“Mad Max Fury Road” was to me as perfect a movie as I can reasonably expect, rocketing up to take the top spot for my all time favorite action movie. This movie is to me, incredible in most every way. And you should see it. As soon as possible.
Unfortunately, because I have heavily procrastinated on this, the soonest that you can see this movie is September 1 in most places. Garbage. But this is in my opinion, better than every other big summer movie that has come along this year.
And that is why I have decided to write this post. See, Mad Max was for me a crystallization of everything that I like in movies, in pretty much every field; plot, cinematography, world building, editing, acting, the whole nine yards. It showed me a golden standard to measure every other movie by, and that’s what I will be doing here over the next bit. I will be basically reviewing ‘Fury Road’ over a few installments, where I compare it to other movies that came out this summer and give my reasons in this way why “Fury Road” was so good, and how these movies for me fall short.
So prepare, folks, for my first installment.

Just a week after “Fury Road” came out, Disney came out with a film called “Tomorrowland” it cost about the same, had a tried and true director in Brad Bird, was marketed to a wide audience unlike “Fury Road.” Success seemed relatively ensured. It was not. Mad Max made 360 million world-wide against a 150 million dollar budget. Tomorrowland only made 203 million against 190 million. So… how’d this movie fail?
Well, simple really, It failed because it kinda sucked. So why did it kinda suck? A myriad of reasons, but one that stands taller than the others and also can be directly related to “Fury Road” The story of Tomorrowland just does not hold up. It’s too complex, which in itself isn’t a bad thing, but in Tomorrowland the story collapses under its weight. If you wanted to give Tomorrowland’s issue a name, it would be Damon Lindeloff. He was a co-writer of the script, and his scripts are usually like this.
See, one of “Fury Roads” great strengths is that its story is simple. Really simple. And because it’s really simple a lot of time can be spent on making it tight, making sure everything makes sense, getting all the details right. And indeed, “Fury Road” is a tight tight script. Never in the movie did I ever stop and say ‘wow, that didn’t make sense.’ Everything in ‘Fury Road’ works with the logic of the movie. In Tomorrowland, these things, both little and big, keep popping up, and keep taking me out of the movie.
To illustrate this point a little better, I’m going to give a little rundown of both movies plots, spoilers, here goes.
Fury Road. After the apocalypse a guy named Max who lost everyone he’s ever cared about gets captured by a warlord named Immortan Joe. During a supply run to nearby communities one of his lieutenants’ named Imperator Furiosa runs off with Joes 5 prized wives for a green place beyond the desert. Max joins with them, they get to the place, learn it sucks, and then go back to where they started and kill the bad guy.
Now here’s Tomorrowland.
Back in 1900 Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, Jules Verne, and Gustav Eiffel find a portal to another dimension and go there and make Tomorrowland, where all the smartest people can go and make cool stuff. In the 60’s a kid named Frank Walker goes to Tomorrowland, but then gets kicked out after making a mysterious machine. In today, a girl named… something I’m sure gets a pin and goes to Tomorrowland for five minutes, and wants to go again. After stuff happens she meets with Frank Walker and goes to tomorrowland, only to learn it’s a dump. It turns out that the machine Frank made can see the future, and says that the world will end in a little less than 2 months. Because the girl is an optimist there is a slight chance the world won’t actually end for some reason(?) they also realize that the machine emits negative waves that make everyone pessimistic, so they blow up the machine, kill the bad guy, the world doesn’t end (for some reason), and Tomorrowland gets reopened.
One was twice as long as the other. Also, you may have noticed a lot more questions thrown into the Tomorrowland review, because there are a lot more questions. Mad Max is easy. A truck drives across a desert. Got it. Tomorrowland though, you have to think to figure out the plot. This is a real disadvantage for the movie, because the more I think about the plot the more likely I’m gonna find issues, especially if it is not a great plot to begin with. Problems abound in Tomorrowland. There are large things like…
1. If all the smart people weren’t taken away from earth to begin with, would we be having all the issues that are ending the world? These people could probably figure out issues like global warming and world hunger and spaceflight, but you take them all away. You Tomorrowland jerks. You’re hurting us by helping yourselves. You killed the world!
2. The whole movie is about the importance of being optimistic, but it never really gets the message across in a constructive way. The main character girl is always optimistic, sure, but she never comes up with a plan to fix a problem. The movie basically states that optimism, and optimism alone will fix things, but you need optimism and action. She never really takes action. Hope is not a plan.
And there are also a ton of smaller things throughout, things that perhaps would have been clamped down on if the writers weren’t expending so much effort on just tying the story together. Things like.
1. The evil Tomorrowland robots act like perfect humans for at least 5 minutes, then abruptly start acting like obvious robots. Shouldn’t they act like perfect humans all the time so that you don’t know who is a robot? Watch ‘the terminator.’
2. When the Eiffel tower turns into a steampunk rocket, it emits an EMP over Paris, potentially destroying an entire city and killing hundreds of thousands from lack of food and water. This is glossed over, and never mentioned or touched upon ever again. You’d think this was a big deal.
3. When they show the girl the future of the world ending, she sees such visions as a nuclear explosion (our fault, we killed ourselves) the icecaps melting (potentially our fault) and the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting. There is positively nothing anyone can do to prevent that from happening. No amount of optimisim will stop a supervolcano eruption from screwing up everything forever.
4. Another EMP goes off in Tomorrowland at the end of the movie, destroying what looks like all of the city’s power generation. Wouldn’t this prove to be a death blow to a civilization that is solely dependent on technology? Are EMP’s just eye candy?
The movie is littered with these sort of problems, and they add up. And while I wish that this was the extent of the movies problems, they keep on coming. I’d love to pin all the issues on that hack Lindeloff, but to be fair to him Brad Bird did not do the best directing here. Waaaaaat? I know. I love brad bird. He directed my all-time favorite animated film, ‘The Iron Giant’. But in this movie, he has the same problem many directors do. He has an issue with shooting action.
Early on in the movie, the girl goes to a store and gets attacked by robots, but a good robot steps in and there is a potentially cool robot fight. It is not to be. The camera cuts rapidly and moves rapidly in a dark room, so you can’t really tell what’s happening. There was something wrong with this fight other than this that I just couldn’t put my hand on though. In Mad Max cuts happen at a fantastic rate, and the camera moves a fair bit. It wasn’t until the internet solved this for me that I figured out what irked me about Tomorrowland action. Watch this fight from Mad Max.

