Throwback Thursday: Why I'm Still Worried About Batman vs Superman

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

The big news this week was the new Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer: our first substantive look at DC’s follow up to Man of Steel and that company’s answer to Captain America: Civil War.  Ever since details about the movie started coming out during production, I’ve harbored some severely mixed feelings on the subject, best summed up as “hopeful, but cautiously pessimistic.”

When it comes down to it, I’m actually a huge fan of Man of Steel.  I enjoyed it far more than I thought that I would ever enjoy a Superman movie.  It managed to turn DC’s omnipotent boy scout into a genuinely sympathetic and engaging character.  What’s more is that it did so while delivering one of the most riveting action climaxes that I’ve seen from any movie this side of The Avengers.  Say what you will about ol’ Supes leveling Metropolis, but it was needlessly entertaining to watch him do it.

Despite everything that Man of Steel got right, though, it never once felt like a Superman movie.  It employed an overcast, grim-looking, Dark Knight aesthetic that was completely out of place for this particular franchise.  Zack Snyder filtered out nearly all of the color from the original cut of the movie until everything looked drab and washed out.  So although it had an entertaining twist on a traditionally stuffy character, we had to sit through footage that made it look like you needed to adjust the contrast settings on your TV.

From what we’ve been able to glean from the trailer, Snyder’s not simply maintained this grimdark status quo, but exploded it to absurdly darker levels.  With the exception of a single shot of Superman against a washed-out sun (and maybe a shot of him dead-lifting what appears to be a satellite), every last second of the trailer takes place at night.

That’s fine for a Batman movie.  Darkness is his whole shtick and he wears it well.  But what works for Batman doesn’t inherently work for Superman.  He’s Batman’s daytime foil: a fact that you couldn’t possibly get from Superman stalking around at night posturing like some kind of super-powered SS agent.

Seriously, I honestly thought that this was building this up to be an adaptation of Injustice in its final moments.  Everything was so absurdly over the top, from the Atlas-styled statue of Superman defaced with “False God” to the whispering voice-overs saying things like “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “Devils don’t come from Hell beneath us, they come from the sky.”  There was even a shot of armed men kneeling before him.  Exactly what part of any of this screams “Superman?

The way it stands now, I’m afraid of what Justice League‘s actual plot is going to be.  Is it going to be the League in full joining forces to take down Darkseid (or an equally stakes-raising villain), or is it going to be Batman rallying the world’s other heroes against a rogue Superman who’s more than happy to dispense his personal brand of justice from on high?  I simply don’t see how we can possibly get from this version of Superman to the status quo between now and 2017.

The more that I think about it, the more inherently wrong having a Batman vs Superman movie this soon into the fledgling DC Cinematic Universe feels.  The thing about The Dark Knight Returns (from which this film draws most of its inspiration) is that it was set decades after these characters first met.  They had fought and worked alongside one another for year before their moral and political ideologies came to blows.

That fight meant something, not because it was two amped up dudes in tights duking it out in the streets, but because it was Batman and Superman: two characters who we had known and watched develop into the people that they were for years on end.  This is the first time that we’ll see this version of Batman.  This is the first time that these two characters will have met one another.  How can we possibly invest ourselves in a showdown when we simply don’t know these versions of these characters (and especially when this version of Superman is so far off base)?

Now, everything Batman about this trailer absolutely works.  Ben Affleck has the grim, brooding look of a haunted man trying (and failing) nightly to somehow undo his parents’ fate.  Jeremy Irons’ voice over as Alfred comes off as the perfect cross between Gotham‘s Sean Pertwee and Michael’s Caine’s “some men want to watch the world burn” speech from The Dark Knight.  This may very well be the best version of the Batman costume ever put to film, and that’s not even touching on how awesome-looking the robotic version is.

This trailer makes me stoked about The Suicide Squad.  It makes me stoked about another Batman movie.  It makes me stoked about Nightwing or Batgirl or any other Bat-based spin off Warner Bros comes up with.  It does not, however, make me any more excited about Dawn of Justice.

