I fly out to Belfast to meet Ryan Hollinger, Diamanda Hagan, and Omega, and while I was there, we went and saw the new Mad Max prequel! We go a bit Mad over-thinking it!
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00:00:00 [STATIC]
00:00:02 Hello, and welcome to--
00:00:04 is this a podcast episode?
00:00:05 Do we count this as a podcast episode?
00:00:07 Is this just a legally required thing
00:00:09 because I need to make some of my budget back from the trip?
00:00:11 Are we just talking about this?
00:00:13 We've just seen Furiosa this evening,
00:00:15 so let's make a video about it.
00:00:16 Because why not?
00:00:18 We're all here.
00:00:19 I'm here.
00:00:21 You probably know who I am because it's my YouTube page,
00:00:24 yes.
00:00:24 But does everyone want to introduce themselves,
00:00:26 even though some of them are significantly more well-known
00:00:28 than me?
00:00:29 Oh, I don't know.
00:00:30 I don't know.
00:00:30 I'm Ryan Hollinser.
00:00:31 Why are you at Horror Films?
00:00:34 I'm not here by choice.
00:00:35 [LAUGHTER]
00:00:37 Maddie kidnapped him.
00:00:39 I thought that was your job.
00:00:40 With a sack, usually.
00:00:41 You chased after him with one of those comic butterfly
00:00:44 catching nets.
00:00:45 With a--
00:00:46 [WHOOSHING]
00:00:48 I feel like Furiosa probably would have probably
00:00:50 done something like that if the film was just
00:00:52 a little bit older.
00:00:53 If it was an older Mad Max movie,
00:00:54 there might have been some butterfly nets
00:00:56 or something like that.
00:00:57 Fantastic.
00:00:58 You have to introduce yourself, too.
00:01:00 Hello, I'm Eric, AKA Omega.
00:01:02 I'm sure you know who I am.
00:01:03 I mean, hopefully.
00:01:05 Yes.
00:01:05 And I'm Film Brain.
00:01:07 [LAUGHTER]
00:01:08 Do you like how I'm the one with no platform?
00:01:10 I'm like, but you know me, obviously.
00:01:12 I'm Diamanda Hagen, and we've done videos occasionally
00:01:16 together.
00:01:17 Yes, yes.
00:01:18 Of which this is one of several.
00:01:20 Yes.
00:01:20 [LAUGHTER]
00:01:21 The last time we did one of these
00:01:23 was for Birds of Prey, which is right before COVID.
00:01:25 So hopefully this isn't going to happen again.
00:01:27 Yeah, hopefully that isn't some sort of omen anyway.
00:01:30 But we've managed to replace Ashen's with Ryan Hollinger's.
00:01:34 So I don't know.
00:01:35 Oh, you got a diagram?
00:01:36 Ah, I don't know.
00:01:37 I don't know.
00:01:38 It's about equal.
00:01:39 It's a bit of a, you know, horizontal move.
00:01:43 Horizontal move.
00:01:45 Had to make a dip in my eye.
00:01:47 We're all equals here.
00:01:48 We're here to talk about the latest Mad Max saga, Furiosa.
00:01:52 I guess, how would I describe the plot of this movie
00:01:55 is basically it's the origin story for Furiosa, who
00:01:58 was played previously in Fury Road by Charlize Theron,
00:02:01 now played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
00:02:03 She is stolen away from the green lands of her youth.
00:02:07 And then she is essentially thrust into the orbit of--
00:02:11 what is his name again?
00:02:12 Demetrius?
00:02:12 Dementus.
00:02:13 Dementus.
00:02:14 Dementus.
00:02:14 See, I can tell you've not played the Mad Max video game
00:02:17 lore.
00:02:17 Dementus is like a mythological character in that,
00:02:20 you know, in the deep lore of the game.
00:02:22 That sounds like something like a 14-year-old would
00:02:23 like write in their notebook with like punk rock letters.
00:02:25 Yeah, it definitely does.
00:02:26 The demented angle, Dementus.
00:02:28 Yeah, I was like, Dementor.
00:02:29 Yeah.
00:02:29 Because you see, the Mad Max video game
00:02:31 was based on the Fury Road Bible, which
00:02:33 included the back story, the plots for this film,
00:02:35 and the thus unmade Wasteland and Fury Road.
00:02:38 So they were able to mine all this stuff.
00:02:40 And that's why there's a lot of continuity between the two.
00:02:42 Although they're not-- they don't line up perfectly.
00:02:43 See, that's the great thing about the Mad Max franchise
00:02:46 is that they have so many great character names.
00:02:49 I'm just going to call him Thor.
00:02:50 I like that.
00:02:50 Yeah, pretty much.
00:02:51 When he had the red beard and stuff,
00:02:53 that was the closest that Hemsworth has ever been
00:02:55 to actually mythological Thor.
00:02:56 That's a good point.
00:02:57 I was going to bring that up in a second.
00:02:59 Spoilers.
00:03:00 She's thrust into the orbit of Chris Hemsworth's Dementus.
00:03:03 And then that puts her in the orbit of a Mortan Joe, who
00:03:06 we previously met in Fury Road and the War Boys.
00:03:10 Dementus takes away her mother, her youth,
00:03:12 and she wants her revenge.
00:03:14 And she wants it in pretty epic fashion.
00:03:17 To give some non-spoiler thoughts on the movie,
00:03:20 I would say that this is--
00:03:21 it's similar to Fury Road, but all the Mad Max movies
00:03:24 have their own kind of personality to them.
00:03:27 I mean, I should qualify.
00:03:28 I've seen all the Mad Max movies,
00:03:30 but I know that other people haven't.
00:03:32 So--
00:03:32 It's the first and half of the second one back in the '80s.
00:03:36 I've seen all of them.
00:03:37 Yes.
00:03:38 I'm the game.
00:03:38 Yeah, I've only seen like--
00:03:39 I've only seen like them in bits,
00:03:40 but I've never like--
00:03:41 all of them Fury Road.
00:03:42 I've never like fully committed to watching an entire one
00:03:44 on its own, right?
00:03:45 So--
00:03:46 If you've seen Fury Road, I think
00:03:47 you're fine because it's like a soft reboot anyway.
00:03:50 Yeah, because that's the thing.
00:03:51 It's so out of context.
00:03:52 I think we were saying when we came out of the movie,
00:03:54 it was like, I was so used to--
00:03:56 I know that in the original film,
00:03:58 it's not just like some sort of a copper
00:03:59 during a sort of unexplained disaster time.
00:04:02 And it's like, but no, it's not.
00:04:03 It's like people with guitars and crazy outfits
00:04:06 and everything.
00:04:06 Well, the big jump happened between the first and second
00:04:09 one because Road Warrior had the Smegma crazies and the gay boy
00:04:13 berserkers.
00:04:14 The Road Warrior pretty much set the--
00:04:16 Rock and Roll.
00:04:16 I told of Rock and Roll.
00:04:17 --for everything that went on to follow.
00:04:20 And then all the movies have been
00:04:22 kind of riffs on what the Road Warrior had set up.
00:04:25 But they're all very different in their own right.
00:04:27 They all kind of go into different directions.
00:04:29 No movie kind of feels like the Terminator franchise, where
00:04:32 all of them feel like remakes of Terminator 2
00:04:34 to a varying degree.
00:04:36 That was the thing I was going to say.
00:04:37 I understand this is kind of like--
00:04:38 obviously, this is off topic from talking about Fury Road.
00:04:40 But that was the thing I walked out of watching Fury Road,
00:04:43 was like, oh, like, Mapax is not technically
00:04:46 the main protagonist of this film.
00:04:48 He's kind of in somebody else's story.
00:04:50 That's quite common with Mad Max.
00:04:52 Yeah, I kind of really vibed with that.
00:04:54 Oh, yes, you could really, like James Bond,
00:04:57 you could just literally replace this as any guy.
00:04:59 It's quite a common interpretation of Mad Max
00:05:02 that he's not actually involved in any of these stories,
00:05:05 except for the first one, that these are plots that happened.
00:05:08 But then Mad Max became, like, in the early days
00:05:11 of the apocalypse, he became like a folk hero who
00:05:13 then died on some back road.
00:05:15 But then decades, generations later,
00:05:17 people retold the story, and they
00:05:19 included this character from another story, another tale.
00:05:22 That's how myths evolved.
00:05:23 All folklore mythology vibe going on
00:05:26 to all these movies.
00:05:27 I feel like--
00:05:28 Also, Gilgamesh was there.
00:05:29 He was totally there in that one.
00:05:30 You really get a total sense of that in this one
00:05:32 as well, which kind of takes the Mad Max kind of lore
00:05:35 and really turns it into kind of like an epic.
00:05:38 There's been no entry that feels like this.
00:05:40 It feels like it takes what Fury Road did
00:05:42 and then kind of massively expands out the world.
00:05:45 It's like if you took the Barter Town stuff and Thunderdome,
00:05:50 and you massively expanded it hugely.
00:05:53 Yes, which is fitting, because the night before, I
00:05:55 was watching Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome on ITV4,
00:05:58 so I had a very good frame of reference for that.
00:06:00 So you got Beyond Thunderdome.
00:06:01 Yeah, I did.
00:06:02 It's good.
00:06:02 Unfortunately, I got Beyond Thunderdome to the kids stuff,
00:06:05 which is the bad Mad Max.
00:06:07 The start of Thunderdome is the best Mad Max.
00:06:09 The stuff with the kids is the worst Mad Max.
00:06:11 If you came into this movie expecting it to be like Fury
00:06:15 Road, again, it's not that movie.
00:06:17 It's more plotty.
00:06:19 It's more dialogue-y.
00:06:20 More mythic.
00:06:21 Yeah, it's not like chase sequences 80% of the running
00:06:25 time.
00:06:25 I mean, it's got the stuff there,
00:06:26 but there's much more going on here.
00:06:28 As a non-film person, I had two major observations,
00:06:32 which I shared when we got off here, but I'll say it again
00:06:34 now, is that the first one is it did not feel like it
00:06:38 was as long as it was.
00:06:39 Yes, I would agree.
00:06:40 I had lunch at like, what, like 12 or like 1 PM,
00:06:43 and we were going to go to like Chinese buffet afterwards.
00:06:45 And you'd think I would be thinking,
00:06:46 hold on, Jesus Christ, I'm starving.
00:06:47 But it really wasn't like that.
00:06:49 And the second thing was it felt like reading a novel.
00:06:51 Yes.
00:06:52 But in all the good ways.
00:06:53 And I really--
00:06:54 I don't know if I can properly articulate that,
00:06:56 but it just did feel like I had sat down on an afternoon
00:07:00 and read an entire novel.
00:07:01 Yes, and that's why my plot snops have sounded a bit weird,
00:07:04 because technically the movie is a bit unwieldy plot-wise.
00:07:07 It's a bit-- because it's kind of going
00:07:08 in so many different directions, which, like you said,
00:07:10 has a novel-like structure.
00:07:12 I mean, the movie is even chaptered, which is--
00:07:14 I'm going to be brutally honest-- one of my least
00:07:16 favorite modern movie things.
00:07:17 Why is so many things chaptered?
00:07:18 They don't need to be chaptered.
00:07:20 I don't know why they're doing this.
00:07:22 I would have been happy with another hour of this.
00:07:23 They have what you'd expect to be a massive action big sequence
00:07:27 thing, but they sort of skip over it.
00:07:29 And I would have really liked the next hour just for that.
00:07:31 This was the literal representation of the trope,
00:07:32 and then there was the war.
00:07:34 Yes.
00:07:34 And then after the war--
00:07:36 And it already began with that at the beginning of the movie,
00:07:39 because it's like, you know, a nuclear bomb
00:07:41 dropped at some point.
00:07:42 There was a horrible war.
00:07:43 Australia barely noticed, because, you know,
00:07:45 this is just Australia every day.
00:07:46 That's literally how we get taught
00:07:48 about the First World War in--
00:07:50 well, at least, you know, when I grew up in American schools.
00:07:52 They'd be like, well, and then there was the war.