The focus of each shot is always at the center of the frame, or only a slight amount away from it. Eye movement is helped along by a change in focus, guiding your eye to where it should be. In Tomorrowland the focus of the shot moves around rapidly and is in a different place with every cut. Your eyes dart around the screen trying to see what’s important, and it isn’t easy. Eventually, I just threw up my hands in defeat.
Now there was one last thing about Tomorrowland that just rubbed me wrong. Tomorrowland is the first movie I have seen in a long time that directly shames its audience for watching a particular type of movie. Spoilers here so watch out.
At the end of Tomorrowland, the bad guy gives his bad guy speech. Here it is.

So, what I got from that is that the reason the worlds ending is because people watch Mad Max and The Walking Dead. Shame on you for watching Mad Max, you’re embracing the apocalypse and directly killing the world. Never mind that it’s a more entertaining (or dare I say even a more optimistic in its own way) movie, you watching Fury Road or playing Fallout is whats ruining things.
This is so damn weird to me. I can’t even really describe it. Perhaps if Tomorrowland was better at giving out it’s moral about being optimistic, or perhaps if it was just better in general, this would have stuck better. As is though It seems like a less than great movie whining about how people went to see a much better film.
Also, this movie can’t rip on Mad Max, it got it’s plot from friggen Mad Max! some of you may have noticed this posts weird title. I’m just going to remind you that Tomorrowland is about a guy named Walker taking a kid to Tomorrowland and it deals with the apocalypse.

George miller should sue.

4586621 George Miller has better things to do then sue Disney because they used the idea of a guy named Walker taking someone to a supposed haven while the Apocalypse looms.

Its a very, VERY old kind of story, so really, the similarties are cotincidential.

Furthermore, while I LOVED Fury Road, I have to point out that this entire post is about Tomorrowland, and how it doesn't compare to Fury Road. I suggest a title like "Why Fury Road was a good movie and Tomorrowland wasn't" or something, if only to be more clear about what we're about to read.

Lastly, have you seen Ex Machina? That was another absolutely brillant film that came out this year

4586857
no, I haven't and I don't really plan to. I have been doing a lot of international travel recently so I have had plently of time to watch critical darling best picture nominated movies (foxcatcher, Birdman, Whiplash, etc). I only really liked one. I shut another one off halfway through because it f'n sucked. usually, I don't end up liking these little independent art movies because of something, something hard for me to put a finger on because it changes movie to movie. so no, I don't wanna watch ex machine because I don't want to be horribly disappointed.

4587711 well that's too bad. It was really good.

And which one was the worst one? I liked all of them.

4587737
Foxcatcher, in my opinion, totally sucks as a movie, and sucks hard. camerawork is completely flat and uninteresting. I get that it isn't a action movin, but you can do a little bit more than shot reverse shot for every scene of dialogue. even things that should be interesting are not. the scene where I quit was when DuPont walks into training with a loaded revolver in his hand. no one cares, no one even reacts. I would react in some way (probably my best shit my pants face, or at least confusion) if someone showed up anywhere carrying a revolver. then he shots the celing, and no one really reacts here either. its treated the same way as if he just yelled 'hey guys'. people would freak the f- out in real life. this thing, which should have been at a minimum interesting in some way, was boring! the whole damn thing was boring! so I quit, and watched Fury instead. Not boring.

4587737 BT-dubz, I actually really liked whiplash, and I thought that birdman was ok, but really needed the artsy 4th wall breaking stuff to be remove from the movie, the story was great, but too much artsy shit diminished it for me.