Understand, I’m still planning on watching this movie the second that it comes out.  I’m still hoping to like it (and just being as good as Man of Steel will be enough for me).  I just can’t bring myself to get my hopes up when I can’t bring myself to believe that it’s actually Superman flying around in the sky.

So are you excited about the upcoming Dawn of Justice, or are your expectations a bit more tempered?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Report: Tomorrowland Wins Out on Holiday Weekend

In which I run down the big winners (and losers) at the box office this weekend.

So I'm obviously behind for the week as far as blogging goes (which is sadly prone to happening when you pick up a couple extra shifts and have to do what in less reputable circles would be considered hard labor).  I'm hoping to make up for my negligence in what's left of this and next week.  Expect a surge of content in the upcoming week or so, because I have no intention of falling (or staying) behind like this again.

It should really come as no surprise to anybody that this weekend's big winner was Tomorrowland.  Even if the reviews coming out for it were tepid at best, Disney's been giving their latest theme park cum movie a big marketing push.  Just about everybody that I talked to wanted to see what the Hell all of those cryptic trailers were all about, while the rest just wanted something fun to watch with their family over the long weekend.

Having seen it just last night, I have to say that I'm with the general consensus on this one.  It's a fun movie that hits all the right buttons, but ultimately fails to deliver on its intriguing premise.  Visually stunning and thematically uplifting just wasn't enough to save this one from a frenetically unfocused script.

The big surprise for me this weekend was just how good the remake of Poltergeist actually was.  While I'll go into greater detail about this in my actual review of the film, rest assured that it's a strangely good reimagining of the 1982 classic.  I'd even go so far as to say that it's even better than the original (if only slightly).  They templated a modern horror movie over its still solid scriptural foundations and deliberately tried to not show up what was already proven exceptional.

Other than those two, the rest of the top ten pretty much fell into place about where you'd expect them to be.  Far from the Madding Crowd is doing oddly better than I ever thought that it would on this list (although its dollar amount seems about right).  Pitch Perfect 2, Fury Road and Age of Ultron are all still performing admirably, even if their box office grip is noticeably slacking of late.  And Home, against all odds, is still hanging in there like a champ.

Box Office Standings:

1)  Tomorrowland - $33m
2)  Pitch Perfect 2 - $30.8m
3)  Mad Max: Fury Road - $24.6m
4)  Poltergeist - $22,6
5)  Avengers: Age of Ultron - $21.6m
6)  Hot Pursuit - $3.6m
7)  Far from the Madding Crowd - $2.2m
8)  Furious 7 - $2.2m
9)  Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 - $1.8m
10)  Home - $1.7m

So what movie did you see in theaters this last weekend?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Forecast: Tomorrowland Leads the Pack in a Tight Box Office Race

In which I predict that big winners (and losers) at the box office this weekend.

Now that Age of Ultron has been suitably reigned in to a more manageable level, the box office is wide open for the rest of the summer blockbusters to move in on.  It, Pitch Perfect 2,  Mad Max: Fury Road, Tomorrowland and Poltergeist all promise to give us a tight race this weekend, but my money's on Tomorrowland stealing the #1 spot by Monday morning.

Although the reports coming in from critics aren't looking too good for Disney's latest movie based on a theme park attraction, it's impressive ad campaign should earn it about $45 million by the end of the week.  Disney's kept the intrigue on this movie high for months now, and I'm one of the many people who'll be showing up just to see what it was all about in the first place.

Poltergeist is this weekend's other new entry.  Although PG-13 horror movies rarely get good word of mouth going, this movie actually deserves it: staying true to the spirit of the original while updating the atmosphere and scares to something more palatable for contemporary audiences.  Don't expect to hear much in the way of praise for this movie (other than from me), but do expect it to turn a decent profit.  It's MPAA rating will ensure that all of the out-of-school teens looking to cop a feel will have ample opportunity to do so while fans of the original should turn up to see a timely update on an old favorite.

