Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road
Grade: A
Genre: Action

I'm not an action movie fan.  I don't particularly dislike action movies, but they aren't my favorite genre.  Which is why, watching Mad Max in the theater last year, I was surprised to notice, about halfway through the movie, that my face ached and I felt kind of stiff because I'd been sitting, literally, on the edge of my seat with a rictus grin of joy, awe, and amazement on my face.

Before I get into the more important parts of the review, there is one thing that stands out about Fury Road that makes it amazing, the severe shortage of downtime.  As Randal Monroe observed in this XKCD strip, most "action" movies are mostly about a bunch of people talking with a few spurts of action in between the talking.

I can't find an actual breakdown of action vs talking in Fury Road, I may try to time it myself one day, but there isn't much talking and there's a whole lot of action.  If, out of two hours of movie there were even thirty minutes that wasn't action I'll be amazed.

Fury Road is simply one long, extended, car chase filled with explosions and gunfire.

It is a movie that grabbed me from the first scenes, held my throat in its fist for the full two hours, and finally left me gasping for breath and begging for more at the end.  I have never, in my entire life, experienced a movie that managed to maintain the adrenaline pumping thrill of a well shot and choreographed action sequence for that long.

And yet, if that was all there was to Fury Road, it'd be a fine bit of action poetry but ultimately (like Sucker Punch) kind of forgettable.

But unlike Zach Snyder, George Miller managed to put characters you care about, characters who grow,  and even a plot and some serious thinking into the poetry he wove out of sheer pulse pounding action.

Miller takes the axiom of show, don't tell, to an extreme and manages to make it work.  The setting tells the story, the costumes tell the story, the characters tell the story by the way they look and how they stand and move and behave.  But they don't tell the story by talking much.

I'd compare this to the way that some very good written science fiction conveys a wealth of world building through only a few lines of dialog or a description that isn't directly exposition.  The exposition, the unveiling of the world, is there but only to the reader willing to invest the time to think it through and figure it out.  Fury Road is much the same.

We know, for example, a great deal about Furiosa.  We know that she believes she has crossed the moral event horizon, that she has done things to survive that violated every moral and ethical tenet she holds.  And we know this not through someone telling us, but simply by who she is, what she is, and the setting she exists in.

She is the only woman to hold any position of martial power in Immortan Joe's society.  Every single other member of his military is a man.  His entire society is based around turning women into property, valuing them only for their reproductive ability, in a way that is a cartoon caricature of the worst of patriarchy.  And yet, in that society, Furiosa, captured as a slave when she was a child, has risen to be one of his most trusted lieutenants.

All this is conveyed simply by the setting, Furiosa being who she is, and, when she was asked what she was looking for, her one word answer: redemption.

Miller writes dialog like words cost money, and the result is beautiful, rich, storytelling done with almost no words at all.  The entire evolving relationship between Max and Furiosa, a relationship that begins with them as bitter enemies and grows to them becoming true comrades in arms, is accomplished with virtually no dialog at all.  Words are almost wholly replaced by action and expression not just there, but through the movie as a whole, and it is vastly better for it.

Unlike the other Mad Max movies, there is no voice over dénouement at the end.  I think Miller made exactly the right decision there.  The movie stands on its own, and it doesn't need Charlize Theron explaining it to us once its over.

All told, Fury Road is well deserving of an A, it is easily two steps up from the average movie in terms of artistry, craft, and sheer enjoyment.  Especially when you remember that they did almost all of it with practical effects, not CGI.  Miller made Fury Road by heading into the outback with a bunch of cars, cameras, and actors, then shooting over 500 hours of material that he cut down to a single, glistening, gem exactly two hours long.

Man of Steel (2013)

Man of Steel

Grade: B
Genre: Action, Alien Invasion, Comic Book

When I first saw Man of Steel, back at its release, I was underwhelmed.  I hadn't intended to bother watching it again, but my son has been on a Superman kick and since its really bloody easy to rent a movie on Google Play, I loaded it up for him.

And I found that on rewatching it was a much better movie than I'd thought the first time I saw it.  Zack Snyder did good.

There were bad parts, the Kryptonian costumes looked uncomfortable and like costumes rather than like clothes people actually wore.  Only Lara Lor-Van (Supes' mom) looked like she was wearing clothes that a person would wear in the real world.

Plus the absurdity that Jor-El, a man bred for science and presumably not trained as a soldier, was able to be billy badass and defeat not just Zod's mooks, but Zod himself.

But leaving that aside, the movie worked well.  Flashing back and forth in Clark's timeline worked as a good way to establish his character and history while not dragging things out too much as all origin stories will if the director isn't extremely careful.

I did wind up positively hating the character of Johnathan Kent.  The problem wasn't Kevin Costner's acting, he did an excellent job.  The problem was that as written Johnathan Kent was not really a nice or good person.  He instilled fear and doubt in his son at every turn, worked actively to undermine Clark's natural desire to do good and help others, and generally was the closest to a villain I've ever seen Johnathan Kent portrayed.  By comparison, Diane Lane's Martha Kent was wonderfully done, and quite refreshing after the American Gothic cypher that she was turned into for the 1978 Superman.

But the best and most interesting thing about Man of Steel was the fact that Snyder, for a first in Superman movies, really looked at Kal-El through the lens of him being an alien.  That shift in viewpoint changed the whole tone of the movie in a positive and interesting way.

I'm also not sure whether it was a deliberate choice, or simply a remnant of Snyder's love of action sequences done by fast forwarding then ultra slow motion for the arrival of the punch or sword or what have you, but this time around I noticed that the first major power Zod and his soldiers really exploited and used was super speed.  Kal-El, by comparison, first developed his senses, his strength, and his flight.  But any good soldier knows that mobility is the key to victory, and so it really made sense that the first power Faora-Ul and the others would develop would be their newfound speed.

