“The next summer movie I’m crazy excited for is Mad Max:Fury Road. The trailer looks insane and messed up, just how I like my movies, and how I really like my action films. Except I’ve never seen the originals. Now I trust that like most far removed sequels/reboots/remakes/whatever, this won’t rely on prior knowledge. Except I really wanted to get to know Mad Max. The first film had been on Netflix for a while, and a couple months back I tried watching it. I got about halfway before realizing I hadn’t paid any attention, so I gave up and waited for another day. Sadly, it was taken off streaming recently, but that gave me an excuse to buy the whole set. I was so excited to watch them this weekend in anticipation of the awesome of the next.
Except, I still can’t seem to get into it. I’m writing up Mad Max and The Road Warrior together since I had basically the same experience with each. Hopefully I can get into Thunderdome enough to write up something coherent, but I’m taking a gamble on that. And it’s not that I’m doing tons of stuff on my computer while I watch, or at least not intentionally. As my mind keeps wandering, I do drift off to internet world. There’s just more visuals than plot, and if I’m not in a darkened theater with no other choice but to pay attention, it’s tough. My mind wanders, and I look back to see more driving or another flashback or something else that I can’t place in context.
It does remind me a lot of an episode of Sliders titled Desert Storm, that clearly was based on Mad Max. It has to do with them landing on a world where water was scarce and there was desert and dune buggies and bad guys and pretty much looked like the world of Mad Max. It’s also a sadly infamous episode as the lead non-regular actor for the episode was killed during filming in a dune buggy accident.
Anyways, I tried Mad Max one night and Road Warrior the next, with pretty much the same result. I’ve since replayed Max a couple times while gaming or doing other things, but I still can’t piece together too much. Just from the visuals, it seems like Fury Road draws more from Road Warrior, but we’ll see how that goes. It’s likely there’ll be winks and nods and inside jokes that just go over my head. So maybe I’ll just need to revisit these after I see the new one. If that film goes the way I expect, I’m sure I’ll be more than happy to live in this twisted world a little while longer.
Later that day…
Okay so I just finished Thunderdome, and I think I’ve gotta just tack it on to here. I was with it for more than the others, even though it was sillier and more out there. The battle in the dome was pretty cool, with the bungee cords and such. Then I space out for a min and suddenly there’s all these kids everywhere? It never quite got me back after that. I do see even more of the gonzo vibe that’s being promised for the next one, so even though these originals didn’t quite do it for me, I’m still insanely excited to see the mayhem on screen. One way or another, it’ll be epic”