00:07:54 And then we just never talked about it.
00:07:56 And like, it's called The Great War.
00:07:57 What are you hiding?
00:07:58 I had that kind of vibe throughout the entire film,
00:08:00 where it's like, because it's broken up
00:08:02 into those different chapters, it does feel like it does these--
00:08:05 I understand the need for time skips,
00:08:07 because it's going for her, like, as a child,
00:08:08 right through to where she was.
00:08:10 It pretty much builds right to the start of--
00:08:12 Furiosa.
00:08:12 --the first scenario is.
00:08:14 And I was like--
00:08:15 but it did feel like it had to cut out
00:08:17 these big ellipses in between it.
00:08:18 It felt like a new season of a TV show to me at times.
00:08:20 It was like, oh, I was like, here's this part of her life,
00:08:22 and now we're into this next part.
00:08:23 And it just sometimes, like, structurally, I felt like,
00:08:26 it's a little disjointed.
00:08:27 I don't know.
00:08:27 Yeah.
00:08:28 From a structural point of view, I always
00:08:29 felt like the movie was--
00:08:31 I wasn't quite certain where it was going sometimes,
00:08:33 because the structure--
00:08:34 I want an extended director's cut.
00:08:36 --of Furiosa.
00:08:36 Yeah, that's going to have, like, a lot of stuff.
00:08:37 Because we mentioned, like, the Mad Max movies.
00:08:40 Like, Max is a protagonist, but he's also kind of,
00:08:44 like, a side figure.
00:08:45 He, like, wanders into world.
00:08:46 Yeah.
00:08:46 And to some degree, it's sort of like that here.
00:08:48 Like, Furiosa is the title character,
00:08:50 but Annie Taylor-Joy doesn't appear as the, like, the--
00:08:54 I guess the older version.
00:08:55 She's way into the movie.
00:08:56 Yeah, she pops up, like, almost an hour into the movie,
00:09:00 which is very late for a top-billed actor
00:09:01 to suddenly walk in.
00:09:02 Yeah, because that was the thing.
00:09:04 It sounded like-- I felt like the whole focus on her
00:09:06 as a young child and where she--
00:09:07 obviously, there was a lot of plot beats
00:09:10 that needed to be there to get her to where she was.
00:09:11 But I was, like, surprised by how much that took up the film.
00:09:14 And then it felt like, as it went along,
00:09:15 the movie got faster and faster to its climax,
00:09:18 because it just felt like--
00:09:20 I guess maybe it was that sequence where--
00:09:21 Like a car downshifting.
00:09:23 --the war thing happened, where it was like, oh, you know,
00:09:25 we're suddenly in the climax, and it's just-- it just
00:09:27 happened.
00:09:27 I don't want to spoil anything yet,
00:09:29 but it's like the whole situation with Chris
00:09:30 Hemsworthy's character and, like, his situation
00:09:32 with his group and how that's all devolving and falling
00:09:35 apart, and he's not a good leader.
00:09:36 But then suddenly, it rushes past that part
00:09:38 to where it's like, then there's a sequence where
00:09:40 they go to a place, and he's taking it over or something
00:09:42 like that.
00:09:43 But it feels like there could be--
00:09:44 I would have liked to have spent more time with him.
00:09:46 I know it's not a Syferios's movie,
00:09:47 but I kind of want to see more of this devolvement than that.
00:09:50 But for the first hour, it kind of is his movie.
00:09:52 It is.
00:09:53 Yeah, that's true.
00:09:53 Yeah.
00:09:54 He's given all the witty lines, and he's like--
00:09:56 I feel like he's the one that's got the--
00:09:57 I mean, maybe it could be his performance,
00:09:58 but I feel like he is, like--
00:10:00 I don't see Syferios as a very--
00:10:02 almost mute protagonist for most of the movie as well.
00:10:04 Yeah.
00:10:05 Which I kind of really liked about it.
00:10:06 But again, I think it was, again,
00:10:07 trying to channel Mad Max, its characterization, where
00:10:10 he's very muted in Fury Road.
00:10:12 But then him being big and boisterous
00:10:13 and taking over the show is kind of--
00:10:15 it's kind of integral to his character,
00:10:17 because he's obviously a showman, and he's all--
00:10:19 he's basically, eventually someone calls his bluff,
00:10:21 and he's not really actually this big, showy guy
00:10:23 that he thinks he is.
00:10:24 He wants to be this legend.
00:10:25 He wants to be seen as the scene figures.
00:10:26 Who's the guy-- who's the main villain in Fury Road?
00:10:28 That's the main--
00:10:29 A more central--
00:10:30 Oh, yeah.
00:10:30 Yeah, so he kind of wants to be seen in that--
00:10:32 he wants to be revered in that regard,
00:10:34 but nobody takes him seriously.
00:10:35 And he's actually just this douchey guy
00:10:37 who happens to have control.
00:10:39 He's just really bad at it.
00:10:40 Like I said, he's basically, in his abilities
00:10:44 to be competent and his efficacy,
00:10:46 he's just about one step up from Captain Jack Sparrow.
00:10:50 Yeah.
00:10:50 Because he's incredibly bad at this.
00:10:53 Like, oh my god.
00:10:54 Like, it's the kind of person that you
00:10:56 know in your organization or your school or whatever,
00:10:58 who's just this awful and just an idiot.
00:11:00 But they always somehow skate by.
00:11:01 And you're like, how are you still alive?
00:11:03 Why haven't you licked electrical sockets yet?
00:11:05 Jesus Christ.
00:11:05 Yeah.
00:11:06 Chris Hemsworth's performance is fantastic in the movie.
00:11:08 He is great.
00:11:09 So what you're saying is that Lord Dementus is Homer Simpson
00:11:14 and Immortan Joe is Frank Grimes.
00:11:16 Maybe in a certain--
00:11:17 [LAUGHTER]
00:11:17 Why?
00:11:18 Yeah, well, he's cool.
00:11:19 He is very philosophical.
00:11:20 And he does-- again, not getting into spoilers,
00:11:22 but he does get quite profane near the end and stuff like that.
00:11:25 And it's like, I don't want to be the villain,
00:11:27 but you could easily--
00:11:28 I think there's enough of an enigma around him.
00:11:31 There's enough ambiguity.
00:11:32 And there's enough of a curious figure within him
00:11:34 that it's like, I want to know how he ended up to where he is.
00:11:37 Because how he ever stumbled into his whatever position
00:11:39 of fleeting power that he has, he
00:11:41 has to have gotten there somehow.
00:11:42 And he clearly talks with someone
00:11:44 with some sort of wiseness or some sort of perspective
00:11:47 on the world.
00:11:48 But it's like, there is a lot to him.
00:11:50 It's like, I think the less--
00:11:52 again, it's like, you get just enough nuggets
00:11:54 where he isn't just over-explained as a character.
00:11:56 He is enigmatic enough.
00:11:58 Although he has that history man hanging around with him.
00:12:00 He's always like, history man, tell me things.
00:12:02 So it could be just like, not even like a Dunning-Kruger kind
00:12:05 of thing.
00:12:05 It just could be he's basically a parrot.
00:12:08 And he has picked up enough profundity from the history man
00:12:12 that he can bring bits of it forth when he needs to.
00:12:15 But at the other times, he's like, OK, love you, bye,
00:12:17 and then runs away from his--
00:12:19 Figuring in about 10 years, we'll probably
00:12:20 get a prequel called Dementus.
00:12:22 Yeah, probably.
00:12:23 Again, it's just like, I know a lot of folks
00:12:24 too much on Dementus, because he's like,
00:12:25 about the-- he's obviously up the mints.
00:12:27 But he is a fairly big part of the movie.
00:12:28 And what I took away from it is that he's someone
00:12:30 that is very self-aggrandizing, wants to create his own legend.
00:12:34 All throughout the movie, he's kind of adopting these various
00:12:36 riffs, nicknames like, I'm the red Dementus.
00:12:40 I'm the dark Dementus.
00:12:41 He's almost like a kind of a weirdly meta parody of Thor
00:12:44 himself.
00:12:45 Because even with his cloak and everything,
00:12:46 I could have thought, I know that Chris Hemsworth played
00:12:48 Thor, but I can't get out the idea
00:12:50 that there isn't some channeling of that character's own--
00:12:55 he's big and powerful, but he's also a bit dim.
00:12:58 Yeah, he wants--
00:12:59 It's the full on-- it's the mythic Thor,
00:13:01 where he is that kind of character.
00:13:03 He's a bit dim, bit of a party animal, has red hair.
00:13:07 [LAUGHTER]
00:13:08 Which-- so that is the most Thor Hemsworth has ever
00:13:11 been on screen, in character-wise.
00:13:14 He's a character that wants to amass power,
00:13:16 but he doesn't know how to use power.
00:13:18 And usually, though, in end game,
00:13:20 when he was fat Thor who had the bearded braid in the final
00:13:22 battle, that was the most visually
00:13:24 he looked like Thor, because Thor
00:13:26 is meant to have a big beard gut and basically be
00:13:28 more like a world's heaviest-- world's strongest man
00:13:30 than a bodybuilder.
00:13:32 Well, I guess that we do see three models
00:13:34 of competent leadership, because they have--
00:13:36 they're competent.
00:13:37 They have these abilities, and people follow them,
00:13:39 because like, oh my god, you can kill people.
00:13:42 You can protect me.
00:13:43 I'm going to follow you.
00:13:43 What's that bit in "The Road Warrior" where he goes,
00:13:45 you want to live?
00:13:46 You go with me.
00:13:47 Yeah, but then you have Immortan Joe,
00:13:49 who is a leader because he delegates properly.
00:13:51 And I'm not saying that Immortan Joe's, like,
00:13:53 ironclad rule over the Citadel is proper, but it is effective.
00:13:57 And then you have Dementus, who talks a big game, who
00:14:01 can inspire, you know, a lot of followers for--
00:14:04 like, he's like, let's have fun.
00:14:05 Let's have a quick buck.
00:14:06 You know, I'll give you what--
00:14:07 he rolls into the Citadel and says, don't worry,
00:14:09 down and drodden people.
00:14:10 I'm going to take over and give you-- and let's all rise up.
00:14:13 And then he makes everything worse.
00:14:14 No.
00:14:15 So you do have those kind of three methods of leadership,
00:14:18 two of which are successful and one of which isn't.
00:14:20 And unfortunately, Dementus is not very effective.
00:14:22 He does know how to kind of amass that kind of, like,
00:14:25 cult of personality around himself.
00:14:28 And when the veneer of that is threatened,
00:14:31 then you kind of really see this horrible,
00:14:34 sadistic side of him emerge.
00:14:36 Like, the casual cruelty of him is always there,
00:14:39 but it's especially present when he has to dole out punishment.
00:14:43 Just like politicians, kids.
00:14:44 Yeah.
00:14:46 Because part of it, it is a revenge story.
00:14:49 She has to go after him for--
00:14:51 was that in the synopsis you spoke about?
00:14:53 No, I said that in the synopsis.
00:14:56 So everyone knows it's a revenge story.
00:14:59 But again, it's like the thing about him is that, again,
00:15:03 I was a bit really worried going into it being a revenge story,
00:15:06 going--
00:15:08 I don't like calling things cliche, but it's like, ah,
00:15:10 crap, you're not going to go down this route of it being,
00:15:12 like, what's the moral of getting revenge is never sweet
00:15:15 and stuff like that.
00:15:16 I know there's a lot we can talk about in the spoiler section
00:15:18 of it.
00:15:18 It feels like-- because part of our development
00:15:21 as a character is she's so fixated on getting him,
00:15:23 but there's also a part of her realizing her own worthiness
00:15:27 as a character.
00:15:28 And that's kind of where the Mad Max template character
00:15:31 comes in.
00:15:31 Jack is--
00:15:32 Pretorian Jack.
00:15:33 Pretorian, yeah.
00:15:34 Pretorian Jack.
00:15:34 And he kind of comes in.
00:15:35 And I find-- that's why I find him the most interesting part
00:15:37 of the film.
