High-Octane Wasteland · 1:18pm May 25th, 2015
"What a lovely day!"
art by Piecee01
Witness!
This week's blog may be short on ponies, but it is chuck-full of Wasteland. And the most bombastic, adrenaline-surging Wasteland yet to grace film! How could I not talk about this movie?
Mad Max: Fury Road is amazing! The entire movie is one long, violent car chase orgy across a desert wasteland populated by raiders and mutants. Fury Road doesn't waste much time with story or characterization -- you don't go to a movie like this for Shakespeare -- but it does manage a few moments of surprising poignancy. And virtually every other moment is a post-apocalyptic romp with some of the most incredible vehicles and wasteland aesthetics to grace theaters in many years.
Below is just one of the raider vehicles in the film. Each vehicle in the film is unique, rust-and-death eye candy. The emphasis on the car chase bleeds into every other aspect of the world, with War Boys gleefully grabbing their steering wheels from a monument-like collection the way some stories might have characters grabbing guns from an armory.
Okay, sure, it's ludicrously over-the-top on every level, you could waste time poking holes in the logic (but why would you want to?), and the movie is the most aggressively orange-and-teal creation out of Hollywood since Jupiter Ascending. But the absurdity only makes Mad Max: Fury Road a more powerful ride; and this time the color grading benefits the aesthetic of the film.
Serious, just look at that. It is utterly ridiculous... and utterly awesome. How could any post-apocalyptic fan not want to see this movie?
And after having seen this in the film, I have to take a moment to admire the concept. While taken to a pure-fantasy extreme, this vehicle is grounded in the history of fife and drum corps. There is a believable core here -- with The Morale Officer Orb, I even postulated Ministry of Morale ponies who played similar roles in the war.
With the big bad's war drums truck riding center in the action, this is the first movie where I could actually imagine the characters hearing the same soundtrack we, the audience, were.
The world and the protagonist make nods towards their connection to the previous Mad Max films, but only enough to justify the title. The movie is more of a spiritual successor to the amazing chase in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome than it is an actual continuation of the plots or characters of the original films.
Everything is iconic. The central villain is less of a character than he is the symbolic ideal of a wasteland big bad. Rarified, with all the extraneous material and characterization removed. I could draw parallels between him and pretty much any apocalyptic big bad ever (including Red Eye, particularly with regards to creating a civilization from the wasteland, but in a horrific manner).
Obviously, I highly recommend this film to any fan of the post-apocalyptic genre.
Could I see Mad Max: Fury Road being inspiration for action sequences, if not the impetus for an entire side story, in the Equestrian Wasteland? Sure! High-energy, vehicle-related combat sequences are not new to the Equestrian Wasteland. Fallout: Equestria had its train fight. Heroes had a high-adrenaline race through a gorge infested with tainted quarry eels. Even The Hooves of Fate had a high-speed escape scene. And with The Motorwagon Orb, I offered up the existence of motorized vehicles based on the design for the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000. Sure, for canon compliance, gasoline would have to be traded for magic, steam or even zebra alchemical superfuels. But why not? It would certainly make for an exciting tale.
Next week, I plan to explore the possible role of a fan favorite in the Fallout: Equestria universe:
art by Glitterbell
Heck yeah!
Oh my god such a cute changeling
I think I know someone who'll be drooling in anticipation of you covering changelings next week
I wonder how the griffon empire affected pre-falloutequestria looking at the lastest episode.
At long last, Kkat covers Changeling burritos.
Y'know, the only Mad Max movies I've seen are Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road. Are the first two worth seeing?
I would argue that this film is more a successor to the end sequence of The Road Warrior than the kiddy ride of the Thunderdome.
3096164 I highly recommend The Road Warrior. Not so much Mad Max, except for the first 20 minutes or so.
3096164 Yeah they are. The Road warrior especially
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3096181 Alright then, I'll see if I can find it on Blu-Ray.
WITNESS!!!!!! WITNESS!!!!!
Then everything explodes... all the times....
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YES! yes they are!
I was wondering when you would mention this... and fully agree.
I was originally gonna watch Mad Max last Saturday after MLP, but after the constant rain, I'm afraid I was unable to watch it and spent it on pizza instead.
You mean the Road Warrior chase not Thunderdome.
I remember thinking to myself 'wow, this movie started off at eleven, guess it's only downhill from here.'
Somewhere around the part where they're lying on the hoods of the cars, spitting gas into the engines for extra RPM's, I realized how wrong I was. It started out at eleven, yeah, but it finished at a twenty.
the changelings were something that came up long after your story. discord was somewhat applicable but the changelings, they were to far along.
as for the changelings themselves? who knows? maybe they would have gone into hibernation during the early stages of the wra, as love was replaced by hate. maybe they endured till now but died out as there was no love to be found in the wastelands. maybe they were mutated into something else prehaps?
lot of people could have one interpretation or the other. like my own 'headcanon' on the lack of twilight alicorn. put simpy she failed the sombra test. it forced the regal sisters to intervene, and twilight had not grown enough to become one. she had faltered.
thus discord was not released, and some time later the war started. perhaps her obsession with making alicorns could ahve been something she subconsciously wanted, realizing that she had failed. or maybe it was a conscious one, that she learned what she failed to do and blamed herself.
there are dozens of ways to integrate these elements into your story without disrupting the 'canon' of your tail.