It's a coin toss at this point whether Pitch Perfect will beat out Tomorrowland at the box office.  Word on the street is that it should match Tomorrowland's predicted $45 take, but fairly negative word of mouth might damper its hopes of repeating last weekend's success.  At least two people I know who saw it fell asleep during their screening, and the demographic outside of teenage girls is decidedly slim.

On the flip side of things, expect Fury Road to do a bit better than expected.  While it certainly lacked Pitch Perfect 2's impressive first weekend showing, strong word of mouth might give this movie the push that it deserves.  It is hands down the best action movie of 2015 so far (sorry Kingsman and Avengers) and is looking like it'll keep that honor by year's end.  Check this out while you still have the chance to.

Age of Ultron should continue to hold its own reasonably well, but last week was the start of its trickling fall off of the top ten list.  Expect it to do a little worse every weekend until it eventually slips off of the list entirely (although with Marvel movies, this might take a while to finally happen).

So what movie will you be checking out this weekend?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Trending: Cartoon Network's New Anti-Bullying Ad

In which I address online news, web content and trending issues.

It used to be that cartoons were expected to teach moral lessons to kids on the down low.  They'd dazzle them with punches, kicks and explosions, but always bring things back around to serious issues by the end of its run time.  Who could forget Roadblock's warnings to not give strangers your address, He-Man telling kids to stay away from drugs and Sailor Moon reminding her viewers to stay true to themselves?

Children's programming in recent years have generally distanced themselves from the preachy moralizing of generations past.  I have to imagine that part of this has to do with cartoons' perceived demographic expanding beyond the very young.  Both Adventure Time and My Little Pony have devoted adult followings and teenagers are generally tuning in as frequently to animated programs as their younger brothers and sisters are.

I get it.  Nobody likes being lectured to, especially when they think that they've gotten it all figured out.  The problem is, though, that man of the kids that think that they understand the way things work are missing out on lessons that would have been a given ten, twenty and even thirty years ago.

This is why Toonami's recent anti-bullying ad has gotten such wide-spread attention.  It hearkens back to a bygone age of proselytizing animation: where kids are educated by their favorite TV characters about real-world problems that too often get swept under the rug.  Check it out here.

I'd go so far as to argue that this latest revival of the generally defunct PSA ad is more powerful than the ones of the old Saturday morning cartoons.  It's not something that's tagged at the end of an episode in order to contextualize what kids just got through seeing (most of which just changed the channel or turned the TV off before in the middle of it).  This was an introduction to a programming block: something that kids had to sit through in order to see what they came for.

Furthermore, it didn't just limit itself to one particular series.  This wasn't He-Man's take on bullying, or Roadblock's, or Sailor Moon's or Lion-O's.  It didn't just draw on the events of any one show.  It was a pastiche of the entire programming block: a single message supported by a myriad of clips that anybody tuning into could find something to connect with.  Whether it was humanity's fear and hatred of Erin Yaeger or Vegeta putting Gohan down into the dirt, there was something for everybody.

And in the end, this wasn't some preachy message spoken from on high.  It felt earnest: life advice from somebody who seemingly went through the exact same thing in his robo-youth.  Tom tells kids not just to stand up to their bullies, but to enact the greatest revenge of all: refusing to believe them and living well.

The biggest shock for me was when Tom spoke about how bullies often do so because they are insecure and bullied in their own lives behind the scenes.  And while, yes, this is something that I was already aware of, it was the specific show that he paired it with that took the wind out of me: Dragonball Z.

While the Saiyan Prince always had the most dynamic and emotional character arc of anybody on the show, I never quite made the connection with his interactions as a member of Frieza's army and bullying before.  Mocked, harassed and living with the very real threat of extermination on a daily basis, Vegeta is the very model of victim cum oppressor.