00:15:38 Not him personally.
00:15:39 I think his character is kind of just--
00:15:40 He's like a Max-er.
00:15:42 He's an insert for Mad Max, and he feels there.
00:15:44 You could easily cut him out and just rearrange
00:15:46 a couple of things, and the story wouldn't actually
00:15:48 be changed that much.
00:15:49 Yeah.
00:15:49 But I think he kind of brings this aside to her character
00:15:51 I wish was explored more, where it's like they build a war
00:15:54 rake, and then she goes with him.
00:15:55 And then all his war party gets destroyed,
00:15:57 except for her who helps him out.
00:15:58 And then he hires her to help him,
00:15:59 because she's clearly very competent.
00:16:01 He becomes like a mentor figure.
00:16:02 Yeah.
00:16:02 And then again, it does that kind of time jump,
00:16:04 where now she's suddenly all trained.
00:16:05 And yeah, you don't really need that whole mentor thing,
00:16:07 because we kind of know she's going to be trained,
00:16:08 ready, and stuff like that.
00:16:08 But she's so fixated on her revenge,
00:16:11 but there's another part of her where it's like she's still
00:16:12 trying to figure out who she is in this world,
00:16:14 because she's never--
00:16:14 And she's trying to figure out her way back home.
00:16:16 Yeah.
00:16:17 I think that way back home part of it,
00:16:19 it's like I think it's like there's a little bit too much--
00:16:22 especially in the second half, it lands so much
00:16:25 in the revenge part that I think the part of her being just her
00:16:28 and her finding her place in the world,
00:16:30 not that she does find it in the end.
00:16:32 I wish that that was kind of a little bit--
00:16:34 landed a bit more on that.
00:16:35 That's why I wish the scenes with that guy, Jack,
00:16:37 was a bit more extended.
00:16:38 But then you can say that was--
00:16:39 Well, especially because there's like a romantic angle that
00:16:41 kind of emerges through this character as well.
00:16:42 I know, a romantic angle bothered me.
00:16:43 Because I was trying to figure out,
00:16:45 so she's probably, what, 10, 15 years since she was kidnapped.
00:16:48 If she was kidnapped, maybe you'll
00:16:49 say she looked about six or seven.
00:16:51 I was going to say she looks about 10-ish
00:16:53 or something like that, yeah.
00:16:54 So she'd be 25 at that point.
00:16:56 I guess.
00:16:58 I never-- I didn't--
00:16:59 I thought the romantic angle was really unnecessary.
00:17:01 I know we have season movies all the time
00:17:03 where romantic angles are unnecessary.
00:17:05 But it's not like there was no indication
00:17:06 in their relationship that there was anything romantic.
00:17:08 It did feel very--
00:17:10 what's the word?
00:17:11 You know, where you're like--
00:17:11 Kind of platonic.
00:17:12 Yeah, yeah.
00:17:13 Because he's just treating her, and he's like, OK,
00:17:15 this last mission is for you.
00:17:16 Well, more paternal, you know?
00:17:17 Like, that's what I thought that they were going for.
00:17:19 And then-- and that's what I thought.
00:17:20 He's like, oh, I'll come with you.
00:17:21 And she's like, oh, you know, I'll
00:17:22 bring this father figure back.
00:17:23 But then, you know, right when shit gets really, really real,
00:17:26 she's like, oh, Jack.
00:17:27 And I was like, what are you doing?
00:17:28 Where did that come from?
00:17:29 But I guess I kind of--
00:17:30 I guess I don't know.
00:17:30 Obviously, I have to think about it more.
00:17:32 But I'm wondering how much that had an impact.
00:17:33 Like, was that written in such a way
00:17:35 to have an-- to add more context to her relationship
00:17:38 with Mad Max in "Fury Road"?
00:17:40 Yeah, I imagine that was the idea.
00:17:41 Why is she so standoffish?
00:17:43 Yeah, she's standoffish.
00:17:44 And then she, like, sort of spares him.
00:17:46 And it's like, well--
00:17:47 because there is, like, a real tense relationship
00:17:49 within "Fury Road."
00:17:50 And I feel like I wondered if that helped--
00:17:52 if she reminded him of some way.
00:17:54 I wondered if that was maybe that she's trying--
00:17:56 it's trying to, like--
00:17:57 Marry that sort of thing to--
00:17:58 Add more context to it.
00:17:59 Because, again, like, yeah, that's
00:18:00 one entirely different show.
00:18:01 But, like, that's kind of what Bear Grylls
00:18:03 all did with being a prequel to "Breaking Bad."
00:18:05 And I know it's a totally different thing
00:18:06 I'm not going to do it.
00:18:06 But, like, some characters are recontextualized
00:18:09 through the prequel in a better way.
00:18:10 So you actually--
00:18:11 I feel like that's what this is trying to do.
00:18:12 Yeah.
00:18:13 And I think the more and more I think about it--
00:18:15 and that's why I like how, like, the Jack character was,
00:18:17 like, actually, you know, he adds a very symbolic kind
00:18:19 of spiritual part of that for her and her relationship
00:18:22 with Max.
00:18:22 There's one bit where "Fury Road," as far as I can tell,
00:18:24 was made much weaker by this film.
00:18:26 If you watch "Fury Road" by itself,
00:18:29 you can imagine that Joe did all these terrible things to her.
00:18:32 And that's why-- and, you know, that's
00:18:34 why her killing of him is incredibly
00:18:36 sort of, like, revenge-y type.
00:18:38 You know, she even says, remember me.
00:18:40 Yeah.
00:18:40 This one does not depict any of that.
00:18:42 She has no real reason to hate Joe.
00:18:44 That's a good point, aye.
00:18:45 Because that is a good point.
00:18:46 I was thinking--
00:18:47 Joe's a scumbag, but he wasn't a scumbag to her.
00:18:50 It's never really depicted on screen to her, which is--
00:18:53 and the implication in "Fury Road"
00:18:54 is that she's undergone a substantial amount of abuse.
00:18:57 But it feels like that's kind of glossed over in, like,
00:18:59 especially the final portion of the film.
00:19:01 Like Gamora and Thanos.
00:19:02 Well, so that's what I was thinking, because there is--
00:19:05 are we-- spoilers yet, or just--
00:19:06 How?
00:19:07 I was going to talk a little bit about Annie Taylor-Joy
00:19:10 as well, because we haven't talked about her yet.
00:19:12 Because what did you make of her performance?
00:19:14 Because I liked her performance.
00:19:16 I think she was--
00:19:16 Yeah, yeah, she was good.
00:19:17 She was very much caring.
00:19:18 She has an angular face, and she reminds me of a woman
00:19:19 that I knew in undergrad.
00:19:20 She's big eyes.
00:19:21 She perfectly looks like a younger Charlie Sterling.
00:19:23 Yeah.
00:19:24 You felt like she was very much kind of taking the mantle
00:19:26 and just--
00:19:27 I feel the same way I see Tom Hardy in "Mad Max."
00:19:29 It's like, it's not like--
00:19:30 it's a-- it's not a--
00:19:32 not like-- it's like the performance fits the character
00:19:35 that they have there, where it's like, I don't--
00:19:36 she doesn't get any of these big spectacular moments,
00:19:39 because it's sort of-- her character is meant to be kind
00:19:40 of very--
00:19:41 Internalized, yeah.
00:19:42 Yeah, yeah.
00:19:43 And again, it's not bad.
00:19:44 But there is-- there's still-- you can definitely
00:19:45 see, like, there's a lot of nuance in "Mad Max."
00:19:47 I just had an idea.
00:19:48 And that very abruptly concludes the non-spoiler version
00:19:51 of the podcast.
00:19:52 So be warned, spoilers from here on out.
00:19:56 Anyway, back to the podcast.
00:19:58 Whenever Steve Pretoria and Jack die,
00:19:59 what if the Furiosa is actual events,
00:20:01 but then in "Fury Road" is someone retelling it as a myth,
00:20:04 and the mysterious stranger that she finds is not Max.
00:20:08 In reality, it was Pretoria and Jack.
00:20:11 And that's-- their story is not exactly the same,
00:20:13 but it's roughly the same.
00:20:14 That's a possibility that if in the quote unquote "real events"
00:20:18 of "Fury Road," it might have been Pretoria and Jack,
00:20:20 and things might have been very different.
00:20:22 But what happened there?
00:20:23 Because it's myth, so the tale's been told over and over again,
00:20:26 and change has happened.
00:20:27 Somehow I didn't end up correcting this in the moment.
00:20:30 But yeah, Jack is very dead.
00:20:32 He gets dragged behind a motorcycle.
00:20:34 I presume that some of us missed this
00:20:36 because it happened in the background of the scene.
00:20:39 But still, it's pretty clear that Jack,
00:20:41 he ain't coming back from that.
00:20:43 Anyway, back to the podcast.
00:20:44 It sounds like the history man is the narrator,
00:20:47 and he's not-- he might not be a reliable narrator.
00:20:49 Yeah, and it's like the second one was the feral child
00:20:52 was narrating it.
00:20:52 So that's-- they've done that sort of thing before.
00:20:54 They've done that in "Mad Max" movies a lot.
00:20:56 Like, they'll have the narrator--
00:20:57 like, "Thunderdome" has that as well.
00:21:00 And there's a lot of kind of running themes
00:21:02 in these sort of "Mad Max" films where
00:21:04 they kind of talk about the elements of the past.
00:21:06 Because it's recent-ish history, but not recent enough
00:21:09 that a lot of the characters actually remember it.
00:21:12 Like, a lot of what they know civilization is mostly
00:21:15 passed down as all history.
00:21:17 Like in both "Road Warrior" and "Beyond Thunderdome,"
00:21:20 Bruce Spence turns up as a guy who helps Max out,
00:21:22 and he's got a plane.
00:21:23 These are two different characters.
00:21:25 So that's another example of-- a possible example of it
00:21:28 being myth, that this is another archetype that
00:21:30 ended up inside this narrative.
00:21:32 Kind of like how a lot of--
00:21:33 Like "Pantomime."
00:21:34 You guys all love that.
00:21:34 And there's, like, always specific characters.
00:21:36 Yeah.
00:21:37 And this is just-- that's another version of it, yes.
00:21:39 The idea is kind of like modern myth and history,
00:21:41 and kind of like--
00:21:43 it's almost like it's being passed down
00:21:45 as sort of like a campfire, and details kind of expanded upon.
00:21:48 I remember "The Simpsons," kids.
00:21:50 You don't know this.
00:21:51 I feel like this one really leans into that aspect,
00:21:54 especially.
00:21:54 You really get a sense that this is not
00:21:57 a literal story in many senses.
00:21:58 This is like a whole mythology.
00:22:01 For instance, there's a school of thought about Norse mythology
00:22:04 is that Loki and Odin were originally the same character.
00:22:07 Because in academic stuff on Norse mythology,
00:22:10 things get changed partway through Viking history.
00:22:13 Like Tyr is usually the main god,
00:22:15 the god of honorable combat.
00:22:16 They also directly cite things like Viking history
00:22:18 and things like that.
00:22:18 Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:22:19 They do.
00:22:19 So there's a point of comparison when they bring up
00:22:20 the war later on.
00:22:21 But then later on, Tyr gets replaced by Odin,
00:22:24 and Loki appears out of nowhere in the myth.
00:22:26 Like, he has no similar figures in local mythologies.
00:22:31 So it is thought that possibly Loki and Odin
00:22:33 were the same person.
00:22:34 And then Tyr gets replaced as the main god
00:22:36 by Odin, who is basically the-- among other things,
00:22:38 he's the god of dishonorable war.
00:22:40 And that's from the same time the Vikings went raiding.
00:22:42 The idea that people get just included and merged
00:22:45 and split apart over myth and stuff, very, very common.
00:22:49 Yeah, and I imagine that feels like the stuff
00:22:51 that Miller is pulling on all throughout these movies,
00:22:54 but especially in the later ones, where the style is
00:22:57 heightened even further.
00:22:58 And you're kind of pushing things even more so
00:23:01 than you would be able to do in the '80s in certain respects.
