Furiosa - A Mad Max Saga

The Fast And
The Furiosa

Furiosa - A Mad Max Saga
Directed by George Miller
Australia/USA 2024
Warner Brothers
UK Theatrical Print

I’m not that enamoured with either the Mad Max movies or of George Miller, truth be told. I thought Mad Max was okay  (reviewed by me here), Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior was the standout film (reviewed by me here), Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was... um... what it was, I guess (reviewed by me here) and then the much lauded Fury Road was, honestly, pretty dull and uninspiring (reviewed by me here).

So I really wasn’t expecting much from this one, Furiosa - A Mad Max Saga, which is a prequel to Fury Road and tells the back story of the character played by Charlize Theron in the previous movie, Imperator Furiosa. The real reason I decided to go see this one is because one of my favourite new actresses, Anya Taylor-Joy, is playing a younger version of Furiosa (and also, as it turns out, an even younger actress who’s absolutely brilliant in this called Alyla Browne, for the first hour). It also has Chris Hemsworth playing a villain here too (which I’ve seen him do before and he tends to do villains pretty well... this one isn’t his most evil, I reckon).

So, yeah, I was only here for the Joy of Anya Taylor but, I have to say, this new movie is a lot less duller and much more watchable, up to a point, than the last movie.

There are just more interesting story beats and ideas in this one, it seems to me... although probably a lot less action... which is fine in itself but, the main problem with this is the way the action is structured because, those action set pieces are pretty good but, the climax of the movie in terms of that specific kind of action spectacle comes maybe a half hour before the end. The big ‘war’ which we are expecting to happen is mostly just a quick montage before we get to see Furiosa go and continue her quest for vengeance. So the end 30 minutes or so, felt a little less like a climax and more of an afterthought it seemed to me.

Okay, about that ending which, literally leads into just a minute or so before the action of the last film, even going as far as to play scenes from Fury Road over the end credits... well, it’s pretty lame. I’m talking about the specific vengeance meted out to Hemsworth’s character by Furiosa at the end... it’s a kind of grim, fantasy vengeance and I’ve got no problem with that sort of far fetched penchant for whimsy thrown up into a movie... bring it on... it’s just that it seemed both tonally off and not that well integrated into the spirit of the post-apocalyptic Mad Max films, it seemed to me... so I left on a low rather than a high, it has to be said.

Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely brilliant in this as Furiosa and she has said it’s the most gruelling shoot she’s ever done... which I guess would be the case if you do most of your own stunts (hanging underneath big, scary vehicles etc) as she seems to have done here. She’s always great in whatever she does, though but, I didn’t necessarily think she was the best casting choice for the film. Not in terms of a bad ass actress who can look believable in the role... she’s got that covered in spades. But I think she is a slight mis-match for Charlize Theron’s portrayal of the older version of the character in Fury Road. Theron played it mostly emotionless but calm and measured... Taylor-Joy has so much personality and energy crackling in every performance she gives that she can’t help but look way more intense than who the character turns out to be in the former film. I guess you could argue the years and experiences have mellowed the character somewhat, later in life but, for me that was a stretch.

Other than that, Tom Holkenborg’s score (aka Junkie XL) to the film seems more listenable than the score for the last but, alas, there’s no CD release as yet so I guess I won’t be able to listen to it at all. Which is a shame. When will these companies learn what people want? Ban downloads and give us proper discs please. Music shouldn’t be a transient experience.

But no, Furiosa is a fairly good and entertaining film and I’m sure most of you, like I did when I saw they’d added the words A Mad Max Saga to the title, will be expecting Max to somehow turn up in a scene where he and Furiosa don’t actually meet. Yep, it’s in there... welcome to Jacob Tomuri as the third actor to play Max in the films, after Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy. He strikes a good pose, for sure (which is all you will get but, I’m guessing you would have guessed that).

One last thing though... if you want to see a George Miller movie that really is a masterpiece (an underseen masterpiece, at that) then check out his last film, the absolutely brilliant Three Thousand Years Of Longing (reviewed by me here) because, that truly was ‘cinema’!
 

