FURY ROAD WARS

How 

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD 

Revitalized My Fascination With Film

I use to love movies. In my teens my friends and I would bike to video stores, rent 3 or 4 films and stay up all night devouring them. I would frequent the cinemas, sometimes going back to watch the same movie twice, three times, or more. I had a DVD collection, a quite substantial one.

When the last time I purchased a film? I have no idea. When’s the last time I went back to the cinema to see a movie for the second time? No clue. My love for movies died out around the same time Revenge of the Sith released in cinemas. I still watch films. I saw Avatar… once. I watched the Marvel Universe films… once each and I fell asleep during at least three of them and never went back to finish. Why did this happen? Did I grow old? Did part of my soul die inside?

As my love for movies waned my love for Television exploded. Shows like LOST, DOCTOR WHO, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and GAME OF THRONES began to engulf my life. Indeed we live in a golden age of TV. People are leaving the cinemas and heading to on-demand internet streaming sites. 

But why the change? Is it because TV is shorter? Easier to access? Can you do more on TV than in the hundreds of PG-13 clone films out there? Do writers have more freedom on TV? Why has TV been more impressive than film in the past decade?

Last night I understood why. After watching MAD MAX: FURY ROAD something happened to me. I put the 7GB movie file in my trashcan, pressed “Empty Trash” and then thought to myself “I want the DVD”! “I want to see that again”! “Then I want to watch it a third time with the directors commentary”. I didn’t want a sequel. I didn’t want a prequel. I didn’t want a webisode. I just wanted to watch the exact same film a second time.

And I realized it was because of the practical effects. It wasn’t necessarily the script or the acting or the characters. Those things were good, but they were not the reason I wanted to see the film again. It’s because the film felt real to me. 

My mind knew that I wasn’t watching a bunch of animated cars defy the laws of gravity. I wasn’t seeing a bunch of animated characters bouncing off animated rocks falling to what should be their animated deaths but the laws of CGI save them. I wasn’t seeing a dwarf in a barrel bounce down an animated river and crash into animated orcs. I wasn’t seeing an animated walking fish stepping into animated feces.

What I saw on the screen were real cars driving through a real desert with real acrobats (Olympians and cirque du soleil performers) and my fracking mind told me that what I was seeing was fracking real and fracking cool.

Because of this I can call MAD MAX: FURY ROAD the best film that I’ve seen this decade. It took me for an adventure in a far away land… to a different time, a different place, and a different world. A world where all the laws of physics and gravity still apply. A world where directors can’t just put a bunch of actors in front of a blue screen and figure out everything else in “post”. A world where you need a finished script to start filming a movie.

I hope that THE FORCE AWAKENS can do this for me as well, but if not, I’ll always have FURY ROAD.