00:23:04 And certainly a lot safer than you
00:23:06 would be able to do in the '80s, as anyone who has ever
00:23:09 watched the "Making of the Road Warrior" documentary
00:23:11 can attest, and the injuries that are shown in that.
00:23:15 Well, I like when they showed the '15 certificate,
00:23:17 and there's something like swearing.
00:23:19 And it said, "Injury detail."
00:23:20 And I couldn't help myself.
00:23:21 I laughed, because I imagined that they were like,
00:23:23 "Fracture of the tibia, and then at the cervical spine."
00:23:27 It sounded very clinical, like someone would be like--
00:23:29 We knew exactly what moment that was referring to.
00:23:32 That fits with George Miller being a doctor, who got
00:23:37 his inspiration from working in an ER.
00:23:38 Yes, that was where "Power of Man Max" came from, wasn't it?
00:23:41 It was kind of like, you're working in an ER,
00:23:43 and it feels like the world's coming to an end
00:23:45 every single night.
00:23:45 Wear your seatbelt, kids.
00:23:47 I was like-- now you're all saying a lot.
00:23:49 And I was like saying, I thought, actually, is it weird?
00:23:51 My biggest problem with the film was
00:23:53 I thought it was an underwhelming reason how
00:23:55 she lost her arm.
00:23:56 [LAUGHTER]
00:23:57 I was like, that's it?
00:23:58 I thought it would have been something else.
00:23:59 She chopped it off to escape.
00:24:01 Did she chop it off?
00:24:02 Yes.
00:24:03 He hung her there to watch.
00:24:04 And that's the thing--
00:24:05 We should get into the spoiler section.
00:24:06 Oh, sorry.
00:24:06 I mean--
00:24:07 Yeah, she gets mangled in the crash,
00:24:10 and then she's tied up by it.
00:24:11 So then she chops it off in order to get away.
00:24:13 Did she chop it off?
00:24:14 I thought she forcibly ripped it off, because--
00:24:17 When he was pulling it off, you could see the tear in it.
00:24:19 I thought, oh, maybe it was--
00:24:20 And think of it, that was very--
00:24:22 She still-- she removed it.
00:24:23 Because remember, in "Mad Max 1,"
00:24:25 the bit that was ripped off by Saw,
00:24:27 this will get you through your foot cuff in like two minutes.
00:24:31 But you'll be dead by that point.
00:24:33 But it'll get you through in half the time
00:24:35 if you cut through your foot, which
00:24:36 was taken directly from the first "Mad Max"
00:24:38 and ripped off by Saw.
00:24:40 So it could--
00:24:41 Oh, yeah, that's what he does to the villain at the end of it.
00:24:44 I thought the bit you were going to mention
00:24:45 was the bit where Max has his arm in the road,
00:24:47 and the bike runs over his arm.
00:24:50 Because there's that moment, isn't there, in the first one?
00:24:52 There's a lot of symbolism behind that.
00:24:53 Because remember, that was the arm
00:24:54 with the tattoo of her map home.
00:24:56 So she sacrificed remembering her way home to live.
00:25:00 Yes, and they make a big point of the sort of tattoo,
00:25:03 because she's putting the star constellations on her arm.
00:25:05 And remember, her knife was hidden on her.
00:25:07 And plus, it's much quicker to cut through her arm
00:25:09 than the cuff.
00:25:10 Yes.
00:25:11 Plus, it's already been fucked up.
00:25:13 And it's, again, Dementors' own casual cruelty
00:25:16 actually backfiring against him.
00:25:18 Because she's initially strung up by the uninjured arm.
00:25:21 And then he specifically instructs
00:25:23 to put it by the injured arm.
00:25:25 And that allows her to escape.
00:25:28 And something that I was wondering,
00:25:29 do you know how the guy--
00:25:31 do it.
00:25:32 And he's like, are you going soft?
00:25:34 It really made me wonder if he saw her doing it
00:25:37 and deliberately turned a blind eye.
00:25:39 Because he was like, I didn't see nothing.
00:25:40 So that's kind of ambiguous.
00:25:42 What's interesting about the Mad Max films--
00:25:44 I think that's part of the appeal of them--
00:25:46 is the idea of the humanity of the characters
00:25:48 and what's left of them.
00:25:49 And they're still trying to find that.
00:25:51 And Furiosa's attempt to try and go back home,
00:25:54 that is her guiding path in terms of her humanity.
00:25:57 You see that with Max as well.
00:25:59 Max, in some of the other movies,
00:26:00 he sacrifices his chance at maybe going somewhere,
00:26:04 like Furiosa does.
00:26:05 At the end of Beyond Thunderdome,
00:26:06 he gets off the plane to allow them the chance to escape
00:26:10 and moves back into the wasteland.
00:26:13 And Furiosa kind of does that here to a certain extent.
00:26:17 Yeah, because she just goes back to Morton Joe.
00:26:19 Although, eventually we know how that plays out.
00:26:22 Yeah.
00:26:22 At the end, I got the feeling that--
00:26:24 it made it look like she came back to Morton Joe
00:26:27 and then instantly left in Fury Road.
00:26:28 I got the feeling it was at least five years there.
00:26:30 Yeah, it's five to 10 years.
00:26:31 The ending in the movie was really weird for me,
00:26:35 because that was the most jarring of time jumps.
00:26:37 Because you kind of expect, oh, maybe Charlize Theron's
00:26:40 going to pop up at the very end of the movie
00:26:42 or something like that.
00:26:43 Well, she apparently did not get on well with George Miller
00:26:46 and hated filming Fury Road.
00:26:47 I mean, it makes sense why that didn't happen.
00:26:49 But it still feels weird, because there
00:26:52 is an obvious time jump there, but it doesn't
00:26:54 feel like an obvious time jump.
00:26:57 I know they masked it with it being nighttime.
00:26:59 It's like, I never see her face.
00:27:01 So clearly, it was supposed to be an older Furiosa.
00:27:04 But again, it's not the same thing
00:27:06 I had with the last act, where it does feel things move
00:27:10 all really quick.
00:27:11 It starts feeling a bit rushed.
00:27:12 I still understand where these jumps do feel unclear.
00:27:16 I feel like there's just a weird progression of time.
00:27:18 I'm still confused that Morton Joe has three sons,
00:27:20 and in Fury Road, you see two of them.
00:27:22 In this one, you see two of them.
00:27:23 And although the video game reveals
00:27:24 what happens to Skabra Skrotus, but Corpus Colossus
00:27:27 is nowhere in this film.
00:27:28 I can only assume the actor physically couldn't do it,
00:27:30 and they didn't want to have the character without him.
00:27:31 He's like managing some war boys in another office.
00:27:34 I mean, that could probably be it.
00:27:35 But it's just really weird if the actor is still
00:27:38 around and acting to have him not appear in some form.
00:27:42 He was one of the main officiators of the Citadel.
00:27:46 - I mean, it is a good point that you mentioned
00:27:48 that they really do downplay the antagonistic side
00:27:52 of Morton Joe.
00:27:53 He is a secondary antagonist, but he's just kind of there.
00:27:56 He almost feels a bit, he feels a little bit too like,
00:27:58 you remember this character?
00:28:00 Instead of kind of reminding us,
00:28:01 give us a little bit more about him as well.
00:28:04 - You could argue that it weird,
00:28:05 kind of does dilute the series.
00:28:07 Like, Fury Road, I liked it, 'cause I was like,
00:28:09 and you have no context.
00:28:10 I thought the movie worked a hell of a lot better,
00:28:12 'cause it was just so weirdly strange, weird world,
00:28:14 a lot of ambiguous characters,
00:28:16 and just a lot of strange world building.
00:28:17 And I kind of liked that.
00:28:18 This movie is like, I gotta guess,
00:28:20 it's like, I say like, don't explain too much
00:28:22 about a character, 'cause sometimes it loses that effect.
00:28:23 You need a bit of mystique to them.
00:28:24 So it's like with Thor, not the one we're seeing him,
00:28:27 because I liked it when,
00:28:28 I liked them being really a bit ambiguous.
00:28:31 But those characters from Fury Road, it's like, yeah,
00:28:34 it's like, it's kind of, I actually was,
00:28:36 I was in the opposite boat where I was like, yeah,
00:28:37 I kind of do want to learn something more about them,
00:28:39 because they felt less menacing,
00:28:41 because it, I guess it's because from their perspective,
00:28:44 it's like, Furios is not a, they're not really a threat.
00:28:47 Yeah, they're not a threat.
00:28:48 Like she's like, she's kind of neutral with them.
00:28:50 She's kind of working on the Fury Road.
00:28:52 Yeah, yeah.
00:28:53 And it's like, the one thing I was thinking about,
00:28:54 like when they're rolling into Gasoline Town,
00:28:57 and the war boys are like,
00:28:58 "J'varr, we gotta get the thing filled up."
00:28:59 And by that point, I was thinking, you know what?
00:29:01 We know that all of these three encampments of folks,
00:29:04 all of these people are the bad guys,
00:29:06 but you see the war boys,
00:29:07 and then because Furios is working with Immortan Joe,
00:29:09 you're like, "Oh, but they're the good bad guys
00:29:11 that we like."
00:29:12 Yeah, it gets a little bit weird like that, doesn't it?
00:29:14 Then there's the weirdness that,
00:29:16 okay, it's been about five years
00:29:17 since I watched Fury Road.
00:29:18 I don't remember Rictus Erectus being that much of a villain.
00:29:22 In this one, he's the nastiest of the ones
00:29:24 on Immortan Joe's side.
00:29:25 They make him into a proper creep in this, don't they?
00:29:27 Like he's seemingly attempting to do something
00:29:30 really quite terrible to Furiosa.
00:29:32 Remembering Fury Road, I just remember him being muscular,
00:29:35 does what his dad says,
00:29:36 but he's stupid but good natured generally.
00:29:38 And having that-
00:29:39 - You know, he's just mostly the muscle
00:29:41 in Fury Road, I remember.
00:29:43 - It's like if he'd had different braising,
00:29:45 he'd probably be a very,
00:29:46 probably a nice personable character,
00:29:48 you know, just not smart, but you know-
00:29:51 - I mean, I can't really comment
00:29:52 because it has actually been a while
00:29:54 since I've seen Fury Road.
00:29:55 I don't think I've seen Fury Road
00:29:56 since I saw the theatrical release.
00:29:58 So I do need a little bit of a,
00:30:00 like kind of rejogging in my memory.
00:30:02 Like, oh yeah, yeah.
00:30:04 - Is that years from now?
00:30:05 - Yeah, nine years since it came out, yeah.
00:30:07 - The scene in question with Rictus,
00:30:08 if that had been a Morton Joe doing it,
00:30:11 that would have fixed two birds with one stone.
00:30:12 - Yeah, that's very strange.
00:30:13 I don't know why they decided to give it to that character
00:30:15 instead of that one.
00:30:16 Like, it was the more obvious choice.
00:30:19 - 'Cause here's what I was wondering,
00:30:20 like, does he just forget that he like, you know,
00:30:23 purchased that girl out of the wasteland
00:30:25 and like sent her into his like harem?
00:30:27 Did he just like never get back to that
00:30:29 and never be like,
00:30:30 "Hey, remember that kid that I was gonna like
00:30:31 probably (beep) for 10 years?"
00:30:33 - Because as a kid, she escaped
00:30:35 and then she disguised herself as a boy
00:30:38 and then started working as a mechanic.
00:30:40 And then she starts working for Jack,
00:30:42 kind of sneaking in and then he finds her identity.
00:30:44 And then they come back to Joe
00:30:46 and Joe doesn't really put the two together.
00:30:47 - Well, she never said her name.
00:30:49 So he never knew that that was her name.
00:30:51 Yeah, but you'd think that like at some point
00:30:54 he would be like, "What the shit?"
00:30:55 - When she comes back to Joe's land,
00:30:57 she like, she introduces herself to the guy like,
00:31:00 "I'm Furiosa."
00:31:03 - So Dementus claimed that she was called Little Dementus
00:31:06 and I don't think they got her name at the time.
