Mad Max Fury Road (2015)

By the time you read this you'll probably have seen Mad Max Fury Road, George Miller's astounding return to the franchise he gave creative life to in 1979. And if you haven't… for once believe the hype.To echo the plaudits, MMFR is a huge, tattooed and scarified middle finger to just about every major studio blockbuster that claimed to be an 'action' movie in the last 30 years. It really is that good.

Releasing the movie a mere couple of weeks after the confused mess that is two and a half hours of Joss Whedon's studio exec-hamstrung (if you believe his recent whining in interviews) Avengers: Age of Ultron is a stroke of genius. After what seems like an eon of utterly CGI-drenched stuff based on (adolescent) comics and impossible physics where even 'normal' humans move with lightning speed and can survive any number of crushing collisions with walls that cave in like memory foam, here comes Miller reminding us that explosion-filled, loud, visceral thrills CAN make not only narrative sense, but can still have us gnawing at our cuticles like tiny children in front of an episode of Doctor Who as well. I swear that throughout the film, not ONCE did my mouth close. I think I may have even grasped the man next to me's hand at one point. MMFR is filled with a master's innate knowledge of what makes a simple chase sequence not only coherent and exciting, but almost enough to fill a screen for two whole hours without once becoming repetitive, boring or anything less than gripping. So how on earth has Miller managed this vastly welcome renaissance of a genre that looked so spent? Well, there's so much more going on under the hood (if you'll forgive the car metaphor) of Miller's glorious celebration of speed, destruction and (yes, really) feminism.

A lot of this may be down to Miller's Australian background. The freewheeling aesthetic at the heart of this movie draws heavily on the indigenous culture of gritty outback realism coupled with an anarchist's appreciation of those wide open spaces which we lack in the UK. For this reason there's a lot of Western about MMFR. But, as in the second and third Mad Max movies, it's a Western peopled by Australian crusties, But Miller goes far beyond mere body adornment and tattoos (and also avoids the annoyingly trite gewgaws of bloody steampunk - my particular favourite detail was the War Rig's human femur as a gear shift). Here the marks of identity that come with every character range from the fine white lines of subjugation and self-harm that decorate both Immortan Joe's's War Boys as well as his Wives. MMFR is a film that also belongs the tradition of Todd Browning, Luis Bunuel or Alejandro Jodorowsky, warping genre by revelling in physical non-conformity. Fury Road is filled to the brim with misshapen bodies, amputated limbs and freakish fashion. One brief scene involving women kept as a source of milk (to drink) could have sprung straight out of El Topo or The Magic Mountain. Even Charlize Theron's character has an arm missing, necessitating the use of a prosthetic. But this celebration of the ragged ends of a civilisation gone insane delights in the strangeness, letting the fever dream drift over the viewer until you inhabit this world. One can only imagine how the casting sessions went. 

Secondly, for anyone who's forgotten how good the original Mad Max films were, one of Miller's most radical contributions to car chase movies was his revolutionary use of editing. This is cutting of the highest order, and it's a dark art that seemed to have been forgotten by every director since Michael Bay and explains why every second of every Transformers film is a confusing loud jumble of blurred nonsense. Every second of MMFR is coherent, and paced like a swiss watch on steroids. Even the rare moments where the film slows down to allow you to breathe are perfectly timed. There's one post-pile up moment where Max emerges from the golden sand which is just as oddly surreal and transfixing as all the hurled spears and war-mongering. 

And for all its violence this is no testosterone fest, but a salutary lesson in post-apocalyptic feminism. Again, to bait all those Whedon fans, measure MMFR against the garbled fudging of women's roles in Avengers or even stuff like Firefly. Here each woman's role is formed by the grim implications of rape and slavery in a society where the simple act of survival of a tribe becomes twisted  by despotism, tyranny and a bogus system of religious symbolism (the War Boys, in their desperate 'half-lives', face violent annihilation with a chrome death's head grin, sprayed from a can, believing they're heading for apotheosis in Valhalla). This is no accident, as Miller used feminist playwright Eve Ensler, an expert on the atrocities in the Congo as a consultant. Essentially the film is fascinated by the implications of power in a near-medieval society and finds the real wisdom residing in female strength. What's more (and this is massively heartening) a large number of major (and positive) roles go to women in their 60s and 70s. To be truly faithful to facts, the real hero of this film is Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa: a woman who has played a waiting game since childhood to gain freedom for her and her female charges.

