Mad Max: Fury Road Review

After thirty years biding his time in the crazed desert of writer and director George Miller's mind, Mad Max has finally returned. Ladies and gentlemen, this movie is it. It's fantastic. Not even going to try and be fancy with my words or anything. I dare say that Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action movie I have seen in a long time. It is kinetic, frenetic, glorious, and absolutely bonkers. George Miller is truly an auteur, one whose style is so wonderfully unique and distinct. The story of the film is simple. Mad Max must team up with Furiosa to escape the vicious Immortan Joe, racing across the desert and interacting with all sorts of crazed characters. This is a movie that, quite literally, never stops moving. Much of the film is dedicated to the main chase, with various action set pieces coming together to form the chase itself. What I think is so impressive is that the film starts out slow (relatively speaking) in revealing some of the craziness, but then rips back the layers during each subsequent stage of the chase, continually one upping itself in terms of sheer insanity and fun.  The performances in the movie are very well done, with Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron really selling their characters and both proving to be great action stars in their own right. Since it is the main part of the film, it is absolutely worth noting that all of the effects in this movie, aside from digitally removing safety harnesses, putting characters in front of crowds, and the sandstorm, are 100% real. The actors are actually crawling underneath trucks zooming at that speed, cars are actually flipping while exploding, and stuntmen are really flinging themselves through the air like rag dolls. There is something to be said about this type of stunt work, especially in an age of CGI stunts and action set pieces. The scenes feel so much more genuine and believable, lending credence to the idea that CGI is best used sparingly and mixed with practical effects. This also helps to create a more believable world. The sets and costumes are beautifully designed in their own grimy way, which helps to give the audience a form of reference in terms of the back story of the film without taking time away from the chase. I found myself trying to come up with my own stories about how the various tribes in the film had come to be and how they lived in the wasteland. Miller masterfully included these elements, really being able to show a lot without having to say a lot, which is a key aspect to any movie. Most importantly though, this movie is fun to watch. We are so bogged down with the soulless CGI spectacles these days, but this movie felt like Miller really put his heart and soul into it. During the first stage of the chase alone, there was a giant truck with four drummers on it and a guitar player shooting flames out of his guitar neck. This eventually escalates beyond all realms of normal human expectations, as we have men on poles swinging between the cars, men jumping on other cars with exploding spears, a blind man driving forward in a car/tank spraying machine gun fire, and soldiers spray painting each other's mouths chrome to prepare them for their upcoming trip to Valhalla. Yepp, that's where this movie goes. It is gleeful, fun, and wonderful. It is the best movie I have seen so far this year. Mad Max: Fury Road gets a 9/10.

Avengers: Age Of Ultron Review

Avengers: Age Of Ultron is the follow-up film to 2012's smash hit The Avengers, both directed by the wonderful Joss Whedon. The movie is the eleventh film in Marvel's constantly growing Cinematic Universe, reuniting all the characters from the first film and throwing a few new ones into the mix to freshen up the proceedings. In the movie, Tony Stark uses the technology of the Tesseract to create Ultron, a peace program AI. However, Ultron's birth goes wrong and he sets out to annihilate the Avengers and the whole world. As a result, the Avengers must band together once again to stop him. About a month or two ago, I wrote a post detailing how I was displeased with the initial news about this movie. I was concerned about how the movie's plot was actively being dumbed down to appeal to a wider audience and to keep the cash cow going. Unfortunately, I was right. However, I was wrong in my thought that it was the director dumbing down the film, as opposed to the studio. Little did I know that the director and the studio clashed frequently over this movie and its production in the months beforehand, as recently revealed by Joss Whedon himself. This conflict of interests and restriction of creative control results in a movie that feels undercooked and underdeveloped, despite all of the events taking place onscreen. This is really a movie that never stops moving, introducing new characters left and right and setting up new plot lines for the future Marvel films in the process. Unfortunately, this really makes the film longer than it should be, taking away from all the fun that is there to be had. A notable example of this is a subplot involving Thor that feels insanely out of place and hurts the overall flow of the movie. In addition to this out of place subplot, the characters of Ultron, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver feel underdeveloped, especially Ultron. His birth scene is so rushed that I was left wondering just exactly why he wanted to kill the human race and his motivations aren't made quite clear throughout the movie beyond the idea that "humans are bad and I must cleanse them from this planet by destroying it." While Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen (Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch) both do a fine job, their characters aren't given enough time to really command the screen, which is unfortunate, because I feel like they could add some new depths of human drama to the team. Surprisingly, we are given a lot of backstory on Hawkeye and Black Widow this time around, which was a nice breath of fresh air and gave Scarlett Johannsenn and Jeremy Renner some room to really flex their acting chops. James Spader gives a typically great performance as Ultron, which is a shame that the performance is wasted on such an undercooked villain who wasn't all that threatening. My final issue with the movie is that, just as I predicated, there is little human drama in this film besides the origin story of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch and the blossoming romance between the two misfits in Hulk and Black Widow. Tony Stark is never shown to have any guilt about the creation of Ultron, despite the robot's desire to kill the entire human race. Stark arrogantly goes about his life, insisting that it was for the good of the world and that he just has to fix it now. I just really wish that Tony was allowed to be human in these films at these points, as a scene featuring him breaking down about how his ultimate peacekeeping initiative went the opposite way would have been fascinating. It would not have only allowed Robert Downey Jr. to play somebody other than the arrogant jerk but it also would have allowed Whedon to show us a new side of the character in a way that only he knows how to. Now, that's all the bad news. To be completely honest, this movie was flat out fun in a lot of places. I was having the time of my life watching the Hulk fight Iron Man in his Hulkbuster armor, which was easily the highlight of the movie's frenetic action. As with the first film, Joss Whedon shows that he understands a team dynamic better than anybody else in screen media, as the interactions between the team members were both hilarious and human. These scenes where the team is just hanging out were just as entertaining as the action sequences, and it is a true testament to Whedon's talent that he is able to handle all these characters and their distinct personalities and get them to mesh so well together onscreen. The jokes come fast and often in this movie, most of them hitting fairly well and only a small amount missing their mark. The action is set on a large scale in this film, much like the first movie. The action scenes are well placed within the movie, expertly balanced with the slower paced talking scenes. Overall, this movie feels like an episode of something, rather than a culmination of elements that have been built up beforehand. It was almost like the producers were standing behind Whedon as he wrote the script with a checklist, making sure he put certain events in the film to further their agenda rather than allow him to make his own film that fits naturally into the Cinematic Universe. Despite all of my gripes (there were a lot, I know), I had a ton of fun with this movie, and it is definitely one of the best action movies to come out so far this year. It is honestly such a joy to see these characters reunited onscreen again, going after the bad guys while still staying true to themselves. The action is a blast to watch and is definitely a highlight of the proceedings. This movie is worth a watch to get you ready for the upcoming summer movie season. I'm still holding out hope that the Universe will tap into some more emotional elements in the coming movies, but for now, this one is just fine. Avengers: Age Of Ultron gets a 7.5 out of 10.