00:31:07 - Yeah, she knows.
00:31:08 - Dementus, didn't you say?
00:31:09 Yeah, yeah.
00:31:10 But even still, it still seems a bit weird
00:31:12 'cause like she hasn't grown up that much, you know,
00:31:15 she's grown up a couple of years,
00:31:16 like she's, but she probably hasn't changed, you know,
00:31:19 she didn't recognize them.
00:31:20 - I remember theories during "Fury Road"
00:31:22 that Furiosa had once been one of Joe's wives
00:31:26 and that was why she escaped with them.
00:31:28 - Yeah, I thought that was the prevailing theory
00:31:30 and that doesn't seem to be the case here.
00:31:32 - It doesn't seem to be, but I would not be surprised
00:31:34 if there was some kind of a deleted scene
00:31:36 where Joe makes it very clear that, you know,
00:31:39 he's gonna, he wants to make her one of his wives.
00:31:39 - Well, he does tell when she is.
00:31:40 - Yeah, I mean, when she's older,
00:31:42 when she's working as an imperator,
00:31:45 that he makes it clear that, you know,
00:31:46 if one fuck up from her
00:31:48 and he's gonna make her one of his wives.
00:31:50 - Yeah.
00:31:50 - They must have written and filmed something
00:31:52 because Miller is too good a filmmaker
00:31:54 to have made that level of fuck up.
00:31:56 It's a long film, it probably got cut out.
00:31:58 - I wonder if there were darker stuff
00:32:00 that ultimately they decided,
00:32:02 look, we wanna get a 15 rating,
00:32:03 we'll save this for the director's cut.
00:32:05 - Well, I think there's also the fact
00:32:06 that if you really watch the Mad Max films,
00:32:08 like, especially in the later ones,
00:32:10 they're dark and like, they're all very dark,
00:32:12 but in terms of the actual onscreen violence,
00:32:15 you know, you don't actually see a whole lot.
00:32:17 It's actually, there's quite a lot of discretion there.
00:32:19 Like, it happens like very quickly
00:32:20 and with not a lot of detail,
00:32:22 like perfect first 15 certificate stuff,
00:32:24 strong, but not really strong.
00:32:26 Like, you see like a flash of blood,
00:32:28 you see someone go under the tires
00:32:29 of like a truck or something,
00:32:30 but like a split second and with no focus
00:32:33 on like the aftermath or anything like that,
00:32:36 it's all very impressionistic.
00:32:38 It's done with like restraint.
00:32:40 - I, 'cause like, I didn't have,
00:32:41 like, I've only seen chunks of the,
00:32:43 like, original, I don't understand,
00:32:45 like, I haven't seen them in their entirety.
00:32:46 I've always known them as like really dark, sinister movies
00:32:49 and I've always had like, you know,
00:32:50 but like, I've always known them as,
00:32:51 yeah, I did never, but they never like explicitly show
00:32:54 anything, it has a lot of implied,
00:32:56 maybe it's your imagination kind of feeling.
00:32:57 - I feel like the first two movies,
00:32:58 they were, you know, they were considered quite hard
00:33:01 for their time and they are,
00:33:02 like, they ran into censorship difficulties
00:33:04 for quite a long time and those are quite rough movies,
00:33:07 but even then you can still see like,
00:33:09 like it doesn't really focus too much on,
00:33:10 it's more about like kind of action and stuff
00:33:13 rather than like direct injury.
00:33:15 You have sadistic characters in it,
00:33:16 but the movie itself isn't sadistic
00:33:18 and that's kind of like the difference,
00:33:19 like it critiques that element
00:33:21 with Chris Hemsworth's character,
00:33:22 but doesn't actually indulge in the same thing itself,
00:33:26 which it could very easily do.
00:33:27 Watch any number of the six million Mad Max ripoffs,
00:33:30 I'm sure there's at least one of them
00:33:31 that does linger on it far too much.
00:33:34 - Oh yeah.
00:33:35 - It's probably Italian.
00:33:36 - So if you want to go further back
00:33:38 into the mists of cinematic time,
00:33:40 the earliest example of the movie
00:33:42 post-apocalyptic scavenger world
00:33:44 where people are repurposing old stuff in ridiculous ways
00:33:47 to create, you know, for their new society
00:33:48 that they're building under the ashes,
00:33:50 Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells, 1936, British film.
00:33:53 - That's true, we had to watch it for notes,
00:33:55 okay, I had to watch it for notes years and years ago
00:33:56 and I was like, oh my God, that's so like,
00:33:58 how did he know?
00:33:59 That's such a good--
00:34:00 - Ralph, who is it?
00:34:01 There's a big name actor
00:34:02 who basically plays the big villain character
00:34:05 who is basically a 1930s version of a Mad Max villain.
00:34:08 He was called The Boss,
00:34:10 he was directly inspired by Mussolini.
00:34:12 Was it Ralph Richardson?
00:34:13 He was some sort of big fucking British actor
00:34:15 who later on became famous
00:34:17 and if he didn't become famous,
00:34:19 if this was his classic role,
00:34:20 it would have been like basically watching
00:34:22 an English version of William Shatner 30 years early.
00:34:25 - Yeah, you mentioned those examples,
00:34:27 it feels like Miller is like a really well-read guy
00:34:29 and he's just pulling from all of this.
00:34:31 I mean, even at the beginning of the movie,
00:34:32 when Furios is grabbing the apple,
00:34:34 Garn of Eden vibes,
00:34:35 like an almost kind of biblical angle to it.
00:34:37 So, you know, it's pulling from all these different things
00:34:39 and you've got this potpourri of various inspirations
00:34:43 and then you just put like most royal on top of it.
00:34:46 - Also on top of that, the very ending involving the tree.
00:34:49 - Yeah, the tree of life, essentially.
00:34:51 - The tree of life, the world tree,
00:34:52 is also a thing from Norse mythology.
00:34:55 I'm pretty sure there's a myth or two
00:34:57 which has involving trees, you know,
00:34:59 people intermixed like that.
00:35:02 You know, not dryads,
00:35:03 but actually a person with a tree growing out of them.
00:35:05 Game of Thrones did that.
00:35:06 - Yeah, quite a horrific fate for that character ultimately.
00:35:09 - It really did remind me of, it's, yeah,
00:35:10 Prometheus who gave fire to the humans
00:35:13 and then every day has to have his liver
00:35:15 ripped out by the hawk.
00:35:17 So it was very like, yeah, very mythological.
00:35:20 I was like, oh, I see what you're doing.
00:35:21 Ha ha, I get the symbol.
00:35:22 - I love that.
00:35:23 I love that whole sort of, I really like,
00:35:24 when it was like saying like,
00:35:26 some people would have said,
00:35:26 oh, as bad as you just shoot a shot and dead.
00:35:28 Some people say this, some say,
00:35:29 I kind of like love that legendary angle.
00:35:31 Like nobody really knows it.
00:35:32 It's like, oh, she whispered to me this.
00:35:34 And then when he, what they say he did,
00:35:36 where he's being, his body's being used to fertilize.
00:35:39 - Yeah, she carries the seed from her land
00:35:42 that her mother gave her.
00:35:43 - I think it's a peach pit.
00:35:44 - Yeah, yeah.
00:35:45 And she carries it all throughout the entire movie.
00:35:47 And then the ultimate payoff is that
00:35:49 she puts it inside him.
00:35:51 - Yeah, and throws the food at it.
00:35:52 - So that's like, cause it's like.
00:35:53 - Oh no, she impregnated him with her seed.
00:35:55 - It's like, there's also like a sort of a,
00:35:57 sort of a bit of twisted irony is like this, you know,
00:35:59 oh, he's going around wanting to be this legend
00:36:01 and wanting to be like revered and all stuff.
00:36:03 And it's like, it's like, well,
00:36:04 you're kind of were used for a purpose in the end, I guess.
00:36:06 - Yeah.
00:36:07 - I just, I thought that was like,
00:36:08 that was the bit I really,
00:36:09 the part I thought was really, really touching.
00:36:10 I guess there's no other hope to it
00:36:11 where it's like we can, yeah,
00:36:13 can create hope out of that, such a tragedy.
00:36:15 - I think what's interesting is like,
00:36:16 the movie is so grand in scale
00:36:18 and Dementors and Furiosa do encounter each other
00:36:22 and they have these big dramatic confrontations
00:36:24 that you would expect out of a Mad Max movie.
00:36:26 You have that whole sequence where they're going in
00:36:28 and then suddenly they realize that it's an ambush.
00:36:32 And that's a very lengthy sequence
00:36:34 and it's quite epic and then it follows into the car chase
00:36:36 and, you know, he eventually catches up with them,
00:36:39 all that stuff.
00:36:40 And that's very Mad Max, that's very Fury Road.
00:36:42 It does all of that.
00:36:43 But the actual finale of the movie is a very small,
00:36:46 very like closed off,
00:36:48 all the world building that has been built up.
00:36:51 Yeah, it shrinks.
00:36:52 It just like discards it
00:36:53 and just focuses on these two characters.
00:36:55 Just in the middle of the desert,
00:36:57 she has him exactly where she wants him to be.
00:37:00 And it feels like an extended taunting revenge.
00:37:03 She deliberately sabotages his water
00:37:05 and disarms the gun in his sleep
00:37:08 and just waits for him to wake up and realize that.
00:37:10 - The thing that I really wanted to happen,
00:37:12 and I know why it didn't,
00:37:13 because it would have lost a lot
00:37:14 of the emotional through way.
00:37:15 Dementus is on his motorbike.
00:37:16 He's all alone.
00:37:17 He's driving into the sandstorm
00:37:19 and he puts his goggles down.
00:37:20 And the bike that he's traded with one of his people
00:37:22 has like a mannequin bust on it.
00:37:25 And I really, really thought,
00:37:27 and God, it would have been great
00:37:28 if there had been goggles around the neck of the mannequin
00:37:30 and he put them on the mannequin too.
00:37:32 And I was waiting and it didn't happen.
00:37:34 So I was thinking about that for the next few minutes.
00:37:36 - Because at that point,
00:37:37 his arrogance has unseated him again.
00:37:40 Because he thinks he's smarter than everyone else.
00:37:42 And it turns out he's not.
00:37:44 Because he was-
00:37:44 - He literally stops in the middle of the fricking desert.
00:37:46 And it's like, that maybe teaches you one thing
00:37:48 is that you don't get that far ahead
00:37:50 of the person she is in you.
00:37:50 Because it's like, every time there's a chase sequence,
00:37:52 it's like, it doesn't matter how far away they are.
00:37:55 That person is dead behind them.
00:37:56 - Yeah, because all of a sudden you see this,
00:37:57 because ours had the subtitles on,
00:37:58 which I thought was well convenient.
00:38:00 But then like, they think, okay, I think we lost them.
00:38:02 Engine's revving in the distance.
00:38:03 (laughing)
00:38:04 - It's instantaneous.
00:38:05 But then that scene is like,
00:38:06 "Is that how you find me?"
00:38:07 And it's like, or she find you.
00:38:08 You're in the, she's like, she's in the middle of the desert.
00:38:11 You went to sleep in the middle of the desert.
00:38:12 Like that-
00:38:13 - During a sandstorm.
00:38:14 - The thing that came to my head was the,
00:38:16 what's the old story about the,
00:38:20 so and so daddy wins the race,
00:38:21 the tortoise and the hare takes the sleep.
00:38:24 - From Aesop.
00:38:24 - Yeah, it's like, he kinda, yeah,
00:38:26 he kinda like, sort of stops and thinks he's kinda like,
00:38:28 and so it's almost like, why-
00:38:29 - He thinks he's escaped.
00:38:30 - Why is he so calm?
00:38:31 Why is he taking a break here?
00:38:33 Like this girl is dead on facts and he knows it.
00:38:35 - That is the one concept of the Mad Max films.
00:38:37 You have never escaped.
00:38:39 Do you never think you've escaped?
