I saw this movie with a friend tonight.
Phenomenal action scenes, especially if that was mostly achieved with stunts and practical effects. They kind of blew their load on the first big chase scene though. The ones after that were still very good, but the finale was far from the climax.
Visually stunning, choreographed brilliantly.
A lot of cringeworthy acting and dialogue.
Really quite shittily done characterisation. I didn't learn who these characters were from the action. There was barely anything to learn about them.
The thing that drove it into the ground for me were the two character turns in the middle of the movie that came out of thin air. Mad Max is about to drive away and leave the girls to either die or go back into sex slavery, doesn't give the slightest shit. He only takes them at Furiosa's insistence, who he needs. Two seconds later, he's unshakably on their side and risking his ass for their lives for the rest of the movie, with no explanation or motivation to suddenly do a complete about-turn (other than the previously hinted "oh, there's a girl in his head haunting him for not saving her/others", though that didn't stop him showing them absolutely no regard ten seconds ago). Same goes, in fact even more so, for the suicidally indoctrinated nutter who then, for the minutest of reasons, sides with the good guys he was just prepared to murder and massacres his old mates from then on.
Also, as much as the guitar guy was fun, the director was waaaay over obsessed with him. It was like he thought he was onto something brilliant with that guy, and was throwing him in front of the camera as much as he possibly could. When the guitar bungees right into the screen and hovers for like five seconds at the end, I was like, I GET IT, THAT DELIGHTFULLY CORNY EXTREMELY MINOR CHARACTER IS A STROKE OF GENIUS, NOW STOP OVERSELLING IT.
Lots of people are calling it a feminist film (I think it's hilarious how "men's rights" people are up in arms about it), and though it does have some of those elements, the fact that half of the female characters in the movie are (a) half-naked and (b) utterly useless makes me call bullshit on that.
I'd vaguely read something about it being feminist and MRAs hating it before seeing it. I would never have noticed anything if I hadn't, I doubt, but I could see how people could read that stuff into it. The plot is women fleeing male-dominated society (with every reason to in the context of the film, mind you) which, they point out, has "killed the world". Every man I can recall was either a mutant, a psychotic brute, or animalistic, and every woman I can recall wasn't. (Dunno how much that lines up with the earlier films and the general universe though, I saw the first movies so long ago, I don't remember them). Hell, I even couldn't help but notice that Max's dialog, that of the male 'hero', was just wordless, almost ape-like grunting on tons of occasions, and thought, "ha, that would play right into the hands of someone convinced the movie was anti-men".
Topic: Mad Max: Fury Road - 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (Read 9831 times)
