Last year, George Miller announced his plans to release on Blu-ray a black-and-white cut of Mad Max: Fury Road, but that black-and-white cut never did surface on Blu-ray. Its absence from the bare-bones Fury Road Blu-ray was precisely why I avoided buying that Blu-ray. For once in my life, I made a wise decision, because on December 6, the black-and-white cut will finally arrive on Blu-ray. Marketed by Warner Home Video as the "Black & Chrome Edition," the black-and-white cut is considered by Miller to be the definitive version of Fury Road. The following is a repost of my June 4, 2015 discussion of Fury Road.
The boldest thing about director Destin Cretton's 2013 indie drama Short Term 12 is its lack of on-the-nose exposition and speechifying, which makes it stand apart in a genre where dramas about counselors or social workers who want to protect child abuse victims are frequently on-the-nose about their storytelling and over-explanatory or preachy. "None of the backstories of the film's four main characters... are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks," I said a couple of months ago. "They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments."
The same goes for Mad Max: Fury Road, Australian director George Miller's incredible and much-talked-about return to the post-apocalyptic action franchise that made his career 36 years ago. Aside from an introductory voiceover that's reminiscent of the recap about the fall of civilization at the start of Miller's earlier action masterpiece The Road Warrior, Aussie ex-cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, ably taking over Mel Gibson's titular role) has even less dialogue in Fury Road than he did in The Road Warrior. He makes Detective Frank Bullitt look like a flibbertigibbet doing an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk.
Paul Nice, the beathead behind one of my favorite mixtapes, 2005's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie?, dropped an enjoyable (but not exactly danceable) Shaw Brothers tribute mix full of Shaw Brothers movie soundbites and Shaw library music cues last week. His tribute to everyone's favorite movie studio with a logo that clearly was filmed against someone's office door window has got me thinking that unless Marvel Studios tops the Raid-inspired fight choreography on Daredevil with even more impressive choreography on its planned Iron Fist martial arts project for Netflix or in the Daughters of the Dragon adaptation I've been wishing for, I doubt anyone's going to assemble a similar tribute mix about Marvel Cinematic Universe filmmaking 40 years from now, in the same way that the Poughkeepsie DJ sampled The Daredevils and Masked Avengers about 40 years after their release.
Throwback Thursday guest blogger Hardeep Aujla and Marvel Studios' harshest critics might be onto something about the MCU movies not holding up as action filmmaking 15 years from now. But if they ever YouTube how Universal Television shot Captain America in the '70s, they'd probably be like, "Wow, that was wack. It makes the studio that brought you Sharknado look like Spielberg. Okay, Joe Johnston and the Russo brothers for the win."
In the '80s, Marvel Comics published a Larry Hama G.I. Joe story about Snake Eyes and Scarlett that contained no dialogue and is still remembered as a groundbreaking piece of comic book storytelling. If Marvel Studios wants to be remembered for more than just snappy banter or one-liners and the transformation of Andy Dwyer into an action star and be thought of as an innovative action movie studio like Shaw Brothers, they're going to have to do something ballsier than even single-take fight scenes in a hallway or in front of a blind Chinese guy singing in Mandarin. I think they should make a silent action movie like that classic G.I. Joe issue and goddamn commit to it like Hama did.
Mad Max: Fury Road is nearly a silent action movie. The guy from Skins is chattier than either Tom Hardy or Charlize Theron. The enthralling 15-minute White Walker/wight attack on the Free Folk and the Night's Watch two Sundays ago on Game of Thrones--in which David Benioff and D.B. Weiss basically knocked on The Walking Dead's door that night and said to Scott M. Gimple, "Try and top this"--isn't exactly chatty either. I'm surprised no one outside of the TV industry has attempted to do a silent action flick like Buster Keaton's The General, which George Miller cited as an influence on his latest Mad Max installment. Think of all the Akiva "My Best Work Was on the Underrated Fringe" Goldsman-penned blockbusters that would have been improved--or all the post-1996two of theone of the all the three-fourths of one of the post-1996 Michael Bay blockbusters that would have been improved--if they'd been completely scrubbed of dialogue.