The Boy On The Bridge

The Gifted
Generation

The Boy On
The Bridge
by M. R. Carey
Orbit Publishing
ISBN: 9780356503561

Warning: Some very mild spoilers.

The Boy On The Bridge is M. R. Carey’s prequel novel to the original novel and film The Girl With All The Gifts (my review of the film is here and the book review is here), which he wrote simultaneously, giving slightly different versions of the same story to different media as he went along. Now, I absolutely loved both the movie and novel versions of that one but I have to say, I expected a prequel to a story which had a very definite and somewhat bleak ending... at least for the human survivors of the post-apocalyptic world depicted... to be somewhat labouring the point as it surely could have nothing new to say. But, actually, I was wrong, it’s not all doom and gloom in this prequel and, well, let me just say that the brief epilogue to the book, set 20 years after the events depicted in this novel, actually acts as an epilogue to the first novel as well... or as a sequel, actually.

So this story is about the crew of the fortified truck/land raider style military vehicle which went out in the world to find a cure but which disappeared long before the action in the first novel/film took place. The vehicle is called the Rosalind Frank, known more affectionately as Rosie, which houses a small team of scientists and military personnel, collecting biological samples from the hungries (the name for the zombies in Carey’s world) in order to try and find some kind of helpful cure or breakthrough against the highly contagious disease which has destroyed the majority of the population... the ‘still human population’... of the planet. You may or may not remember that the discarded carcass of the Rosie was found by a bunch of survivors in The Girl With All The Gifts and was made much use of, by them, for a while.

This is the story of one of the scientists, Greaves, a boy genius who has a kind of high level Aspergers or something similar, who is also the inventor of the blocker/inhibitor that we were introduced to in the first book/film that humans smear on to hide their scent from the hungries. He’s mostly hated, or at least looked on with much suspicion, by most of the others apart from one scientist, Dr. Khan, who kinda rescued him as a young boy. However, Khan is pregnant, as it turns out and really shouldn’t be on this mission in this state... especially after something happens around halfway through the book which puts both her fate and that of the baby’s in a much more questionable state, in terms of how they will be accepted by the rest of the crew.

This novel also builds on the idea of the Junkers (which were in the first novel but not in the movie version) and, very importantly, the tribe of half hungries/half human children who the ‘special’ pupil Melanie discovers in The Girl With All The Gifts... depicted here a few years before she meets up with them.

And, it’s a very entertaining and certainly gripping novel. Somewhat, it has to be said, because the author has followed a similar formula to the first one. A ‘special’ kid (in this case human) and an adult who sympathises and has a relationship of sorts with him. And then the world is seen through the eyes of Greaves for a lot of it but it’s also much more of an ensemble piece in terms of other characters also having a lot to say and do... Carey limits himself to around five or six characters with which we share the odyssey of the book.

And, yeah, this is a short review for sure but, mainly because it’s a brilliant novel and I had no complaints at all. I do want to say though that, if you’re familiar with the first one in either of its forms, then this tale isn’t just a case of filling in the gaps... it does advance things to the point where a kind of hope can be found out of the ashes of both what happens here and at the ending of the original tale. Also, without giving too much away, the epilogue of the book is where you will find out, definitively, what just became of Melanie and Miss Justineau from the first book. Things tie in a lot nicer than you might be expecting and... well, I’d love to read a third book at some point but, like the first story, I’d be hard pressed to figure out where the author could possibly go from here. But, yeah, he did pretty great with The Boy On The Bridge so, perhaps that’s not just wishful thinking on my part. So... a hugely entertaining and very suspenseful novel which more than lives up to the original. My one warning to potential readers, though, would be to read The Girl With All The Gifts before you start on this one... otherwise that epilogue is going to make no sense and will give away spoilers for the first novel (and film). So, yeah, give it a go.