This is the exact kind of thing that children's TV needs to bring back on a more wide-spread scale.  Regardless of whether it's viewers even want it, they often need it, and that's justification enough for me.  I also love this new model that Cartoon Network developed: broad, inter-series appeal, prefacing - rather than chasing - the shows that they center around.  Other networks owe it to their viewers to follow this example and bring back these cartoon-based PSAs.

So what do you think of Cartoon Network's anti-bullyin ad?  Do you believe that they should be brought back by other networks as well?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Poltergeist Revisited

In which I revisit a previously explored topic with fresh eyes and an open mind.

I was at a meeting the other week and actually got into an interesting conversation with my boss about Poltergeist.  I wasn't surprised by her willful insistence that the remake was going to suck.  Statistically speaking, that's already a foregone conclusion (even if I'm heading into it a bit more optimistically than she is).  What took me by surprise was her insistence that the original film was hands down the greatest horror movie of all time.

While I've always been a fan of the original movie, I would hardly rank it among the better horror movies out there.  Other than a face-rippingly memorable scene or two, the whole thing actually always struck me as pretty tame.  It's a great, not especially scary introduction to the genre for children.  It's relatively mild execution and decidedly happy ending assure kids that monsters can be beaten while giving them a jolt of excitement along the way.

There's nothing too graphic for them to handle (even a scene where a man hallucinates ripping off his own face).  Nobody dies (which is a genre rarity).  The family unit is preserved with typically Spielbergian romanticism.  I was wasn't shocked for a second to find out that it was rated PG.

Looking back on it, it's actually a pretty standard haunted house story.  A well to do, nuclear family moves lives in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood where nothing could possibly go wrong.  Even when spooky stuff starts going down - like invisible conversations between their young daughter and the people living inside their TV, or furniture moving around and rearranging themselves on their own - it's nothing to worry about.  That is, however, until their daughter is stolen from them by the ghosts haunting their property, and they desperately reach out to anybody who's willing and able to help them get her back.

While the idea of non-R horror movies actually being good has been around for a while, it rarely extends to American horror films.  R's where you get your heavily horrific themes, your amped up violence and your big scares.  PG-13 (and below) is where you get jump scares and teenagers.  Let the Right One In and The Grudge worked, while Ouija and Drag Me to Hell most certainly did not.

So why does Poltergeist - which has the brazen audacity to be rated only PG - work?  A lot of that can probably be attributed to Spielberg's oversight.  The man knows how to make a good movie regardless of genre.  He knows what works and what doesn't.  What's more, he knows that the emotional core of any movie will be in its characters, not in the window dressings you add on top of it.

Poltergeist is foremost about the preservation of one family: an inherently good, inherently decent group of people that we honestly care about getting through the end credits.  We see them interact together long before we see them tormented by ghosts, giving us time to understand who these tormented people are and seeing them as more than chattel lining up for the slaughter.

And when the ghosts do come out to play?  We're not entreated to a listless series of jump scares and "gotcha" fake outs.  The movie, light as it is, relies on tension and its characters rather than trick lighting or camerawork.  The characters work through their horrific scenario with intelligence and reason like actual people would, rather than blindly running into danger and screaming.

It doesn't matter if the special effects are dated or the scares don't really hold up.  The story and the characters are just as genuine as the day the movie debuted.  The climax is just as shocking as it was in 1982 and the kids - often the death knell of otherwise good movies - actually held their own against the film's more veteran performers,

So yes, Poltergeist is a perfect gateway horror movie.  It's just scary enough to be a new kind of fun for unindoctrinated children, but not too terrifying as to scare them away from similar movies.  While it is at times icky, it's neither gory nor grotesque.  It scares them into thinking that this could happen to them while at the same time reassuring them that the family will endure and that monsters can be defeated.  It's not a perfect horror movie - and probably wouldn't even make my top 100 of the genre - but it continues to thrill more than 30 years later, which is something profoundly special.

Rating:  7/10

Buy on BluRay:  If you have children, yes.

