#right before i went to see this #i watched the video where someone re-saturates a selective group of frames from man of steel #simply to show how much colour the studio deliberately drained out of every shot; how narrow and dull the palette is #which is pretty emblematic of a lot of contemporary sci-fi; esp. after the dark knight #and i get it. as a visual shorthand it’s nothing if not efficient #no better way to show that the world’s gone to hell than to drain all the colour out of it #no better way to announce your ‘dark and gritty’ hellscape where everything and everyone’s compromised and corrupted #shades of grey as the dominant aesthetic and ethical stance #it’s neat. yeah. #i’ve seen mad max criticised for being too ‘simple’ and its morals too ‘easy’ #because god forbid we have a narrative that points at the sexual subjugation of women and says ‘this is wrong’ #and keeps saying ‘this is wrong’ #doesn’t muddy those waters doesn’t offer any kind of qualifier #‘this is wrong this should be opposed with all our strength’ #and at the same time says ‘you can come back’ #however low you’ve fallen however weird and hurt and broken and voiceless you are #all you need is someone to look you in the eyes and see a person who can be saved #and it says this visually too: look how beautiful the world is; even when it’s dying and cruel #look at the deranged and terrible and gorgeous ways humans adorn their survival #there’s something haunting and lovely even in the most awful and barren of places; the lands of only salt and ashes #who wants to live for a world with no colour in it just a dull grey kind of half-life #the world in mad max is horrifying it’s bloody and feral and apocalyptic #but you believe it’s worth living for #because there’s hope and weird screaming optimism in every frame #pessimism’s easy #it’s much harder to hope at the end of the world (x)
Tag: mad max
I was talking to someone about Fury Road today and they said ‘I just hated how it had no plot. They just left and then turned around and went straight back, it was so stupid’ and I think my soul was in danger of leaving my body because really – that’s the whole point. That’s the great message of Mad Max Fury Road – they need to leave and go back because they need to understand that the Green Place doesn’t exist. Valhalla doesn’t exist. There’s no better place waiting, no Eden to escape to, nowhere for Furiosa and the wives to run to. This world, broken and damaged and war-torn as it is, is all they have, and if they want a Green Place then they have to make it themselves. They have to choose peace. They have to choose love for each other. They have to take the seeds from the older, violent generation and start again. They have to destroy the oppressive power structures holding them back, capitalism and the patriarchy that Immortan Joe represents.
The Green Place was around them all along, and it takes this long, cyclical journey to understand that, both for them and for the audience. The circular narrative structure is an absolute work of genius, and the fact that the entire plot can be boiled down to “they leave and come back” is an indication of how well this works as an action movie – that the plot is simple enough so everyone can understand what’s going on while explosions are going off and cars are racing past at 100mph – yet it’s still incredibly rich and wonderfully complex too.
And what a pertinent message to send out – the generations before us killed the world and now it’s up to us to fix what’s broken. There’s no Green Place but the one we make ourselves, which will be born out of fire and blood and rise from the ashes of the old world.
“Angharad is the true ideological opponent of Immortan Joe. He represents a toxic ideology of death, while she represents life, the alternate way of living. As the instigator of the Wives’ escape, and the one who came up with “We Are Not Things” she was the most revolutionary of them because she saw the potential for a new way of living, and she saw clearly that “what killed the world” was a way of life that glorified killing” [x]
#darling heart#god i SCREAMED when she did the bottom left#physically putting herself and her VISIBLY HUGE PREGNANT BELLY between joe and max#STARING DEFIANCE AT HIM with just capable’s arm around her#purposefully fouling his shot without a single fuck about her own safety#because she’d rather die to save a life than live and return to joe#MY GIRL#mad max#as queue wish @zombeesknees
#i bet she used to think she was above it too
WHY WOULD YOU POINT THAT OUT. but no like at first she looks up like “goddamn these naive idealistic youths” but then her gaze drops for a moment like “yea we’ve all thought that at one point. but thats not how the world works” and she looks back to the dag and eventually gives her the seeds like “i hope you’ll be able to stay above it”
There might be six pages of dialogue in the script. Maybe ten if they wrote out Tom Hardy’s grunting. It’s good grunting, don’t get me wrong because most of Tom Hardy’s work here is dialogue without dialogue. Max saws at the back of his masked head with a nail file so fast and with such insane anger that it becomes a line. You could have Tom Hardy complain about his face being strapped into a metal mask, sure, but it’s so much better to have this heathen outcast grunting and twitching and pulling at everything for the first 45 minutes of the movie like he’s a starving raccoon let loose in a restaurant walk-in freezer. He says his name once and I cried when he did even though I’m pretty sure he kills like 80 people for just doing their jobs as ripped albino death riders.
You’re more than welcome to come with us.
… No, I make my own way.
“Angharad is the true ideological opponent of Immortan Joe. He represents a toxic ideology of death, while she represents life, the alternate way of living. As the instigator of the Wives’ escape, and the one who came up with “We Are Not Things” she was the most revolutionary of them because she saw the potential for a new way of living, and she saw clearly that “what killed the world” was a way of life that glorified killing” [x]
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