FUN FACT : If you watch Mad Max : Fury Road with dialogues turned off, you will not miss much.
This movie has been designed to mesmerize you by its visuals. And you can see how difficult it must have been for director George Miller to do that in this day and age of CGI and digital enhancement. What can one do so that the user ignores the 34 WhatsApp messages and watches the movie uninterrupted for two hours?
Answer : Miller bombards you with incessant spectacular visuals. Tattoos are not a novelty, full body tattoos are the norm – women who look like Playboy Playmates appear in the desert out of nowhere and proceed to shower together – steering wheels with skulls on them – modern, sleek vehicles are a passé; instead we have robust, tattered vehicles that look like they have been through WWII. You do not get much time to reflect on the visuals because you are constantly being zapped with new ones. You have punk – rock – goth – binoculars – drums – lone electric guitar – mother’s milk – nipple clamps – chastity belt – the whole shebang. And then there are the pastiches. Captive humans as an energy source à la Matrix, shotguns : the Terminator kind, weird permutation of the Vulcan salute and characters whose appearance reminds you of Star Trek, The Mummy, E.T., Silence of the Lambs, Poltergeist and fifty-one other movies. Remember the red dude playing electric guitar that breathes fire? That’s your ‘little girl in red’ from Schindler’s List. He is also an evolved version of the bagpiper who plays in front of the British army in John Wayne movies like The Longest Day. The review mirror shot during chase is a classic Spielberg. He started using it right from Duel and continued at least till Jurassic Park.
I could go on but even then I am sure I would still miss a few hundred symbolisms. The point is, Miller succeeds in keeping you riveted to your chair. Did you notice that there is no rape or murder in the movie, unlike the original Mad Max? That’s because that, too, has become a passé. For the Internet generation, everything has become a passé. Why does the movie start with the protagonist eating a lizard? It’s not for shock purpose, even children are not shocked by that any more. It’s so that users who regularly watch the reality show Naked And Afraid can relate to the movie.
And therein lies the rub. Allow me to elaborate. Go and watch the original Mad Max. And before watching, remember that it, too, was a cult movie of the time and became a huge hit worldwide. 100 bucks if you can make it through the movie without fidgeting, yawning or displaying any other signs of boredom. I watched it. I was bored to tears. The apple eating, coffee drinking Mel Gibson is tepid and instead of looking hip, he looks like a regular guy. So does the weird gang leader, who is fond of making Vulcan mind melding moves on unsuspecting strangers. The strange gestures these guys make which must have been so hip at the time look plain awkward. The oh-so-sensual cabaret dancer looks lame – you see more skin in a toothpaste ad today (and better lighted, too!). Sorry, George Miller, Mad Max was BORING!
Wait! That’s not fair, you say. All movies from the seventies or earlier would look silly today because we have changed. Have we, really? Is there a movie from the seventies that still looks fresh today? How about The Godfather? I watch it for the 257th time and it never occurs to me that this was a movie made more than 40 years ago. Why is that? Okay, I know that comparing Mad Max and The Godfather is not fair, the latter was much superior in all departments, so we will just compare the visual aspect.
What was the attraction of Mad Max? It had the state-of-the-art chase scenes, characters who broke conventions of the time, and things that were hip at the time – thugs riding bikes and good guys aka cops chasing them. Or guys shooting unclothed mannequins on a beach. Things like that. What about The Godfather?
Cinematographer Gordon Willis relied on techniques that have been used in the last century by many notable photographers and before them, by painters going back to the Renaissance – techniques like chiaroscuro or Rembrandt lighting. Remember the sequence when Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) meets Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall)? Interplay of shadow and light is what gives the scene – and the whole movie – a whole different character. Or the scene where Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) is talking to Michael (Al Pacino), with both their closeups in focus, facing each other, instead of the conventional over-the-shoulder shot. I have never seen a dialogue framed so beautifully in any other movie. Remove Gordon Willis from the movie and it loses half of its strength. Freeze any frame of The Godfather movies and chances are it will make an interesting photograph. Willis does not move the camera much. For him, the art of visual storytelling lies in combining together a series of well shot frames.
CGI is both a boon and a curse. Boon, because its immediate effect is mesmerizing. Curse, because it has a very short half-life. Spielberg and his team spent three years researching on how to bring dinosaurs alive on screen. You see more advanced CGI in a car commercial today. Jurassic Park is still interesting today, but not for its CGI. The cinematography of Janusz Kamiński backed by an amazing score by the great John Williams are enough to keep me in my chair till the T-Rex roars for the last time.
Mad Max : Fury Road is perhaps the most visually appealing movie of 2015.
The $150 million – that was its budget – question is : What will people in 2040 think of it, by which time it would have spawned quite a few imitations?