So what do you think of Poltergeist?  Are you planning on watching the remake this weekend?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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Throwback Thursday: Why 2011's Muppets Actually Worked

In which I revisit old articles from Filmquisition and Unreality.

Before watching it for myself, I simply couldn’t fathom why 2011’s The Muppets was as popular and as well-received a film as it ended up being.  The Muppets were those fuzzy, rainbow-colored puppets from the seventies that my grandmother liked to watch reenact A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island and The Wizard of Oz.  After being cancelled in the early eighties, they parleyed their popularity into a string of increasingly modest grossing films before falling out of the mainstream entirely at the end of the last century.

Somehow that strung-out franchise – which had not been even remotely relevant for the last two decades – had created a wildly popular, Academy Award winning film.  But therein, of course, lies the rub.  After finally caving into the incessant need to know what the big deal was – what I was missing out on – I realized that it was the franchise’s lack of relevance that was the exact reason why it worked as a film.

Even though there had not been a profitably relevant audience for the franchise in decades, the Muppets had somehow stayed in the peripheries of the popular culture.  My grandmother is proof that there was still an enthusiastic – if unprofitable – fan base that remembered the series and films fondly.  John Denver and the Muppets was a Christmas staple in my house throughout my childhood, ringing in the holidays with absurdly catchy renditions of popular carols.  And even though the films based on Jim Henson’s puppets were not turning over huge profits, there were still six of them (eight, if you count made-for-TV movies).  So while they were far from a relevant force in the popular culture, they were still there, in the back of people’s minds, getting at least some notice.

The film, as it turned out, was both intelligent and self-aware enough to take the franchise’s utter lack of relevance and mainstream appeal and build the rest of its narrative around it.  The Muppets are a bunch of washed up has-beens that both barely have nostalgic appeal and lack relevance in the Twenty-First Century.  They’re too dated, too old fashioned, to possibly have a place in the Electronic Age – and that’s the whole point.

The Muppets is itself a meta-fictive justification for its own existence.  This is most directly brought to the forefront in Kermit’s shockingly melancholy meditation on the prospect of “getting the band back together.”  He asks that “if we could do it all again, / just another chance to entertain, / would anybody watch or even care, / or did something break we can’t repair?”

While the villain is caricaturish, the plot is essentially a PG-rated version The Blues Brothers and several of the film’s subplots are extraneous at best (particularly Gary and Mary’s love problems), the film succeeds because it can justify its need within the popular culture: not for nostalgia, exactly, but for an old fashioned style of family friendly amusement.

At a time when entertainment as a whole is increasingly segmented into small, hyper-focused demographics – where it is increasingly unlikely that you and your family / neighbors / coworkers / friends are watching the same thing – The Muppets has an absurdly broad appeal.  It is something that everybody can enjoy at least a little, even if they would generally prefer to watch the high-octane thrills of Drive, the poetic meditations of The Tree of Life or the high-concept comedy of The Artist.

In this regard, The Muppets is perhaps the most unifying recent experience not grounded in the realities of the outside world.  Even Marvel and DC tend to draw a line in the sand, causing many fans to choose one or the other, but not both.  The Muppets, however, is unobjectionable entertainment that provides a common experience at a time when popular entertainment tends to isolate individuals, rather than connect them.

So what did you think of The Muppets?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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From the Vault: Man of Steel

In which I review a movie from my collection.

With all of this Dawn of Justice talk in the air, I figured that it was high time to revisit a movie that I never actually thought that I would like going into it: Man of Steel.  I've never been a big Superman fan; he's basically always struck me as an infinitely less interesting Captain America: a boyscout with no discernible personality other than being a decidedly good guy.  The first movie with Christopher Reeve was solid, but the series quickly spiraled into stupidity from there.  Man of Steel was DC's first real crack at the character in years, and they had a lot to prove given the competition.