Station Eleven

Terminal Act

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781447268963

A few months ago I was absolutely bowled over by a new TV miniseries which I watched twice. It was a ten episode show called Station Eleven (reviewed here) and, by the time I was through it the first time, I realised I would have to read the original source novel, which was written by a writer I’d never heard of called Emily St. John Mandel.

And now I have and... well, for starters, it’s great.

I think sometimes it depends what iteration of a piece of art you are exposed to first as to which version you respond to better. I have a Twitter friend (thanks Laura) who said she preferred the book and I suspect, although I may be wrong, that she read the book before seeing the TV show, which was not developed or worked on by the author but by a fellow writer and friend of hers, from what I can understand. As for me... I think I’m just about coming down to preferring the TV show myself but, to be honest, it’s a really hard call. There are major differences between the two... and also many more similarities... but both are carrying the same kind of spirit within their respective media.

I’m not going to go over the basic plot again but it takes place before, during and after a pandemic of Georgian Flu has wiped out the majority of life on Earth and we get scenes of a whole bunch of characters from different times in their lives, their stories slowly developing as they brush against times and places important to other characters, to build an overreaching story arc, of sorts. The novel is split into nine sections - those being 1. The Theatre, 2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3. I Prefer You With A Crown, 4. The Starship, 5. Toronto, 6. The Airplanes, 7. The Terminal, 8. The Prophet and 9. Station Eleven... each of these subsections being split into various chapters which generally take on one or two of the characters at a time.

And I think this is a case of the TV show expanding things or taking different directions from the novel in pursuit of a ten episode adaptation and actually improving them... while at other times missing some other specific story beats, which it could perhaps have done with.

For instance, the novel starts off with exactly the same scene as the TV show, with Arthur Leander dying of a heart attack on stage and Jeevan jumping up from the audience to try and save him... also trying to comfort the younger version of Kristen, the same day that the Georgia Flu hits the city. However, unlike the TV show where Jeevan and Kirsten are bonded by the experience and the two of them start off and spend the first year or two in the apartment with Jeevan’s brother, Frank... here they part ways for good. Kirsten can’t remember in the book just how she survived the first year of the pandemic. And Jeevan holes up with Frank and has other experiences separate to hers.

So there is no amateur play adaptation of the graphic novel Station Eleven in the book, put on by Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank as there is in the show. Indeed, Station Eleven is actually a deluxe comic book of two separate issues in the novel (I’m imagining one of those square bound format style graphic novels which were all the rage in the mid-1980s now, like Batman - The Cult or Blood - A Tale). Someone on the internet said that Jeevan is a far less important character in the book than in the show but, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. He’s just a slightly different character and he does, in fact, touch other’s live (both in negative and positive ways), even if nobody remembers his name. For example, in a newspaper article from the time of the death of Leander, he’s mentioned as ‘a member of the audience’ and everyone post pandemic who reads that surviving newspaper article years later can vaguely remember him.

And he does survive in the book as he does in the show, although we are not treated to that brilliant sequence where he’s helping about 15 to 20 women give birth on the same night in a makeshift hospital upcycled from an old, abandoned supermarket. One the other hand, we do see how he once, quite negatively, touches Miranda’s life in this... on the night that she decides she needs to divorce Arthur Leander, when we become acquainted with one of the professions Jeevan has worked in over the years.

And I knew I was in the hands of a really great writer from very early on in that, Mandel really makes you feel the emotional resonance of the characters by the phrases and choices of words she uses to put across their moments. For instance, there’s a scene in the first section where she could have just said a specific character started to cry... instead, she says this, “The lights over the sea blurred and became a string of overlapping halos.” which is frankly a much better way of getting your message across, I think.

Another thing she does, to keep a sense of continuity going over the rapid ping ponging from different time shifts, is to introduce the occasional themed section, inserted into the narrative as a juxtaposition with whatever character you happen to be following at the time. So, for instance, one of these devices is an interview that Kirsten gives to a brand new, amateur newspaper in one of the new post-pandemic communities, fifteen years after the outbreak of the Georgia Flu. And, later, it makes its way into the airport to Clark (who is a lot thinner and clean shaven compared to the wonderful actor who brought him to life in the TV show) and his Museum Of Civilisation. And it’s from this article that he recognises that Kirsten is someone who would remember Arthur Leander (because, unlike the TV show, they’ve never actually met pre-pandemic).