At heart, Man of Steel is a story of aliens visiting and invading the Earth, and Snyder managed to capture the awe at the arrival of aliens, and the fear at them being hostile perfectly.  Its more in the family with Independence Day, and The Day the Earth Stood Still than it is with the first series of Superman movies, or even with Superman Returns.  By choosing that approach to the movie, Snyder manages to instill a sense of awe and wonder at parts of the Superman story that I'd have thought were mostly worn out.  I'd been of the increasing opinion that retelling the origin of the more famous superheroes needs to end.  We know how Spidey gets his powers.  We know that Clark is the last survivor of a doomed world.  We know the Fantastic Four got their powers through irresponsible science.

But by changing not the content, but the viewpoint, of Clark's origin, Snyder developed something new and well worth watching.  Yes, we know Clark is the last survivor of a doomed world and most people who do Superman stories gloss over that part.  But for all that he grew up in Kansas that makes him an alien.  And that aspect of his origin turned out to be well worth exploring.

On rewatching Man of Steel, I find that I intend to watch Batman vs. Superman which I'd previously not intended to do.  Overall, it was a fine movie.

Superman (1978), a look back at an old movie

Superman - The Movie

Grade: D

Genre: Action(?), Comic Book

My son has been on a bit of a DC kick of late, what with the Flash on Netflix, so I decided to show him the old 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman.

To say it didn't age well is to vastly understate the problems with this movie.

I recognize that times and tastes change, and that modern moviemaking has advanced.  But yeesh.  

It was so **SLOOOOOWWWWW**. Begin with the flipping credits, which were done in that godforsaken era when they had to show all the bloody credits before the movie started, everything from the stars to the assistant to the key grip. Five minutes and 23 seconds of nothing but John William's excellent music and a bunch of names flying onto the screen and off again before they let the movie actually start.  I realize that's a relic of the era, but it set the stage for the pacing of the rest of the movie.

The Krypton sets and costumes did age well, the sets are minimal and don't look awful, the costumes were good.  In fact, I'd argue that the Krypton costumes looked better in the 1978 movie than in Snyder's 2013 Man of Steel.

But it started with the setup for the second movie.  Before Jor-El can actually get to the part where he says Krypton will be exploding any moment now and that the leadership is ignoring a crisis at their peril, he has to be the final judge, and apparently executioner, of Zod and his minions.  This develops plot, but for the second movie, not this one.  Couldn't it have been dealt with in a flashback in the second movie?  Even if they wanted to film it for the first, just to avoid having to get Marlon Brando back or whatever?  And dang even that went slowly.  The bit where Zod & Co were actually being put into the Phantom Zone just dragged, it was many long tens of seconds of reaction shots and a long dragging shot of the 2D plane that would be their prison slowly zooming across the screen and it felt like it just went on and on for no reason.

Finally, 11 minutes and 15 seconds from the start of the movie, the plot starts moving with Jor-El putting out his plea to the council to evacuate Krypton.

But it kept on being so slow.  There were long psychadelic sequences with baby Supes in the escape pod, growing up and being educated by Jor-El's computer ghost.    Then long dragging scenes in Smallville.  Then another bloody 2001 A Space Odyssey style psychadelic scene with fragments of Jor-El lecturing the now teenage Supes.

It was 48 minutes from the time the movie started until Clark arrives in Metropolis. Seriously, no joke. Out of a 2.5 hour movie, they spent almost an hour just setting things up to get the main character to the place where the action takes place.

And the slow pacing didn't let up then either.  Long sequences with nothing actually happening on streets or in offices, long pans across street scenes with random people waking around, interminable times when character wasn't developed and plot didn't advance and basically you just sat there waiting for something to happen.   

They harkened back to the old TV series with a few scenes of Supes fighting crime, but even those dragged and had no real action movie style pacing.

Perhaps its just my modern audience viewpoint intruding here, having Supes fight most crime seems kind of pointless.  He captured a cat burglar, and my thought was "doesn't he have something better to be doing?"   And the bit where he captured a gang of robbers seemed a bit too little and too late, there were dozens of stray bullets flying around and likely hitting bystanders during that whole sequence.

The actual plot, the part where Lex is going to use a nuke on the San Andreas fault to make California fall off and turn his useless desert property into valuable beachfront property is basically glossed over, after wasting the first 1.5 hours of the movie on a boring nothing, they pared down the actual plot to a few brief, but still somehow very drawn out and slowly paced, shots of incompetent and sexy sidekick changing some missile codes, then an extended (and SLOW PACED) action sequence of Supes reversing the damage and the weird flying around the Earth to make it spin backward bit.

Don't misunderstand, slow pacing can at times be good.  I loved Kikujiro, a movie that is nothing but long slow scenes with little action happening.  But it was better done, with a whole lot of subtext going on during all the long slow scenes, and there was artistry there.

The sequence with Lois and Supes flying around wasn't bad, the idea was to try to catch the wonder of flight and the truly amazing thing about Supes being Supes.  It worked well and if it had been tightened up I think it would have broken the mood they were trying to set.  But most of the long slow sequences had none of that purpose, and weren't so well done, and were just long for the sake of being long.

There were elements where it was absolutely brilliant.  Christopher Reeve looked great and acted perfectly as Superman, always the moral core of DC's universe and he played it well with humor and a caring undertone that kept his Perfect Boy Scout routine from seeming cloying and smug.  Reeve's bumbling mild mannered reporter Clark Kent was so spot on that it set the standard and still looks amazing even today.

Overall though, I'm amazed it did well. I think, if someone aggressively edited it, you could actually get a decent hour and a half movie out of that steaming mess. Obviously tastes have changed since 1978.