00:38:40 - That's why we like the-
00:38:41 - With that one, I reckon it was because he figured
00:38:44 no one would be stupid enough to try
00:38:45 and follow him in a sandstorm.
00:38:46 - Yes.
00:38:47 - Oh no, it was absolutely that.
00:38:48 Like that's why, like there is hubris got him
00:38:49 in the end in a way.
00:38:50 - Yeah, well, it's hubris got him in an extended way
00:38:53 because, you know, he like, he tries to,
00:38:55 he tries to take over a Morsanjo's land
00:38:58 and Furiosa alerts him to the fact that it's a ruse.
00:39:02 They engage in this war, which eliminates
00:39:05 pretty much everyone from him.
00:39:07 And so he is pretty much the last one left.
00:39:10 And then she tracks him down and like,
00:39:13 personally delivers the coup de grace.
00:39:16 - There's a stupidity that's so deliberate to it though.
00:39:18 I'm like, I'm like, wait,
00:39:19 why is this guy trying to take on the Citadel?
00:39:21 He's not, but has he not been established
00:39:23 to be a terrible leader who doesn't actually
00:39:24 have that many people on his side?
00:39:26 So it's kind of like, it's like, it was,
00:39:27 it was inevitably, regardless of Furiosa,
00:39:29 it was inevitably going to end in defeat.
00:39:31 - Probably just kept, he probably just kept failing upwards
00:39:34 and kept doing what he'd been doing previously.
00:39:35 - Oh my God, he took over that one time.
00:39:36 So he was able to clearly got somewhere with it.
00:39:38 - I think he was really good as a nomadic leader.
00:39:41 They go from place to place, pick up new people,
00:39:44 get supplies, keep going on.
00:39:45 But when he tried to challenge like,
00:39:47 I don't want to say agrarian, but you know,
00:39:49 a settled hunter gatherer society that had all of,
00:39:53 at least the basics of civilization,
00:39:56 he completely fell apart because he was basically
00:39:58 just a primal leader.
00:39:59 - Well, Dementus, you know, he's, he's probably--
00:40:02 - Crusader King, Crusader King.
00:40:03 - Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.
00:40:04 - He was a tribal leader, not a feudal leader.
00:40:05 - Oh no, oh God.
00:40:07 - But Dementus, like his, his, his promise is that like
00:40:10 the next land I take over, then things will be better.
00:40:13 Once I take over the next land, then things will be better.
00:40:16 - Again, Crusader Kings.
00:40:17 - But he doesn't know how to run things properly.
00:40:19 - Again, Crusader Kings.
00:40:21 All I have to do is buy NFTs.
00:40:23 Oh wait, no, all I have to do is buy crypto.
00:40:24 No, wait, all I have to do is invest in AI.
00:40:26 All I got to do is conquer India.
00:40:28 - No one cares about Crusader Kings except you.
00:40:30 - But yeah, it's this very brutal kind of personalized
00:40:34 revenge at the end of the movie, which kind of,
00:40:36 I guess, unseats your expectation of what the climax
00:40:39 of a movie like this would be.
00:40:41 Like you'd expect it to have the big action sequence
00:40:43 when actually it subverts that quite heavily.
00:40:45 - Like a knife fight or something.
00:40:46 - I did think it was very understated,
00:40:48 but it was nice that Dementus,
00:40:51 especially in his early parts,
00:40:52 he had several Greco-Roman sort of references
00:40:54 just to go with the Greco, the Norse references
00:40:57 from Morton Joe.
00:40:58 So that was a nice touch as well.
00:40:59 You get two different types of sort of paganism.
00:41:01 - So I think that the revenge at the end of the movie,
00:41:04 they had this quite long discussion.
00:41:05 And I suppose on one level you could go like,
00:41:07 oh, it's the typical, well, you're just like me conversation.
00:41:11 But actually there is enough depth to kind of justify it.
00:41:13 - Yeah, it kind of feels sorry for her in a way.
00:41:16 And then she's like, 'cause he's like,
00:41:17 'cause he does make that mention go on like,
00:41:19 what you're experiencing is exactly what I experienced.
00:41:21 'Cause he mentioned it with his own family.
00:41:22 - Yeah, because it's implied, well, not just implied,
00:41:24 that he had a family at some point.
00:41:27 So there seems to be the implication
00:41:29 that you could read into that.
00:41:30 Like he probably was like a normal guy at some point
00:41:34 and then like he just cracks
00:41:35 and then he's just become this like ridiculous
00:41:39 sort of pantomime villain of himself.
00:41:41 - Bit like Negan from "The Walking Dead."
00:41:44 - Oh yeah, yeah, like he definitely is.
00:41:46 I was like, that's why I kind of tackle with,
00:41:48 does he have some element of self-awareness to him
00:41:50 in that end where he's kind of like,
00:41:52 actually he kind of knows he's playing this big character
00:41:54 that he's not, it's kind of hiding behind a mask in a way.
00:41:56 But then I say that a lot.
00:41:57 - Like he was just an accountant
00:41:58 who liked to go to the gym.
00:42:00 So when everything broke down, he was already swollen.
00:42:02 He was like, well, I guess it's savagery.
00:42:04 - It could just be Chris Hemsworth.
00:42:06 - Oh, come on.
00:42:07 - There is this weird recurring motif with the bear,
00:42:11 'cause he gives her the bear, doesn't he?
00:42:12 - Oh yeah, yeah.
00:42:13 - Which belonged to his kid.
00:42:14 And that pops up all throughout the entire movie.
00:42:17 The bear keeps popping up.
00:42:17 - And the video game, arguably.
00:42:19 - Quite distinctive bear, 'cause one of the arms
00:42:20 is torn off and it's like a little plastic arm.
00:42:23 I remember, yeah.
00:42:23 - For a shadowing.
00:42:24 - You know, it's a recurring image.
00:42:26 So there's this kind of idea that at some point early on
00:42:28 that he protects her like a child.
00:42:30 He pulls her out from the hole at one point.
00:42:32 So there is that sort of element,
00:42:33 but he also doesn't really treat her like a daughter,
00:42:36 'cause he's just using her as a way of trying to get back
00:42:38 to where she came from.
00:42:40 - That's actually a very common feature
00:42:41 of a lot of narcissistic parents.
00:42:43 - Yes.
00:42:44 - They don't have children because they want to raise
00:42:45 or nurture a life.
00:42:46 They have children because they think
00:42:48 that they're supposed to.
00:42:49 Or, you know, this'll be mommy's little doll dressed up,
00:42:52 or this'll be daddy's exact copy who is gonna, you know,
00:42:55 do all the sports that daddy never got to do.
00:42:57 And, you know, so people who have children
00:42:59 because they're supposed to,
00:43:00 but don't really know how to provide
00:43:02 like nurturing for them.
00:43:03 So they're basically, this is my child,
00:43:05 and they're very important because they're important
00:43:07 to my ego.
00:43:08 It's not important to me that they're a person.
00:43:10 - Yes, and that's why he keeps her around in a cage
00:43:13 for a good chunk of the movie.
00:43:15 - This is my daughter whom I keep in a cage.
00:43:17 - To be fair, he also kept the history guy in there too.
00:43:19 So that maybe that's just--
00:43:20 - I thought the history guy was there to take care of her.
00:43:22 - Well, maybe that is the case.
00:43:23 - The history guy seemed to just go with him
00:43:25 of his own accord.
00:43:26 And at some point left of his own accord.
00:43:27 - Yeah, but we didn't see them traveling
00:43:29 before she arrived.
00:43:29 So maybe it could be either.
00:43:31 But I figured that he just kept all of the people
00:43:33 he found very, very important to him and useful
00:43:35 in this one place that was extra defended.
00:43:37 - Oh, yeah, 'cause the history guy says become invaluable.
00:43:38 And that's the ground.
00:43:39 - Yeah, so that's probably like a safe for people
00:43:42 that he owns that are really important to him.
00:43:44 - See, one thing that I thought was gonna be
00:43:45 a Chekhov's prop, but it wasn't,
00:43:47 and I was kind of disappointed was,
00:43:49 you know, when she's a child, she has one of,
00:43:50 I think they were kind of corsos,
00:43:52 was the breed of dog that played his dogs.
00:43:54 And she has one of the wee puppies and she's like,
00:43:55 "Oh," and the puppy's like, "Oh."
00:43:56 And then I thought like there would be a point
00:43:58 at the end where we're like,
00:43:59 where he like sets his dogs and like one is gonna bite her,
00:44:02 but then realizes it's her.
00:44:03 And it's like, "Oh, I love you."
00:44:04 - That conversation at the end of the movie,
00:44:05 I mean, I thought it was kind of interesting
00:44:07 'cause I mean, I suppose there is that element of that.
00:44:09 She has in some ways become like him
00:44:12 because she is so determined and exacting
00:44:14 in her own revenge and her own cruelty.
00:44:16 Like she starts doling it back onto him,
00:44:18 but also she's not like him because she,
00:44:21 I don't know.
00:44:22 - She can't be on TV, that kind of thing.
00:44:24 - Well, also 'cause she still retains her semblance
00:44:26 of humanity, whereas he is largely shirt that.
00:44:29 He is so cruel to such an extent that even like the people
00:44:32 around him are disgusted and disturbed
00:44:35 by the kind of measures that he does.
00:44:38 - Oh yeah, like the octopus is like, "You're an asshole."
00:44:40 - Well, I was gonna say, actually,
00:44:41 when you were saying that, it reminded me of like,
00:44:42 well, she's chasing an actual Eden.
00:44:44 Like we were saying the whole metaphor
00:44:46 about the garden of Eden at the start.
00:44:47 Whereas he makes a point about how anywhere,
00:44:49 or even the Jack character, he's like,
00:44:52 "Anywhere you go, it's a bad place.
00:44:54 Everything is bad, everything's falling apart."
00:44:55 So I suppose in the sense that with Thor's Thor,
00:44:58 I was gonna say, Thor's Thor,
00:45:00 he's not really fighting for an Eden
00:45:02 'cause he doesn't really have one.
00:45:03 He knows not how to create one either.
00:45:05 Yeah, obviously everybody wants to get to their Eden.
00:45:07 They can't seem to locate it and stuff.
00:45:08 So when you mentioned there, like where they have
00:45:10 similarities, but she retains humanity.
00:45:12 So it was like the whole metaphor of like,
00:45:14 oh yeah, she has a heaven to go to,
00:45:17 whereas he can only ever persistently find hell.
00:45:20 'Cause that's all it's really about.
00:45:20 - That's really good. - There is no help.
00:45:24 Actually, you know what?
00:45:25 His whole monologuing at the end,
00:45:27 and we're like, oh, at least he was, you know,
00:45:29 like kind of bringing nuance to it.
00:45:30 That might've been itself a parodying of,
00:45:34 not a parodying, but like a parodying
00:45:35 of like previous mythologies of the old world.
00:45:38 You know, 'cause the history guy's always telling him
00:45:40 all this stuff and you were hearing things
00:45:42 about the old world that passes down.
00:45:44 That might be the trope of the villain monologuing
00:45:47 at the end, this is what you do when you're about to die.
00:45:50 Because of that trope has persisted almost
00:45:53 like a biblical trope down into their mythology.
00:45:56 - Well, I think there's also the fact that he talks about
00:45:58 like this is the day I'm going to die.
00:46:01 - Oh, it's gonna be so epic.
00:46:02 - It kind of goes back into the war boys thing
00:46:04 of like, witness me and kind of wanting to be mythologized
00:46:09 and wanting to have your legend kind of ascribed,
00:46:11 like here's this guy that died in such a dramatic way.
00:46:16 And again, she robs him of that technically
00:46:18 because she does it in a more discreet
00:46:22 and more kind of extended way.
00:46:25 - We don't know for sure.
00:46:25 - Yes, but the implication is that she's--
00:46:29 - There was no audience because what does he need above
00:46:31 anything else is an audience.
00:46:33 - It reminded me of a bit in Thunderdome actually
00:46:36 where the pig killer actually says something along the lines
00:46:39 of what does it matter if I get life,
00:46:41 life expectancy is three years anyway,
00:46:43 or something like that.