And, yeah, I don’t think I want to say much more about the original version of Station Eleven other than... The Prophet is, amazingly, a lot less sympathetic a character than in the TV show and that another certain key character, who is visited an antagonistic, violent death in the TV version, is afforded a much more peaceful, ‘TV network unfriendly’, deliberate overdose of sleeping pills here. If you liked the TV show, then I’m pretty certain you’ll want to give this one a go... if you haven’t, well you may want to read this version first and figure out for yourself which bits have been improved and which bits have been left out, to the detriment of the show (whole characters are wiped out in the TV show while others are given more prominence, for example). Both are great and all I can say about the novel, really, is that it’s truly wonderful stuff and I’ll definitely be pursuing some of this writer’s other novels, for sure.

Bird Box

Don’t look now...
or ever

Bird Box
USA 2018
Directed by Susanne Bier

Warning: Light spoilers.

I’ve been hearing about Bird Box for some time and Twitter was full of it when it was released back in 2018. I was reluctant to see it as it didn’t have a cinema release and I was hesitant to watch stuff for free before the coronavirus pandemic (the more things don’t get released in a proper, distanced cinema venue though... and the less they are released as a proper Blu Ray, then my reluctance to bother paying for a different venue increases... cinema equals big experience and shop window, Blu Ray equals the actual product you can hold in your hand... don’t try and fob people off with this digital “from the ether” rubbish, it’s not the real thing, end of story). And then, of course, there was the Bird Box challenge, which consisted of people trying to travel or drive long distances while blindfolded, causing a fair few accidents in the process is my understanding and prompting a certain distancing to this behaviour from the evil studio involved in the production of the film. Personally, when it comes to blindfolds, I’d rather take the Nine And A Half Weeks challenge myself but, hey, to each their own.

Other than that, though, I knew absolutely nothing about Bird Box other than it starred Sandra Bullock, who seems to me to be a fine actress. I’ve not read the source novel (although I think I will need to now because certain elements of the film seem to have been left deliberately ambiguous and maybe they weren’t so much in the book?) so I can’t tell you how close it is to that but, I can say it’s a fine film.

It starts off very strongly too, with Bullock’s character Mallory telling two five year old children they are going on a long, perilous journey where they will not take their blindfolds off and if they do, she will hurt them. This is a grim set up and, indeed, the premise of the film is quite a downer, as we see the small family making their way to a boat to go down the river to a possible sanctuary. We then flash back to five years before, at the start of the events which lead to this, where we have the single but pregnant Mallory and her sister going to hospital to check up on her incoming sprog. They ignore the news that, in various countries, there have been devastating mass suicides among the people for the last half a day. Then, as they leave the hospital, it starts where they are and there is pandemonium. Mallory’s sister kills herself after they crash their car but Mallory manages to get to relative safety in a house with some people, including the two male leads for the film, the less than likeable Douglas, played by John Malkovich... and Bullock’s potential romantic interest Tom, played by Trevante Rhodes.

The problem is... there are things out there. Things you can’t really see but, if you happen to glance in the direction of one (often indicated as an invisible presence by leaves swirling about and the words of long dead loved ones calling out to a person to look at them) you will either kill yourself or, in the case of a select few humans (usually the already mentally unbalanced ones), you will align yourself with whatever is doing this and try to compel, by force, any other humans to look and die. And it’s these rogue human elements which do the most harm in this movie, as they’re less easy to spot or control and, since a survivor is likely to be blindfolded when out in the wild, it makes them easy prey as opposed to these human sympathisers who can see what’s going on. All the survivors have as an extra help is the birds in a box or cage, as the title suggests. Birds go frantic whenever one of these creatures is near although, to be fair, not so much is made of this in the movie version, at least, to warrant this as the title of the work, in my opinion.