Oh yeah, there's director J.C. Chandor, whose 2013 film All Is Lost, with Robert Redford alone on a boat, almost contains no dialogue--Chandor said he wanted to see what Redford would be like as an actor if his voice was taken away--but All Is Lost is a survival drama, not an action flick. Whether part of the action genre or not, a huge part of what makes Fury Road, the "Hardhome" massacre sequence and All Is Lost riveting is their minimal dialogue and the performers' reliance on their physicality to carry the story. Before Fury Road, Game of Thrones and All Is Lost, a few writers and directors--all working for TV--were aware of how riveting depriving their actors of their voices could look, especially in a dialogue-heavy medium like TV, so they experimented with near-silence.
Some of Breaking Bad's most memorable cold opens were done as mini-silent action movies. Genndy Tartakovsky, who drew storyboards for Iron Man 2, did a silent action movie a few times on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars (the minimized dialogue is why I always preferred Tartakovsky's cel-animated Star Wars prequel tie-in over George Lucas' actual prequels, which, at their worst, turned into C-SPAN in space). The director of Avengers: Age of Ultron himself did it once for almost an entire hour on Buffy, and it remains one of the show's most popular episodes. I'd make a silent action movie if I had the money and the connections. So what's stopping the studios from experimenting with wordless action sequences for two hours?
Sure, The Artist was one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winners, but a modern-day silent movie isn't exactly box-office poison. People (who are open-minded enough to put aside the notion that a silent movie is too old-timey) will go see such a movie if they're fans of whoever's going to be doing all the non-talking. Mel Brooks' star-studded Silent Movie was a hit in 1976, and I bet that if IMAX theaters show for just one week the "Hardhome" massacre sequence--and only that sequence--droves of Game of Thrones fans will roll into those theaters that week like that creepy "Hardhome" zombie avalanche.
With their one-act or one-episode experiments, Vince Gilligan (and his Breaking Bad army of imaginative directors like Michelle MacLaren), Tartakovsky and Joss Whedon proved once again that far braver creative souls have been emerging from TV. So maybe a silent movie would be too bizarre for the playing-it-safe (and now Joss-less) film division of Marvel Studios. Someone said Jackie Chan, who worships Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, should be the one to tackle a silent movie, but I doubt Chan would get that experimental these days: he's in the "Steve Martin shifting back and forth between Father of the Bride and more serious movie roles" phase of his career, not the "Steve Martin doing weird shit like recording banjo albums" phase. But you know who I think would be up for a silent actioner because he has proven that just because you're a 70-year-old filmmaker, that doesn't mean you have to phone it in? George Miller.
The Aussie director considered making Fury Road silent. A silent version of Fury Road is even being planned as an extra for its Blu-ray release. Also, it looks like Mad Max is getting less chatty with each installment. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time Hardy does his last movie as Max--and Hardy's inevitably going to make more of them--he'll say only one line in the whole movie: "Oy."
Every Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm intentionally pulling out the ticket that says "Mad Max: Fury Road" because I'm just in awe of both the film's visuals and the intriguing writing for its female characters, and I want to discuss how satisfying an action film the fourth Mad Max installment is--as well as discuss the one aspect that's disappointing. Mild spoilers ahead.
The boldest thing about director Destin Cretton's 2013 indie drama Short Term 12 is its lack of on-the-nose exposition and speechifying, which makes it stand apart in a genre where dramas about counselors or social workers who want to protect child abuse victims are frequently on-the-nose about their storytelling and over-explanatory or preachy. "None of the backstories of the film's four main characters... are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks," I said a couple of months ago. "They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments."
The same goes for Mad Max: Fury Road, Australian director George Miller's incredible and much-talked-about return to the post-apocalyptic action franchise that made his career 36 years ago. Aside from an introductory voiceover that's reminiscent of the recap about the fall of civilization at the start of Miller's earlier action masterpiece The Road Warrior, Aussie ex-cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, ably taking over Mel Gibson's titular role) has even less dialogue in Fury Road than he did in The Road Warrior. He makes Detective Frank Bullitt look like a flibbertigibbet doing an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk.