00:46:44 So like death is cheap in this world anyway.
00:46:47 Like death probably has more currency than actually living.
00:46:50 (laughing)
00:46:51 Live fast, die, die something,
00:46:54 leave a beautiful looking corpse.
00:46:56 (laughing)
00:46:58 - And speaking of that,
00:47:00 the action sequences are really, really impressive.
00:47:02 - They are, but the issues that Fury Road had
00:47:05 where you can clearly tell the digital stuff attitude,
00:47:08 like everyone yelled about how Fury Road was all like,
00:47:10 you know, no practical and no CGI, which was wrong.
00:47:13 - Completely wrong, completely wrong.
00:47:15 - I mean, you know, not as an insult, it's just a fact.
00:47:18 And this one did even more of that.
00:47:20 And it was good, but if you're expecting the practical world
00:47:24 of the first three Mad Maxes, not quite.
00:47:27 - To be honest, I made my peace with that
00:47:29 because let's be honest, the first,
00:47:31 you would never get away with filming a movie
00:47:33 like the original Mad Max trilogy,
00:47:36 especially the first two,
00:47:36 because people got really messed up on those movies.
00:47:40 If there's a way of like doing things safely
00:47:41 where people don't like fly off of motorcycles
00:47:44 and then break their legs and things like that,
00:47:46 you know, you're gonna do it.
00:47:48 So I feel like aesthetically,
00:47:50 the movie kind of leans into that
00:47:51 with this kind of maximalism.
00:47:53 - I'm always in favor of treating people
00:47:55 in ways that they don't end up horrifically mentally
00:47:58 or physically scarred because of being in a movie.
00:48:00 - So you've not watched enough film--
00:48:01 - Looking at you, Stanley Kubrick.
00:48:02 - You've not watched enough film from South Asia,
00:48:04 I gotta tell you, you know, like stuntmen there,
00:48:06 you know, there's not even insurance probably.
00:48:09 - Yeah, it's insane, but for a Western movie,
00:48:11 we're not gonna get anything like that.
00:48:13 - Probably like the really, really brutal violence in it.
00:48:15 There's like, well, yeah, like, you know,
00:48:17 with, you know, when we, especially we have
00:48:18 right, Hamilton's character, there is comedic,
00:48:21 the sort of slap, I wouldn't say slapstick,
00:48:23 but like very, like very dynamic kind of death.
00:48:25 So it's like--
00:48:26 - Oh yeah, there's always comedy.
00:48:27 - There's the guy that like gets shot
00:48:28 and he flies over on his bike and you see his legs
00:48:30 like mangle outside of the snow or outside of the sand.
00:48:34 It's just something kind of really humorous
00:48:35 about the way it's--
00:48:36 - It's so over the top.
00:48:38 It's so exaggerated.
00:48:39 - When Smeg was thrown into what looked like a Sarlacc pit
00:48:41 and he's like, "Oh no," and I leaned over and I said,
00:48:43 "Finally, someone died in Quicksand.
00:48:46 "I've been waiting since the 80s to see that."
00:48:48 - Oh yeah.
00:48:49 (laughing)
00:48:50 - Yeah.
00:48:51 (laughing)
00:48:51 That was great.
00:48:52 - You know, like the violence becomes almost slapsticky
00:48:54 to a point, and again, I think that's a way of kind of like,
00:48:57 like, yeah, it's like this big dramatic world,
00:48:59 but there is like comedy to it.
00:49:01 It's oppressive in, you know, in, by design,
00:49:04 but it's not like oppressive to watch,
00:49:06 which is always a very fine balance.
00:49:08 - The violence was very differently handled
00:49:10 and Fury Road was basically all business
00:49:12 when it came to violence.
00:49:14 Everything's done hyper competently and efficiently
00:49:16 and edited spectacularly.
00:49:18 - And very center-framed.
00:49:19 They didn't really follow that as much in this one.
00:49:20 - In this one, it's a lot more free-flowing.
00:49:22 It's less laser-focused on it.
00:49:24 Whether that's a good or a bad thing is up to you.
00:49:26 I preferred the way they did it in Fury Road.
00:49:28 The action's handled more like it was in the earlier ones.
00:49:31 - Yeah.
00:49:32 I do think that Fury Road is a better movie.
00:49:35 I think it's a stronger movie overall.
00:49:37 I think that's because it's more laser-focused.
00:49:39 - I was gonna say, it's like, it's, you know,
00:49:41 it's the whole thing, like, keep it simple.
00:49:43 Like, this movie I felt was more ambitious
00:49:44 'cause it's clearly going for more of an epic
00:49:46 on the scale that it's possible to do.
00:49:48 But like, I even,
00:49:48 for comparing action sequences like that,
00:49:50 Fury Road's tight.
00:49:51 Like, it's like, it's really, really held together.
00:49:53 It's a very simple chase movie.
00:49:54 It's very, and I think it works that way.
00:49:56 And rather than overcomplicating itself,
00:49:57 where it's like, this movie would have been
00:49:58 in action sequences, you could see,
00:49:59 it can't really top what happens in Fury Road.
00:50:02 It's like, I'm stuck in doing it.
00:50:03 - Yeah, that middle, that middle accent piece
00:50:04 where they're all, they're first on the Fury Road
00:50:06 and they're like, everyone gets kind of wiped out
00:50:08 over the course of it.
00:50:09 Like, it's invented, but it, you know,
00:50:10 you're thinking where.
00:50:11 - You can see them trying to add new elements to it,
00:50:13 like the guys in the wingsuits and everything.
00:50:14 - And the device at the end of it,
00:50:18 like the propeller device that kind of smolches people.
00:50:21 - It's like, I was so happy when they finally got
00:50:23 to turn that on, 'cause it was like,
00:50:24 lampshaded for so long.
00:50:25 I'm like, do it, do the big thing.
00:50:26 - Yeah, the whole setup to that,
00:50:28 that was really, it was really tragic that we,
00:50:30 what was it, there was the guy
00:50:31 and he gets like shot or something like that.
00:50:33 - Yeah, there's like a very young war boy
00:50:35 in the back of it and he spends the whole time
00:50:37 wanting to turn it on.
00:50:38 And then right before the moment he dies.
00:50:40 - Yeah, he gets terrible excited.
00:50:41 - But he put the stuff on, so he died.
00:50:44 - I figured he died inside it while it was going on.
00:50:48 - No, no, no, because he went up and like,
00:50:50 you know how he like, you know, put the thing up,
00:50:52 'cause that's where the switch was.
00:50:53 And then all of a sudden he went down really quick
00:50:55 and she thought he like, pressed out.
00:50:56 - Well, he started firing at him from the, yeah.
00:50:59 - Well, because one of the bullets had gone through,
00:51:00 got him in the head and then he fell.
00:51:02 - Oh.
00:51:02 - That's why she had to rush over to activate it herself.
00:51:05 - I was figuring part of the purpose of that
00:51:06 was to kill him and I was really confused by that.
00:51:08 - No, it's just basically, she thought that he pussed out
00:51:10 and went and hid, but he actually got shot in the head.
00:51:13 - Yeah, she opens the hatch afterwards
00:51:14 and realizes, oh, he's dead in there.
00:51:16 I think that none of the sequences top
00:51:18 what they did in "Fury Road",
00:51:19 but it's a really high bar anyway.
00:51:20 And I do think-
00:51:21 - Yeah, that was a really long climax.
00:51:23 Like that went on for several lifetimes.
00:51:25 - I would have been happy for another hour.
00:51:27 - I do think that-
00:51:28 - No, no, no, in the original one.
00:51:29 - Oh yeah.
00:51:30 - The bit where they're in the ammunition town,
00:51:32 that's a really spectacular scene.
00:51:33 Where they're on the tower, she's sniping
00:51:35 and then he gets the rocket launcher
00:51:36 and the tower starts collapsing.
00:51:38 I think that's probably the best action sequence
00:51:40 in the entire thing.
00:51:41 - Yeah, that was very tight.
00:51:42 - I felt properly tense during it,
00:51:43 because I was worried about your guy, Jack's safety.
00:51:46 I don't know why, I think it was just like,
00:51:47 I was like, 'cause it did felt like very,
00:51:49 like when he took her out of the truck
00:51:52 and she's going in the car, I was like,
00:51:53 ah, there's gonna be like some sort of buildup.
00:51:55 'Cause they just had a little moment the night before,
00:51:57 he might die in this scene or whatever.
00:51:58 And it's like, so the whole thing,
00:51:59 I was waiting for that moment
00:52:01 for something really tragic to happen.
00:52:03 But it's always like, oh, on edge with the whole thing.
00:52:05 - I always like the Battlestar Galactica remake show.
00:52:09 If anybody is happy, someone's five minutes away
00:52:12 from being shot in the face.
00:52:13 - Yes, yes.
00:52:13 And I felt like that was kind of the thing with Furiosa.
00:52:17 Any semblance of happiness is usually snuffed out
00:52:19 fairly quickly.
00:52:20 - That's a bad sign.
00:52:21 - Where are you going so full of hope?
00:52:23 There is no hope!
00:52:25 (laughing)
00:52:27 - Yeah, I'll just trudge merrily along.
00:52:29 - Can we discuss how, very briefly,
00:52:31 about how multiple actors are playing multiple parts?
00:52:34 - Oh, really?
00:52:34 - Elsa Pataky played the blonde lady from the Green Place
00:52:37 who was with Furiosa's mom, that's Hemsworth's wife.
00:52:40 She also played one of Dementus's sort of,
00:52:43 you know, back assistants who had like
00:52:45 all this terrible scarring on her face, called Mr. Norton.
00:52:48 And then you've got, the guy who played a Morton Joe
00:52:50 also played Dementus's right-hand man with the one eye.
00:52:53 - Ah, that's canny, 'cause you don't really recognize them
00:52:56 as being the same actor.
00:52:57 So, you know, that's economical.
00:52:59 That's the, I mean.
00:53:00 (laughing)
00:53:01 - Your man's like, "Oh, I'm getting so much money
00:53:03 "in this film."
00:53:03 - Yeah, but more correctly, the guy who played Joe,
00:53:05 he was cast as the one-eyed guy first,
00:53:08 and then he was cast, you know, just randomly as Joe.
00:53:11 He figured he wouldn't have any lines,
00:53:12 but he was really proud that he managed to perfect,
00:53:15 you know, the huge--
00:53:16 - Yeah, 'cause the actor that played a Morton Joe
00:53:18 had died, you know, hadn't he?
00:53:20 - Yeah, so he, but he was really proud
00:53:22 he managed to do a good impersonation of Hugh Kees Burn,
00:53:24 who, a rather distinctive way of speaking,
00:53:26 Hugh Kees Burn, who also played Toe Cutter
00:53:28 in the first Mad Max.
00:53:30 - Yes, he did, he did.
00:53:31 - And memorable in that movie as well, in his own right.
00:53:33 I liked this, as far as Mad Max movies go,
00:53:36 it's not, it's definitely not my favorite.
00:53:38 I mean, I would personally say that Mad Max 2
00:53:40 is probably like the, still probably the best one.
00:53:44 - Like your gold standard?
00:53:44 - Yeah, between, it's between that and Fury Road.
00:53:47 Those are probably the two best,
00:53:48 and this is definitely competing for third place
00:53:52 with probably the original Mad Max.
00:53:54 Not to say that Beyond Thunderdome is a bad movie,
00:53:56 but it's definitely by far the weakest of the--
00:53:58 - The first half is really good.
00:54:00 The last second half is so bad,
00:54:02 it kind of wipes each other out.
00:54:04 - It's kind of interesting because Beyond Thunderdome
00:54:06 is the only PG-13 Mad Max movie,
00:54:08 which is bonkers.
00:54:10 You know, it's bonkers to think of,
00:54:11 but when you watch the movie,
00:54:12 it's, the approach to the violence--
00:54:14 - Tina Turner's in it.
00:54:15 - Well, I know that, yeah.
00:54:16 - The approach to the violence is kind of similar
00:54:18 to the later ones, in that, you know,
00:54:20 it's a bit more restrained in terms of the violence.