A synopsis (as was discussed by my friend and I in the pub afterwards) is also another clue to where Miller and co. have absolutely hit the nail on the head. The plot is almost laughably simple. And simply bonkers. Again, compare this to Marvel's more recent product (discounting Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a real hoot) where plot threads and insanely cloddish expositional dialogue  obscure the occasional whip-smart wisecrack. Miller has a veteran's instinct for what makes a film work. It may sound utterly pretentious, but his remarks about seeing Fury Road as a form of cinematic poetry makes perfect sense. He has stated that this is a film that could be seen (without any subtitles) anywhere in the world and it would still be completely comprehensible: and he's right. The whole film probably contains about ten pages of dialogue. This concision allows every other detail in the movie to help convey back stories and detail, giving it a richness that no amount of blurby exposition can solve. Tom Hardy as twitchy old Max, delivers scant remarks, all prefaced with unsure grunts which convey his fight with insanity by making us believe that he's come so far that nothing can go past unquestioned or without a worried shake of a guilt-filled head, filled with hallucinations of his dead family and friends. What's more, you don't even see his full face until about halfway through the movie.   

To sum up: Theron hits the road in a giant 'War Rig' - a big black truck that looks like it just got pimped in a very dark fetish club - with treason on her mind. She's stolen the Citadel leader, Immortan Joe (played to the hilt by Max veteran Hugh Keays-Byrne) 's bevvy of 'Wives'  (essentially the film's only conventional eye-candy): young women who are kept as breeding machines. No longer prepared to be treated as 'things' the women (one of whom is pregnant) attempt to reach a place of sanctuary. Joined by former road warrior, Max Rockatansky (Hardy) they then go for a two-hour chase across the best deserts I've seen since Lawrence of Arabia (in actual fact, Namibia). The post-apocalyptic hell serves (pretty much as Monument Valley did in John Ford's Stage Coach) as a superbly linear backdrop to the action, which involves pumped-up dune buggies that ROAR with throaty V8 engines along with an army of other modified gas-guzzling monstrosities. One even comes complete with a set of big war drums and a GUITARIST. This is a society which depends on the triple gods of water, oil and bullets. Pretty much like today, then…

Max and Furiosa cross a desert or two, and then go back again. Things blow up. People get mangled. And that's about all there is. And the amazing fact is that you really don't need more. I saw MMFR two days ago and I'm STILL thinking about it.

Of course, too much proselytising will transform a two-hour joyride through surreal mayhem into something it would never claim to be. And yet MMFR's brilliance is that it reclaims a genre grown so tired and hackneyed due to its reliance on a slickness born of studio accounting and computerised reliability. While Fury Road does boast CGI trickery, it merely serves as a way of more efficiently delivering the very real stunts and destruction wrought by Miller's cast and crew. never once do you doubt that what you see on screen is exactly how it would go down. Such suspension of disbelief seemed impossible in this day and age. It's taken a 70-year old Australian to show us that fun hasn't gone from our screens forever.

The Gods Want Their Fire Back - why Prometheus really isn't very good

In space no one can hear you plot… but they sure can hear the marketing department muttering to themselves.

One day I'll get around to writing a huge piece about the failure of science fiction in the early 21st century: the way that for a brief moment at the end of the 20th century it seemed - like everything else that was new, young, bold and full of possibility - sci fi could be the new narrative medium to truly reflect, critique and analyse the psyche of homo postmodernus. Truth is, the state of sci fi in literature IS fairly healthy. But apart from me and 20 other people, who reads that stuff any more? The battlefront of modern culture long since moved onto different platforms. But for some reason speculative fiction in cinema seems to have been relegated to the box marked 'unchallenging summer blockbuster' and left there to rot. An expensive corpse, but a corpse nonetheless.

And Ridley Scott's Prometheus is the worst offender. Promising all the visceral thrills and doomy, grainy space vérité of his earlier classics, it swaps actors for cyphers (the most engaging character supposedly has no emotion), horror for gratuitous laughs and poetry for spectacle. Maybe it's the final sign that cinema is redundant as a useful cultural thermometer. As an old friend once rightly stated - to tell the big stories in proper detail you need the massive story arc of a TV series, several seasons long. That's why, in many ways Babylon 5 was the best Lord Of The Rings adaptation possible, and Battlestar Galactic was the keenest commentary on the state of US contemporary politics that you could ask for. Mind you, TV really ballsed up Dune, didn't it? But maybe we can all agree that since Jodorowsky abandoned his first attempt in 1975, it's an unfilmable book, best left on the page.

More importantly - how did we get to the stage where a 200 million dollar movie, scripted by supposedly one of the brightest minds in speculative screenwriting (along with two others), doesn't make much (if any) narrative sense. While I fully understand the pressure that studios and distributors put on even the most respected of auteur's work it still seems astounding that Prometheus is so, well, silly. And while the original Alien allowed for a sequel, Prometheus seems only geared for that one outcome - extending the franchise to infinity and beyond. If it ever happens it'll need someone with cojones the size of Gore Verbinski's to paper over the cracks.

