One of the summer’s most anticipated movies has roared into town like a spike-car from hell, guzzling up all the gasoline and milk in sight. After watching all four Mad Max movies this year, Marisa, Jesse, and Nathaniel discussed the series at length. Our Mad Max review covers the first three movies, then has a thirty-year (or several-month) time-jump before getting into Fury Road. We discuss part fours (part of our weeks-long series on the summer of the fourquel), continuity or lack thereof, why Beyond Thunderdome is the weird one, what a badass Charlize Theron is, and also we touch upon the Alien sequels and Temple of Doom, why not. As usual, spoilers abound.
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Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
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I wasn’t able to record this with, but I feel like I was there in spirit insofar as I made a joke to Shane and Sabrina about Jai Courtney being in Fury Road right before we went into the theater. I listened to half of this on my way to work, half on the way back and I didn’t try to blow up any other cars!
2 points on revived franchises (not part fours):
– Superman Returns is maybe my favorite one of these (besides maybe Fury Road, time will tell), but I am very clearly in the minority on this.
– It made a twisted kind of sense that the trailer for Vacation played before Fury Road when I saw it. That movie does not look good and I’m upset that they killed John Francis Daley off of Bones so he could direct it.
I feel like I’ve vacillated on Superman Returns a fair amount for a movie that I’ve only seen the one time back when it came out. I’d love to hear more about what you dig about it.
As I mentioned in the recording, I feel like we’ve either already seen or are currently promised any of the revivals I’d be excited about. I’ve talked elsewhere with Jesse about how weird it is to be moving directly into the target for the “sell them their youths” thing at the same time we’re in such a competitive media environment. It’s like all these companies are surrounding us with firehoses spraying our favorite things (or at least stuff we remember, maybe fondly) and hoping they’re the ones that get to knock us over. There are currently viable Planet of the Apes and Godzilla series (with the promise of an additional new Japanese Godzilla film from Toho as well). Two Muppet movies and a TV series on the way. We’ve gotten another Indiana Jones movie, a new Star Trek film series, Rocky Balboa (with Creed coming this fall), and this incredible new Mad Max film. There’s even been a Tron sequel, with another on the way. All that plus they’re promising a steady stream of new Star Wars movies (for the second time in my life), a Jurassic Park due out this year, that Evil Dead series that Campbell and Raimi are working on, Twin Peaks and X-Files revivals on television, a new King Kong movie, reports that Schwarzenegger is going to do a proper sequel to the original Conan, that Ghostbusters remake, and vague plans for a wave of Universal Monster movies (which I’d be soooo excited for if it didn’t sound like their approach isn’t up my alley). I’m also theoretically pretty interested in that Bill & Ted movie that seems to maybe be inching towards fruition, and Paul Reubens already got his long-promised Pee-Wee Herman movie going at Netflix. There’s so much there already that it’s hard to think of what else I’d be excited about.
I really wanted to just sign in to say that such was the power of Fury Road that I couldn’t think to mention Conquest of the Planet of the Apes as a contender for my favorite Part Four.
It’s also a hard question to answer because when they decide to do a decades-later sequel or reboot something, my first response is usually “Nooooo!” If I hadn’t seen anything about Fury Road (or known Tom Hardy was in it), I probably would’ve thought it’d be another bad decades-later part-four, like that Rambo movie. It’s impossible to tell which ones of these will be good and which ones won’t based on the property. You’d think that a new, Spielberg-directed Indiana Jones would be a slam dunk, but even your very positive defense of it comes with a lot of caveats. Meanwhile, the junky Fast & Furious movies started a big upswing with its part four (but really part five). Who would’ve guessed?
As much as I try to avoid cynicism about movies in general, I do think with all of these revivals it’s probably healthy to maintain a healthy skepticism even when it’s something I should by all rights be super-excited about. Or rather, to be pretty selective about that super-excitement (hence I will not be losing my mind with anticipation over Jurassic World the same way I was for Fury Road).
A couple more thoughts (spoilers in the second one):
1) We did connect Mad Max to First Blood in the podcast, but the more I think about it, the more those two are alike to me. When people think of both franchises, they picture the most exaggerated elements, but both series start with smaller, simpler, sadder stories that show you how the protagonist came to be before they start going off the rails with craziness.
2) When I asked Nathaniel and Jesse if they meant “angry” or “crazy” when they used the word “mad,” they both said “crazy,” but I think Hardy might be an angrier Max than Gibson was, at least when he saw people wearing his clothes or driving his car. I really wanted him to get his car back.
There is definitely a quietly seething quality to Hardy’s Max that I really enjoy. He’s not going to let it pop through with a real outburst; it’s more like the kind of angry you get when you break a glass, and then cut your hand sweeping it up, and then stub your toe when you take out the garbage, by yourself (or when you, say, accidentally delete a crucial part of the podcast you were editing and have to edit it back into the master file from one of the sources).