00:54:23 So I suppose it kind of comes from there a little bit
00:54:26 as well, when you think about it.
00:54:28 - It's got one of my favorite little person actors.
00:54:30 It's a guy who was in multiple 1930s movies.
00:54:32 He was really old and he played a master.
00:54:35 - Yeah, master.
00:54:36 One half of Master Blaster.
00:54:37 - Oh, I know that, yeah.
00:54:38 Who runs Barnard Hound?
00:54:40 - Which is not to say that there are really any
00:54:43 proper bad, bad Mad Max movies.
00:54:46 Like even Beyond Thunderdome,
00:54:47 it's definitely a flawed movie
00:54:49 and I don't think it really gels together as you said it is.
00:54:51 - A lot of the rip-offs are pretty bad though.
00:54:52 - Yeah, the rip-offs are really bad.
00:54:54 If you want to see how Mad Max could go wrong,
00:54:56 just watch one of those.
00:54:57 - Yeah, but made in the mid '80s mostly.
00:54:58 America's like, "We got a lot of deserts too.
00:55:00 "We got a bunch of idiots dressed up as stuff in some cars.
00:55:03 "So yeah, we can make a Mad Max."
00:55:04 Oh no, it's not quite as good.
00:55:06 What's going on?
00:55:08 ♪ What's Max got to do ♪
00:55:09 ♪ He's got to do ♪
00:55:10 - Yeah, the thing is, they're all interesting
00:55:12 in their own right, I feel.
00:55:13 Like they're all trying to do something different.
00:55:15 They're all trying to,
00:55:16 they've all got their own kind of unique identities to them.
00:55:19 And that's good for a franchise
00:55:20 'cause I think it's very common,
00:55:22 especially in this day and age,
00:55:23 to just have a movie that just keeps feeling
00:55:25 like it's trying to do the same thing
00:55:26 without a spin on it.
00:55:27 - You know what, the last Doctor Strange movie,
00:55:30 we walked out of it and we went to Lidl
00:55:31 to get some groceries and I was quiet for a while
00:55:33 and I was like, it didn't really feel like a movie.
00:55:35 It felt like another episode of the Marvel show.
00:55:39 - Yeah, exactly.
00:55:40 - It was just like, and "Shang-Chi Legend of the Ten Rings",
00:55:42 we watched it on Netflix, it felt the same way.
00:55:43 It's like, and today on the Marvel show.
00:55:46 - It feels like an installment
00:55:47 and many franchises just feel like,
00:55:49 and here's another installment where--
00:55:51 - The MCU ever since day one basically
00:55:53 has been a series of movies in the style of a TV show.
00:55:56 - It is, but they used to have more distinct identities,
00:55:58 whereas now because they're all synced up,
00:56:00 they all feel like they're a little bit too interconnected.
00:56:03 They're too televisual in a certain sense,
00:56:05 which is a bit of a weird thing to say
00:56:07 about movies that cost that much, but still.
00:56:09 I do think, you know, this is a big proper cinematic movie
00:56:12 and I do think that Miller has a story to tell,
00:56:14 maybe too much story to tell even for two and a half hours,
00:56:17 but definitely has something he wants to make.
00:56:19 - And I think it's more engaging
00:56:20 and I know that people talk about superhero fatigue
00:56:22 and stuff like that and this is gonna be weird,
00:56:24 but go with me, it goes back to 9/11
00:56:26 and they had an issue of Superman
00:56:28 and Superman is like on top of the Empire State Building
00:56:31 looking sad, oh, it's the 9/11 episode,
00:56:34 and I became unrationally annoyed by that
00:56:38 and I was ranting about it later over some beers
00:56:40 with my friend, I was like, here's the thing, right?
00:56:42 Superman wasn't there.
00:56:44 Wouldn't it be great if Superman or all the superheroes
00:56:48 were in the real world and they got the bad guys
00:56:50 and they prevented thousands of people
00:56:52 from legitimately actually dying?
00:56:53 I felt that was the most insensitive thing
00:56:55 and everyone's like, oh, well, in Marvel it was better
00:56:57 because they just helped the first respond,
00:56:59 yeah, well, they should have been doing something.
00:57:00 We're now at a point in cultural affairs or current affairs
00:57:03 in just the way that the world is
00:57:05 where it would be really great if Superman came up
00:57:09 and took Donald Trump by the back of the neck
00:57:11 and then just curb stomped his ass,
00:57:13 but that's not gonna happen.
00:57:14 - Oh, honey, honey, literally that happened in the '70s,
00:57:18 but it was with Reagan, it was Captain America.
00:57:20 - It hasn't happened now.
00:57:22 - No, with Reagan, sorry, Nixon.
00:57:23 And I think that a lot of the superheroes,
00:57:25 it's leaning a lot more silly and a lot more,
00:57:28 hey, it's Wong, everybody likes Wong,
00:57:30 here he is for his cameo, we don't care,
00:57:32 there's a war and a genocide on.
00:57:33 - There's not a cultural relevance,
00:57:35 that's the point you're saying, yeah.
00:57:37 - I think the cool thing about Furiosa,
00:57:39 again, there was the whole kind of climate change
00:57:40 and world tumult aspect at the beginning,
00:57:44 is she is a very normal person in extraordinary circumstances
00:57:48 who becomes this mythical figure.
00:57:52 - She becomes resilient, yeah.
00:57:53 - By doing all of this stuff.
00:57:55 So anyone who sees that, especially maybe like Gen Z
00:57:57 or folks can think to themselves,
00:57:59 maybe not in a conscious level,
00:58:00 I do like this because this person has agency,
00:58:03 even though it feels like she's got--
00:58:05 - The world has gone mad, yeah.
00:58:05 - Yeah, and so I think that I would like
00:58:07 to see more films like this,
00:58:09 and I hate to say it 'cause I did like
00:58:11 a lot of the Marvel films, less superheroes,
00:58:13 because I don't care how candy-colored Shazam is,
00:58:17 he's not going to any of these conflict spots
00:58:19 and stopping wars, so I don't know.
00:58:22 - And maybe that isn't probably the best vehicle
00:58:24 to comment on those things anyway.
00:58:25 - Well, exactly, that's what I think about it.
00:58:27 - Yeah, would you recommend the movie?
00:58:29 Do you like the movie?
00:58:30 - Oh, I don't know, I'd recommend it if you're like,
00:58:32 again, it's one of those things,
00:58:33 I think if you're not really into the whole Mad Max saga,
00:58:36 I don't think it is as easy to recommend it
00:58:39 if you have to have some sort of content.
00:58:40 - Yeah, you definitely have to be kind of invested.
00:58:42 - Yeah, oh, like at the end where they were just kind of like,
00:58:45 by the way.
00:58:46 - Fury Road, yeah, it's more because I think
00:58:47 it's more palatable than this,
00:58:49 where this one does sort of,
00:58:51 you have to go in, I think, with some sort of care about,
00:58:53 yeah, again, I do, yeah,
00:58:55 there's a sort of context that needs to be there
00:58:56 for you to have, I think, more engagement.
00:58:58 So I recommend it on that level,
00:58:59 like if you're into the series, then yeah, absolutely.
00:59:01 But if you're going in with no context.
00:59:03 - As a first entry, yeah.
00:59:04 - Not as a first entry, no.
00:59:06 - Is your better doing Fury Road and going backwards?
00:59:08 Because I think this one doesn't ease you into the world
00:59:11 the same way I think that movie weirdly does.
00:59:13 - Yeah. - I think it's the way I see it.
00:59:14 - I would agree with that, actually.
00:59:16 I would say watch Fury Road first
00:59:18 because it's working back from that,
00:59:20 it's not working towards it.
00:59:21 - Also the way the credits work,
00:59:23 it also will make no sense.
00:59:24 The credits literally are just segments from Fury Road.
00:59:27 - They turned Fury Road into the mid-credits sequence.
00:59:30 It's great. - Yeah.
00:59:30 - It was genius.
00:59:31 - Oh no. - They did a Marvel thing.
00:59:33 - They made it into a TikTok.
00:59:35 - Would you recommend the movie?
00:59:36 - I would have happily taken my mother to it,
00:59:38 although she passed away some years ago.
00:59:40 'Cause when Fury Road came out, I took her to the cinema
00:59:43 'cause she watched the Mad Max films years and years ago
00:59:45 'cause she was a fan of Mel Gibson before he went crazy.
00:59:48 But, you know, and she enjoyed Fury Road, you know,
00:59:51 'cause it was the same guy doing it.
00:59:53 So I would have happily taken to that.
00:59:54 I think she would have preferred Furiosa over Fury Road.
00:59:56 - I think you're right.
00:59:57 - It's more traditional filmmaking than Fury Road was
01:00:00 'cause Fury Road is a very efficient engine for violence.
01:00:03 And you know, for the kind of plot it's doing,
01:00:05 well, Furiosa is deliberately mythic in scope
01:00:07 and it's more like a traditional old school,
01:00:10 big sweeping film.
01:00:12 So for someone, you know, my mom was in her seventies,
01:00:14 I think she would have jived with it a bit more
01:00:16 than she did Fury Road.
01:00:17 - So if you're old, watch Furiosa.
01:00:20 - I thought it was good.
01:00:21 And it had that thing where Chris Hemsworth
01:00:23 just looked like he was having a fucking ball.
01:00:26 - Oh yeah.
01:00:26 - Looks like he just is gonna turn to the camera
01:00:28 and he points, oh my gosh, you guys, I get paid for this.
01:00:30 This is fucking great.
01:00:31 - Like he's played the villain before in like Bad Times
01:00:33 at the El Royale and things like that,
01:00:34 but he's never really become known for it.
01:00:36 And maybe he should be getting more chances
01:00:40 to kind of try and subvert the kind of Thor imagery.
01:00:43 I feel like he's had enough opportunities as the hero,
01:00:45 maybe give him more chances to kind of just be bad.
01:00:49 - Yeah, do it.
01:00:50 - Yeah.
01:00:51 Someone actually pointed out on Twitter,
01:00:52 I did like a final thought,
01:00:54 all the kind of like Marvel guys,
01:00:56 like Hemsworth and Evans and Mark Ruffalo,
01:00:59 they all seem to be having a real thriving time at the minute
01:01:01 just playing against type and playing bad guys.
01:01:03 - Oh yeah.
01:01:04 - Well, you know, when you're rich
01:01:05 and studios will just hand you piles of cash
01:01:07 to be in your film,
01:01:08 it's like we were saying about Nick Cage the other night,
01:01:10 go for it, live your dream, do whatever you want.
01:01:12 You know, like be an actor and an artist.
01:01:15 And who knows in five to 10 years,
01:01:17 we might get the final Mad Max one,
01:01:18 which cause Miller worked on Furious,
01:01:21 the Fury Road and the Wasteland all at once.
01:01:24 - Oh really?
01:01:24 - And yeah, script wise and story wise,
01:01:27 he worked out the entire,
01:01:28 it's meant to be a big three-part thing.
01:01:30 I don't know if it's set before or during or after,
01:01:33 if you wrote, I have no idea, but it's about Max.
01:01:35 And I heard rumors that it's going to be a mini series.
01:01:38 I don't know.
01:01:39 I know that sections of the,
01:01:41 this big Bible that he came up with back in the nineties,
01:01:44 was actually what they based the video game on.
01:01:46 So that's why they line up so well, but not perfectly.
01:01:49 - I kinda wanna play it now.
01:01:49 - Yeah.
01:01:50 - And we still have it.
01:01:51 - Yeah, we do.
01:01:52 It was great fun.
01:01:53 - Well, hope you enjoyed listening to this.
01:01:56 Hopefully we've been relatively coherent.
01:01:58 And yeah, if you wanna follow my stuff,
01:02:02 there's a Linktree page,
01:02:03 go to linktr.e/filmbrain.
01:02:07 All my stuff is there.
01:02:09 I'll save you having to like go to a million places.
01:02:13 Until next time, I'm Matthew Buck, fading out.