? Get ready for a montage.

Part of what distinguished Fury Road from the other franchise films of its era was Miller’s refusal to weigh down the movie with lore. But Miller chafes at the notion that Furiosa could be accused of fan service. “In terms of choosing what to tell of her story, it wasn’t sitting down and making a shopping list,” he says. “It was character-driven.”

For all the dirt that Miller’s tricked-out motorbikes kick up, his films are ultimately character studies—and Furiosa is an indelible one.

RichardTheBruce

Why George Miller Is So Excited for You to See
Furiosa
The Fury Road director explains that people's reactions to his movies are his favorite part of the process.

https://gizmodo.com/furiosa-expectations-george-miller-mad-max-fury-road-1851483253
By Germain Lussier

George Miller on the set of Furiosa. Image: Warner Bros.

Think about the expectations. Nine years ago, you released maybe one of the best films ever made. It won a ton of Oscars, made solid money at the box office, and has since only risen in respect and reverence. And now, you’re going back. Not just to that world, but to that story and those specific characters.

That’s the task George Miller set out with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, his follow-up to the iconic Mad Max: Fury Road. Recently, io9 had the pleasure of sitting down with the legendary filmmaker and ask him if he felt he’d achieved that same bar with Furiosa and how he thought people were going to react to it. His answer was fascinating. You can watch it below and read after that.

“I hope so,” Miller told io9 when asked if he lived up to expectations. “You don’t know. The truth is it’s really interesting to me. It’s one of the excitements. One of the things that keeps me doing it is that. You tell a story. You bring your best instincts and skills forward into the process, and you tell the story, and then you kind of push it out into the world to see what people will make of it. And you can’t tell. You can’t predict it. And I found that’s always been the case.”