In the last days of Krypton, Jor El and his wife Lara commit treason by giving birth to a son: Kal, who is sent to Earth where he will live on as the last son of Krypton.  When General Zod's opportunistic coup is put down, however, he swears vengeance on the Kal, vowing to track him down to the ends of the universe for what his parents did to him.  But a greater destiny awaited him on Earth: to become the hero that the planet desperately deserved.

I will readily admit that I never expected to enjoy a Superman movie this much going into it.  There was actually more to this version of the character than "a genuinely good guy masquerading as a buffoon."  He's a troubled young man desperately trying to find his place in a world that he knows he doesn't belong to.  After discovering where it is that he really came from, however, he steps up to become a beacon of hope to his adopted people and save them from a decidedly Kryptonian threat.

Besides that, the movie featured some incredibly top-notch action sequences.  In particular, the final fight between Zod and Superman was some of the best stuff that I've seen in superhero movies to date.  While it's not quite "Battle of New York" good, it's a savage smack down that's everything I ever wanted to see from what essentially amounts to a battle of gods.

That being said, though, the movie is really flawed in a few fundamental ways.  As I've already enumerated on, Man of Steel neither looks nor feels like a Superman movie.  That's not to say that I miss the comic-looking Reeve movies, just that a Superman movie aught to look like, well, a Superman movie.  It needlessly adopted a gritty, Dark Knight aesthetic that was completely wrong for the franchise because that's what Warner Bros figured would sell.

While I do appreciate the new direction that they took with the character - trying to actually make him dynamic and interesting - they didn't fully succeed at that task.  He definitely has a Hell of a lot more to work with than Supermen of the past, but it all came off as more than a little heavy handed and vaguely adolescent.  And while there's always been a religious aspect to the character (basically having Moses' childhood and Jesus' adulthood, only with more punching), the ways in which the movie manifests this subtext is far too blatant and overbearing.

Zod is an incredibly one-note villain, given life through an absurdly over-the-top performance.  While I really liked the literal twist of his life's purpose - that he was raised to protect Krypton specifically and nothing less than an actual, factual Krypton would do - that comes up so far into the movie, and preceded by so much over-the-top screen time, that it's pretty much a case of too little, too late.

I also never cared for its needlessly non-linear story-telling on the Earth side of things.  Now, I love Memento and The Imitation Game as much as the next guy, but those movies worked precisely because they demanded that kind of non-traditional editing.  Man of Steel is a big budget action movie where aliens punch each other until the world around them is leveled into dust.  The arrangement of the film is both unnecessary and distracting to the actual story that it's trying to tell, and I can't help but feel like it was utilized at least partly to hide a substandard coming of age narrative under its superheroic dressing

Upon rewatching the movie, I was surprised at how little Clark's soul searching quest held up in retrospect.  Sure, none of it's bad, but it's never quite interesting enough to really care about.  On top of that, Jonathon Kent is probably the worst father in the history of cinema: telling his godly son that he should have let his entire class die because saving them might draw a bit of unwanted (and decidedly local) attention to himself.  I agree that his altruism should be tempered with caution, but what he was talking about was standing by and watching dozens of innocent children die for the most thinly justified of reasons.

And for as awesome as the first half hour is on Krypton - seriously, at one point we watch Jor-El fly a dragon through an alien apocalypse - the terrestrial half never quite held up to that opening sequence's promise.  It had a good cast, good director and a bloated budget, but never quite came together into the Superman movie that it was trying to be.

If this is the best that we can expect from DC, they should quickly prove to be no competition for Marvel cinematically.  I can only hope that from here on out, they'll make Superman feel like Superman, Batman feel like Batman and have everybody else fall somewhere in between the two.  That's not to say that Man of Steel is a bad movie, just that it's it's a reasonably solid one that simply fails to hold up as well as it should on repeated viewings.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  If you can look past its glaring flaws, there's a pretty solid movie there.