I just saw this movie yesterday, and I couldn't agree with you more. Granted, I haven't seen the first three films, but I have reason to doubt that any of them (except Beyond Thunderdome, if it has a chase that's as amazing as you said) could match the sheer awesomeness of this one. I have a strong feeling that many Fo:E writers who've seen this movie (me included) will take some chase scene cues from it...
I didn't know there were that many Mad Max movies. I only watched the first and was satisfied with that. I thought this was like the second or maybe third Mad Max movie ever. Oh well.
Oh Kkat I was wondering when you were going to say something about Mad Max Fury Road. So it seems you mentioned there are some vehicular chase scenes in some of the spin off stories, but I actually am wondering if someone will do a Mad Max/FoE crossover. That sounds silly or cliche at first, but I haven't seen a story of like that yet.
I remember seeing the Doofwagon in MMFR the first time and I thought of it as most viewers and the producers are describing it as. Also couldn't help but be reminded of this when seeing that massive rig also...
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Are you sure you actually saw the first? A lot of people think Road Warrior is the first when it is actually the second, because it was the first one to get a major release outside of Australia (and if you haven't seen Road Warrior, you should, it's the best of the older three).
And despite what the author says, Road Warrior is generally held to have the best chase sequence, too.
3096875 Saw it on television years ago, it said Mad Max and it had Mel Gibson. The trailer to the first looks familiar so far, but then again all the movies are bloody car chases. Perhaps I should simply watch all of them at some point. That would solve the problem.
I was thinking I wanted to see Fury Road, and this blog post just confirms my suspicions. Hopefully I'll make it to the theater some time soon!
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I'm not saying that the chase in Beyond Thunderdome is better than the chase in Road Warrior. I'm saying that Fury Road harkens back more to the Beyond Thunderdome chase (at least, both aesthetically and thematically) than it does to the plots and characterization of the previous films.
Not to mention it has the return of one of the most iconic aspects of the Mad Max franchise coming back in full force.
The Interceptor
The movie was fantastic, and I could see how one could make this work with fallout.
Well... I used the motorwagons in my sidestory and they run on oil and gasoline in it. My explanation was that shortly after the coal run out, many energy companies tried to find an alternative to it. Oil being one of the alternate resources, but before they could win the fuel race, the magic generators were produced. Oil and Gasoline then went to be used solely in motorwagons and there were refuling stations around. A Magic driven cars were rare but they would become similar in the Fo:E world to our own Ford Nucleon.
3098415 Curiously, I always thought while the first movie of the Mad Max trilogy gave a good idea of how far he had fallen in the other two movies, it also seemed to skip a bit of how he ended up in a much more wasteland setting in the other two movies.
At least in the first one it had seemed like some form of civilization still existed. Though at the same time it did seem to be gradually rotting with all the gangs getting away with stuff. It just seemed like the setting changed so much from the first movie. Max must have been traveling for some time and things must have seriously fallen apart further out from the city.
Of course when it came to chase scenes, I always like the other two movies better then the first one. I'm really hoping I like this new movie. The storm in the commercial really left an interested impression of the world in general for me when I saw it.
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Fair enough. Is there a reason you picked that one specifically then? That Fury Road is more like the giant chase scene at the end of Beyond Thunderdome than the giant chase scene at the end of Road Warrior? Or is it just that Thunderdome was the one immediately predating this movie?
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I think the idea, which they didn't necessarily convey well, is that movie one is a society on the brink and movie two is society afterwards, with the apocalypse happening off-screen between them.
Just an observation; given that Max loses the Interceptor in Fury Road, doesn't have it in Thunderdome, and that there is a Warpup in Thunderdome-- Fury Road probably takes place between Road Warrior and Thunderdome.
And the best part of this already great movie? It's Aussie cinema.
I fucking love that movie.
Whilst seeing this movie, the entire first half of it I spend at the edge of my seat going "I want to write this. I want to write this." only to realize I could never do it justice. The entire last third of the movie I was too busy trying to contain myself from giggling at the over the top amazing insanity of it.
Still, the thoughts keep bouncing around my head...
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A thing to consider is that, for example, between Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome a total of 15 years off-screen had taken place (according to outside sources). Lots can deteriorate in that time, especially in a place like Australia where there's huge swaths of Outback with nothing in it already. It turning from bushland to total desert and salt flats makes sense with enough time passing.
I never go to the movies. I just wait for the DVD to come out. I went to go see this movie in the theaters. When my weekend rolls around, I'm going to go see it again. Because it. Is. Amazing.
Probably the best part about it isn't the action sequences, it's that it doesn't hold the viewers' hands. It is the penultimate example of showing, not telling. Dialogue is sparse, but—especially with Nux—we still manage to see actual character development throughout. Instead of telling us about the world, the way the characters behave allows us to puzzle out things for ourselves.
On the surface it's very much a summer popcorn action movie, and supremely satisfying in that regard, but when you delve into it's myriad layers of world-building it becomes brilliantly iconoclastic, an instant classic. (And if it doesn't at least win an Oscar for its cinematography alone, heads will roll...)
But what about the movie "No Country For Old Men?"
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Epic awesome music. It inspired me to draw Vinyl Scratch as the Doof Warrior! Witness me!
img03.deviantart.net/e746/i/2015/179/9/f/vinyl_bass_warrior_by_sword_of_akasha-d8z6qtd.jpg