It's remarkable how outside of the introductory voiceover, Fury Road conveys Max's PTSD and his guilt over the lives he was unable to save strictly in visual terms, namely two-second flashbacks to a dead little girl who keeps taunting him (either she's a daughter he raised many years after bikers killed both his toddler son and his wife in the first Mad Max film or a kid he failed to save from a recent massacre). During one of those flashbacks, another apparition appears in Max's mind, and he's the only Aboriginal in the whole goddamn movie. The Nerds of Color blog points out that out of Fury Road's cast, "actress Courtney Eaton is part Maori and Chinese, Zoe Kravitz is African American and Megan Gale is half-Maori. The text of the film does not reveal these to be necessarily conscious choices, meaning these actresses did not need to be persons of color, but here they are." But aside from those three cast members, the movie's ensemble, just like the casts in so many other recent movies about the future, is as white as a Lawrence Welk Show taping.
The Caucasity is a small speed bump in a car chase movie that's a mother lode of great examples of show-don't-tell storytelling, from Max's minimal dialogue to any scene involving war-rig driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron), both the film's real hero--even more so than her adversary-turned-ally Max--and its breakout character (aside from, of course, the bad motherfucker with the flamethrower guitar, a.k.a. the Doof Warrior). Not until Fury Road's third act does the audience realize why Furiosa chose to turn against her despotic, water-hoarding boss Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and help five of the warlord's female sex slaves--one of whom is pregnant with Joe's child--escape to safety.
Furiosa's doing it out of remorse for being previously complicit in the same exact sex-slavery system that kidnapped her as a child. She was abducted from her home in the region known as the Green Place, along with her mother, and was raised in the Citadel, the mountaintop society ruled by Joe, and she wants to return to her matriarchal tribe in the Green Place and provide Joe's breeders with sanctuary there. But the film never specifies if Furiosa was actually one of Joe's sex slaves before becoming one of his imperators, a.k.a. lieutenants (a character detail that's not stated in the movie is Furiosa's infertility, which explains why she's a rig driver and imperator instead of one of Joe's breeders), and it doesn't have to. Like Chris Klimek said in an NPR piece about Fury Road, "We're not subjected to a cinemas-interruptus monologue where she tells us why [she's helping the women escape]. We get why. Theron's eyes show us why."
The beauty of Theron's lean and mean performance--by the way, when Theron said "guzzoline" instead of "gasoline," that moment, even more so than either the return of Max's old Interceptor or the presence of Junkie XL's suitably chaotic-sounding score, really made me feel like I was home again in the dystopic desert world I grew to enjoy during The Road Warrior--is similar to the beauty of Brie Larson's performance in Short Term 12, where many of the things Larson's equally laconic character doesn't say and is unable to share with other people are more powerful than the things she does say. If Short Term 12 is a triumph of economical storytelling, Fury Road is a fucking 62-foot buzzer-beater of economical storytelling.
"Miller didn't have much money [for 1979's Mad Max], but he made his action look astounding by focusing on clarity," noted Kevin Lincoln in the Dissolve essay "What modern action films could learn from the original Mad Max." In Fury Road, which was filmed on location in Namibia, Miller has much more money, but his action sequences continue to focus on clarity--instead of opting for something like ultra-fast cuts that end up making everything incomprehensible--and they emphasize old-school stuntwork and old-school practical FX in the age of 007 windsurfing a fake-looking CGI tidal wave and Indiana Jones being chased through an equally fake-looking CGI jungle. Fury Road is 80% practical FX and 20% CGI, and most of that CGI was used not for explosions--or animating Max's leaps and dives in the same way that animation was used to create Spider-Man's movements in live-action Spidey movies--but for removing stunt rigs and creating Furiosa's mechanical left arm.
There's a purity to Fury Road's action sequences that's as appealing and intriguing as the purity in both the film's dialogue (part of me wishes Miller made Fury Road into a silent movie like Buster Keaton's The General, which he's cited as an influence on his "western on wheels" and has already been mashed up with one of Junkie XL's Fury Road score cues by some genius over on Vimeo) and the characters' motivations. So it bugs me when I stumble into a criticism about the purity of those motivations, like Leonard Maltin's complaints that "I didn't care about any of the characters" and "They are so sketchily drawn." Are you basically saying, Mr. Maltin, that Fury Road could have used more exposition to get you inside the characters' heads? Because Fury Road really doesn't need more. Just like Short Term 12, it's a film about survivors of abuse and PTSD sufferers learning to overcome their difficulties with both communication and trusting others--or turning those difficulties into their strengths--to fight their adversaries together and regain their agency. There's no time for speechifying or letting everyone know at length how they feel. They've got a Green Place they need to drive to.