So what did you think of Man of Steel?  Does it make you excited for the nascent DC Cinematic Universe's future outings?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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The Weekend Review: Mad Max: Fury Road

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

It still surprises me that Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the big movies this summer.  On a lot of levels it makes perfect sense: its bleak, dystopian setting is certainly something to school all of the YA derivations with.  Its hard R rating stands out among all of the teen-friendly, PG-13 summer fare that tones down the violence in exchange for a much larger audience to drawn from.  While a lot of great action movies have been getting broad praise for being "more than just an action movie," Fury Road goes in the opposite direction: making the entire movie about its genre, rather than working against it out of some kind of meta-fictive spite.ng into the summer I wouldn

The most recent Mad Max movie is nothing more than it ever sold itself as: an unrelentingly action-packed two hours of death and insanity that'll cost you $10 and a bag of popcorn to see.  It's brutal, savage and one Hell of a ride: a stark contrast to the comparatively light-hearted competition and what will invariably prove to be the best action movie of the summer.

That last part is key to understanding just why this movie works so well.  There's no question in my mind that Age of Ultron is and will continue to be the better of the two movies.  Its witty dialog, nuanced characters and trademarked blend of action and comedy will see to that.  The latest Avengers flick is a great many things, only one of which is an action movie.

Fury Road, however, is not.  It is exactly one thing: a two hour chase scene intermittently broken up by smidgens of world building.  It is, however, the best movie in theaters at what it does.  Say what you will about the rest of Age of Ultron, but the action felt a little samey when compared with the first Avengers.  Nothing really stood out from the fight scenes and the best bits of the movie were always in its down time: whether a party at Avengers Tower or regrouping at Hawkeye's rustic abode.

Mad Max, however, is the epitome of an action movie.  It has great set pieces, exhilarating fights and chases and the most astounding and memorable use of practical effects that I've seen since The Cabin in the Woods.  It doesn't have the sleek veneer of a typically Hollywood production and that's a large part of its charm.

It knows exactly the kind of movie that it wants to be and went well out of its way to be exactly that.  We're dizzyingly entreated to ambitiously scaled, in-camera chase scenes where every crash and explosion is the real deal.

So what if it lacks Marvel's character development or genre hybridization?  So what if Max - or really anybody other than Nux - lacks anything even close to resembling a character arc.  So what if the plot exists only as an excuse for protracted chase scenes?  It invariably delivers on everything last thing that counts in this kind of movie.

There's been a lot of talk about the so-called "feminist agenda" of the movie, which is really nothing more than a genre-specific backlash of the number, focus and development of the movie's expansive cast of female characters.  As one twitter user succinctly put it, "at one point during Mad Max there are 12 women on screen and they all have speaking roles & none of them are talking about a man."

I understand that the Bechdel Test has been ballooned well beyond the point that it was initially trying to make, but its criticism still rings true: movies - especially popular ones - predominantly star, are about and concern themselves with men.  Rightly or not (and the answer is typically "not"), it's a fact of the industry that women are grossly under-represented and their narratives are usually subservient to a man's.

The weird thing is that this movie's become a beacon of internet misogyny, as if daring to make a story where women act like Human beings and can be in charge of the nature and direction of their own narratives is somehow cinematic blasphemy.  Fury Road has a menagerie of fantastic female characters, all with their own reason for being where they are.  The story is one of mutual survival, rather than whisking away with or rescuing the helpless women who got in over their heads.  They don't need Max in any more profound way than he needs them, and that rocks some people to their very core.

Fury Road is without question the single greatest movie in the Mad Max franchise's history.  It post-apocalyptic vision is the best realized yet and the action is, in a word, sublime.  It's a critical step forward to meaningful gender equality in film, especially within the traditionally hyper-masculine action genre,  If you harbored any doubts about this movie before, you can rest assured that Mad Max's only real competition in 2015 is going to come from Spectre.

Rating:  9/10

Buy on BluRay:  Hell yes!

So what did you think of Fury Road?  Was it as good as The Road Warrior?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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