Mad Max: serendipity!

• Fury Road. FURY'S ROAD. It's her road.
  
  
• @xatharine was admiring the near-total lack of worldbuilding & I realized what that was like: fanfic. Fic where they didn't waste more than like a minute setting up apocalyptic yadda yadda or Max's numbingly predictable manpain past because lol, you already know it from canon! Fuck explaining the fucking fridged girls, okay? he's HAUNTED. GO WITH IT. Give it a minute to make it clear it's not an AU, eat that lizard, hit that pedal & chilly down with the warboys! We have some truly great OCs to get to here.
  
  
• …seriously, did this movie remind anyone else of Labyrinth? When the rock dwellers were boppin' their motorcycles all about, IDK, I kind of got "Chilly Down" stuck in my head! The polecats too, man!
  
  
• (Note: in a labyrinth, you walk the spiral all the way in, then you turn around and walk all the way out. I'M JUST SAYING.)
  
  
• You have probably heard the hype and all so let me not oversell it. It's not Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's Aliens. It's a Shit Blows Up Real Good movie. But as an example of that genre, it is GLORIOUS.
  
  
• Let me steal hradzka's thoughts again, because this is perfect:

  FURY ROAD headcanon: Immortan Joe’s obsession w/ perfection gave Furiosa chance to rise. She didn’t lose that hand. She was born without it.

  Right! That's why she got to be War Smurfette instead of just more livestock!
  
  
• Oh, my god, Immortan Joe. I am so sorry for everyone I have been blithering about this to for days. I have Mad Max Mentionitis, it's terrible. But anyway. Immortan Joe. You know who I keep comparing him to? Dr. Doom. Immortan Joe does not have Dr. Doom's problem there. Immortan Joe has an army that runs like a well-oiled machine! His minions are an energetic, competitive, dedicated, psychotically bloodthirsty Cirque de Soleil troupe of hundreds! They are all covered in white clay which is actually quite good thinking because Coppertone is probably not in business anymore and these are all white people (why are these all white people? All of them? I can't help thinking that if anyone was going to survive in an Australia devoid of mechanized civilization a fair percentage of them would be Aboriginal Australians?) and without some kind of sun protection they would crisp like chicharrones. Despite a lot of moving parts and a desperate shortage of fuel, his citadel runs smoothly: he could have used water power, but instead he keeps the young male population busy (good thinking); he's not abusing their strength because the great weights work on a system of counterbalances; the citadel not only functions well but expresses its function through its form in the best tradition of Louis Henry Sullivan! Everything in Immortan Joe's stronghold is horrifyingly beautiful, okay? His armor is carefully designed to look like muscles at the distance from which the plebs get to see him. Every bit of machine or weapon features painstakingly handcrafted skull ornamentation, it's like the Arts & Crafts movement via Iron Maiden. I love it so. This is the setup of an evil mastermind who helps his people to excel.
  
  
• And then there's the way his army rides into battle. What a sense of style! Goddamn, no wonder the warboys are having so much fun!
  
  
• ALSO THE WAR GUITARIST.
  
  
• WE COULD NOT GET OVER THE WAR GUITARIST.
  
  
• Actually I could not get over the soundtrack in general. I am not usually a big one for movie soundtracks, but I am trying to find a way to make out with this one, because I need to consummate my love for this music.
  
  
• No, seriously, personnel decisions are key to being a successful evil overlord! Even Immortan Joe falls down there eventually. I think his fetish for blood family was his downfall: I think the weird little dude in the chair was his brother or something. Man, if I am ever an evil warlord, and you are my second in command, and my renegade Imperator and a raggedy band of [SPOILERS] shows up with my [SPOILER], like, immediately spray them with gunfire and roll up the gates, okay? Joe was almost a truly great evil leader, but a truly great evil leader inspires his followers to develop the evil from within themselves, not to just kind of run out of evil when the boss is not right there to inspire them.
  
  
• For a while I wondered why we kept coming back to a bolt cutter, of all things, in a Shit Really Blows The Hell Up movie. Then I realized: the movie is about liberation.
  
  
• Speaking of the Anvil of Subtlety, let's not even talk about the seeds. Ah, fuck it, I enjoyed it. :D
  
  
• Really, it's fic. Within the first 5 minutes Max announces that he is going to be the least interesting character in the movie. "The only thing I want anymore is to survive. I am here to provide canon continuity as you meet OCs who actually have desires and will therefore be providing motivation and a plot. In the meantime, please enjoy my muscular physique, my sad, haunted eyes, and my pouty, full lips."
  
  
• Kameron Hurley has more cogent things to say about the film, including just how nice it is that it skips the pervy camera.
  
  
• Seriously. Even when the nearly naked supermodels are cutting off (bolt cutter! Liberation!) the terrifying-looking chastity belts (Arts and Crafts! Iron Maiden!) and splashing water all over their diaphanous translucent gauze wisps. It's a shock! These extremely well-cared-for well-groomed women are the shock they should be, after the way everyone else is living in this apocalypse! But it's not…it's not quite the wet t-shirt Slave Leia scene that every iron-clad rule of genre is straining to turn it into. Not quite. It's a crave-inducing scene, but through Max's eyes, it's honestly a question: are the girls more eye-catching than the water?
  
  
• And the other thing, they addressed my problem with Snowpiercer! They should have been delighted to have nice proteinaceous bugs to eat by then! Actually in this one I was so relieved to see him eat that bug because I know it's set in Australia and I figured either he killed it or it killed him.
  
  
• I saw this movie by accident! I had a plan with @xatharine to go see Avengers! And then we accidentally bought tickets for the wrong day. And then it turned out that Avengers wasn't even showing in that theatre anymore, Mad Max was. And by the time we'd figured that out, we were like, fuck it, we're at the goddamn theatre, we're gonna watch the movie that's here. IT COULD NOT HAVE TURNED OUT BETTER.