If we discount the truly avant garde and non-linear we have to accept that Scott's in the business of making stories come to life with that fabulous OCD-adman-level attention to detail. To play devil's advocate for a second, maybe this film that seems to be approaching the condition of swiss (space) cheese in its logic while looking undeniably incredible, has come about because Scott wanted to play with all the latest digital toys that his best mate Jim Cameron has whipped out in recent years, and just caved in to a marketing dept's craven wishes? That, in itself, is a travesty, but when you also think about clunky details such as Guy Pearce's laughable prosthetic make-up even THAT argument falls down.

Apparently, in the nauseating 'viral' online videos that preceded the opening we see Pearce as a young man, which is why in the film he looks like Peter Gabriel onstage in about 1972. This is the studio desperately chasing 'cutting edge' methods of 'story-telling across new and emerging platforms'. Well, that's what they'll be telling themselves. It is, of course, bullshit. Just because some 30-something idiot with ironic facial hair tells you that your 'product' needs such gewgaws to make a younger audience relate to it, it ain't necessarily so. Maybe, just maybe, if you have a respected director who's a known safe pair of hands and a record of delivering classy, yet box office, fare, maybe concentrating on the film itself - giving the characters depth or at least motivation would have been a good idea? Maybe people would have ben excited enough to go and see it?? Like George Lucas' travesties in prequel-land, demographic chasing has wrought a universe that looks cool but where we care little for characters or chain of events.

The first third of the film is rushed exposition as dumbly obvious as just littering the set with signs saying 'look, this will become important later'. This, in turn, fails to build the requisite amount of tension before the body horror onslaught we all paid to see. A useless bums-on-seats rating means that no film required to recoup vast amounts was ever going to give us a real shock. When the first two victims succumb to generic nastiness it's an actual relief. The main 'good' characters are too irritating to be objects of sympathy or empathy. Logan Marshall-Green as Noomi Rapace's boyfriend/co-evangelist is so irksome that you feel cheated by the almost merciful death in flames. So we have a film that has us rooting for the bad guys to do something quick to wake us up (the two most compelling performances are from Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron). This is a trope of the worst of horror movies these days - that we only end up lusting for more gruesomely inventive ways to see the innocents dispatched. It's both voyeuristic and deeply unhealthy, and leads to awful stuff like Saw.

Visual élan is high on the agenda, and it's a genuine thrill to see that H.R.Giger has returned to the designer's chair. A brief glimpse of his murals (see above) just tantalises, although the knowing nod to his designs for the aforementioned Dune are a sweet touch (see below). It's soon back to a lot of sets that looked like Apple designed them - all gleaming white surfaces, scrubbed and ready for the blood that's waiting to be sprayed across them. How on earth are we supposed to believe that such advancement was ignored on the Nostromo - the grimy transport ship that was so believable (this is why Duncan Jones' Moon worked so well).

By the final act you just have to hold up your hands and give in. Is Michael Fassbender good or bad? What the hell was that 'engineer' doing in the waterfall at the beginning of the film? Is a self-inflicted caesarian really that easy to get over? And was Stephen Stills' accordion REALLY only there to allow Idris Elba to sing 'Love The One You're With'? The questions go on and on, and not in a 2001-like 'woah, that blew my mind' way. But that's what you get for hiring a man who lead us through six seasons of mumbo jumbo to just hang us all out to dry.

Having said all this, it wasn't an unenjoyable experience overall, and most of these glaring questions have been answered by this canny blog post from the excellent Den Of Geek, yet amazingly what made the paucity of the deal more evident was the surprising fact that Barry Sonnenfeld's return to the Men In Black franchise turns out to be a reasonably tightly-plotted, enjoyable romp. Yes, that's right, I preferred it to Prometheus! The nifty time-travel paradoxes were flagged and dispatched with admirable attention to detail, the main characters turned in enthusiastic and engagingly comic performances and at no point did the CGI overtake the essential premises on offer - that of the deepening relationship between Will Smith and his farther figure partner Tommy Lee Jones. Josh Brolin expertly impersonates Tommy Lee as his younger self, there's a great series of knowing jokes that simultaneously pointed at the awful injustices of late '60s American culture while still managing to be affectionately nostalgic. The Andy Warhol jokes are particularly amusing. A surprise, then, that the script was by the same team that gave us Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull - a sequel that seemed like one long computer game. Maybe the producers realised that the fans of the originals may have, after all, grown up and got themselves educated and don't necessarily need to be patronised or coerced so bluntly. Blimey. It may not be such a mystery as to why hardly anyone watches anything European made between 1950 and 1980 anymore, but it would be nice to think that we could return to an art that doesn't treat us all as idiots.