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Bateman (545)
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Brilliantly unpredictable
I'm pretty sure this is actually Outsider Art
Stunning...
Unironically a near-masterpiece
Could have been a minor masterpiece, if not for the ending
So, about that TV series, then...?
Surprised at the bad reviews
What was up with the weird colors for blood?
Good film, but...
Almost seems like two different movies stitched together
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Off the top of my head...
Immigrant Song
The Song Remains The Same
The Battle of Evermore
Stairway To Heaven
Rock and Roll
Thunderdome was absolutely a disappointment if compared to the first two films, but it at least was a film that was <i>actually about its titular character</i>, explored interesting themes such as how human history passes into myth and the role hero figures play into it (something that harks all the way back to the first film), and had fully-fleshed characters, including the best antagonist in the series in Aunty Entity.
<i>Furious Furiosa</i>: Fury Road, on the other hand, was two hours of a CGI-laden, image filter-riddled, Michael-Bay-minus-the-self-awareness mess of two-dimensional cardboard cutouts and greenscreened car crashes and explosions.
You know, I actually agree. Three movies were more than enough.
That's why I wish they would stop slapping his name on to try and sell films that have nothing whatsoever to do with him or his story.
Road Warrior was a whole lot more than a huge car chase - it was the next installment in the story of the eponymous character, and flawlessly executed at that. The fact that Mel Gibson only has 16 lines of dialogue in it only highlights the sheer genius of the script.
Consider the opening scene, when after dispatching two of his pursuers and seeing himself rid of Wez, Max finds a music box mechanism in the bloated corpse of the truck driver. He winds it, its simplistic, tinny rendition of "Happy Birthday to You" in stark contrast to all the death and destruction around him, and he clearly reminisces. He remembers. He thinks back to better, happier times. He <i>almost</i> smiles... and then realizes what's happening. He's letting his guard down; he's almost allowing himself to <i>feel</i>. So right back up come his defenses, he stops winding and pockets it, carries on with rifling through anything the men he has just killed might have had that he could use, and drives on aimlessly as he's been doing every day of his life.
It's a phenomenal, brilliantly written character moment, with not a single word spoken or necessary; Road Warrior is full of similar scenes. The big truck chase doesn't happen until way into the second half of the film, as opposed to Fury Road, where it's actually the entirety of it.
...Man, that sucks. I really enjoyed the first season.
7.5/10
Not quite among the greatest classics of the 80's, but still pretty catchy and memorable.
I honestly can't decide between Mad Max and Road Warrior for first place. I could write a veritable <i>novel</i> singing Road Warrior's praises, and it'll always have a special place in my heart as it was my first exposure to the series.
The older I got and the more I revisited Mad Max, though, the more I came to find its <i>pre-apocalyptic</i> setting more and more compelling, with its pervasive, creeping sense of doom, a society that's still barely holding together but slowly and inevitably coming apart at the seams, and nothing but a few heroic fools like Max and Captain Fifi trying to stand against the irresistible tidal wave of chaos. The fact that it <i>doesn't</i> feature Road Warrior's (admittedly brilliant) junkyard-tribal aesthetics, which have since become synonymous with the genre, is actually a plus in my book at this point.
Thunderdome, on the other hand, was a sadly missed opportunity. To its credit, it actually felt like Max had moved on as a character from Road Warrior, and Auntie was by far the most interesting and nuanced antagonist in the whole series, but its tone is too cartoonish and kid-friendly from the second half on. I still maintain that if they'd kept it consistent all the way through, and then ended the story by having Max give his life so Savannah and the others could escape (an act of ultimate selflessness) or else joined them and helped them rebuild, replacing his lost family with a spiritual one, it could have been the best out of all three.
So, yeah, TL;DR, I guess my ranking would be
1. The Road Warrior
2. Mad Max
3. Beyond Thunderdome
With 1 and 2 being largely interchangeable, and a significant distance between them and 3.
The <i>Furious Furiosa</i> films don't belong to the series in my mind, and never will.
Agreed, it's really not one of Jim Jarmusch's better films.
The only segment I found really interesting was the first one, which was the original "Coffee and Cigarettes" short. The rest were just meh.
I also have to wonder... some of my earliest memories are of playing Enduro, River Raid and Pitfall! on the Atari 2600.
Hmm.
Not gonna lie, it still looks far too steeped into the Furious Furiosa "Mad Max" nonsense for my taste, complete with Max hallucinating about random people when the core of his character was that <i>he couldn't bring himself to care about anyone after the loss of his wife and son</i>. Also, that monologue at the beginning was way too literal; you can trust your audience to put in at least <i>some</i> effort into understanding your story, you know?
Still, I gotta admit there's two things here that hadn't been seen in a so-called Mad Max movie since 1985: some actual goddamn <i>grit</i> as opposed to CGI and image filters to hell and back, and a character actually resembling Max Rockatansky who appears to be the actual protagonist of an actual story. At several moments it actually gave me glimpses of what a good modern Mad Max film could have been.
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