And it’s really not a bad little sci-fi horror film. It’s not that scary, truth be told and, it is a little predictable but it has a nice structure which flashes back and forth between the journey Mallory is now on with the two kids and the various incidents along the way which happened over the five years which get her to that point. And there is some nice foreshadowing to the audience of events which have happened but we have not been shown yet, in the form of things like a child’s toy suddenly making it clear that not both of these kids are Mallory’s (which we’d kinda figured out but it’s made implicit which one isn’t hers before we are shown the how and why in a flashback scene).

And it’s a nice, entertaining slice of post apocalyptic movie making done right... I’d put it up there with the classics of the genre and far surpassing films which almost but, didn’t quite, get a similar premise right... such as The Happening. Also, it does what a lot of these kind of films do, something which a lot of zombie apocalypse films especially seem to pride themselves on doing (or rather not doing) in that it leaves the antagonist manifestation or whatever the heck that’s doing this completely unexplained. You never have a sense of what or why on this thing and that really helps serve the story because it a) doesn’t get dulled down with having to overly explain it all and b) makes for more drama as the humans can try and work their way around the mystery.

So, yeah, all in all I’d say Bird Box is a pretty good movie and I’d certainly recommend it for fans of post apocalyptic science fiction and, to an extent, fans of certain kinds of horror films too. I’ve now had to purchase an expensive and hard to get (in the UK) but brand new and unused Blu Ray on demand for my dad because, frankly, he loves Sandra Bullock movies and that would be the only way he’d get to see this (shame on certain companies for not making it in a more accessible format like this in the first place). But yeah, good little movie, a shame about the way in which it’s been released (which is becoming the new normal and it really shouldn’t be allowed to be).

Prisoners Of The Ghostland

Testicular Prancer

Prisoners Of
The Ghostland
USA/Japan 2021
Directed by Sion Sono
XYZ Films

Prisoners Of The Ghostland is a new movie directed by Sion Sono... my first time with this director, as it happens. I can’t believe I’ve gone this far without stumbling into any movies on his lengthy CV. The film has a bizarre aesthetic to it and, I have to say, I’m not quite sure what the setting of the movie is but... I think that’s just more gasoline on the fire of the almost hallucinogenic momentum of the story as it hits various points along the through line. For example, one of the settings is a kind of ‘backlot’ set of a Western town, populated almost exclusively with Japanese actors... called Samurai Town.

Now, the production was originally supposed to have shot in Mexico and that possibly explains the strong Western overtones to the movie to an extent... heck, there’s even a scene towards the end of the movie where the music is pitched in homage to Ennio Morricone’s famous spaghetti western sound. However, before the movie started shooting, Sion Sono suffered a heart attack. The film’s main lead, Nicolas Cage, then decided that it would be easier for the director if the shoot moved from Mexico to Japan. When this happened, some of the main cast dropped out and that leaves just four main non-Japanese stars in the roster (there are a few more but the main ones are as follows...). We have Nicolas Cage himself, adding to his resume of crazy roles (I’ve gained a lot more respect for him as an actor over the last ten years) as Hero. Then we have the always amazing Sofia Boutella as Bernice, Nick Cassavetes as Psycho and Bill Mosely as the villainous Governor.

The story is that notorious bank robber Hero is in jail after his friend Psycho caused a heist to go very wrong. However, after Bernice tries to escape the town run by the governor, she ends up in the scratch town on the other side of an area known as the ghostland... where apocalypse demons of some sort (there’s a slight twist in the story line later which I won’t reveal here) stop people from returning to the other town. So the governor springs Hero to go and bring her back. However, Hero is fitted with a suit with explosives around the neck, arms and testicles. Two of these devices go off in the course of the film due to certain conditions such as striking a woman or feeling desire towards Bernice but, I’ll leave you to find out which ones for yourself... this one goes places other movies tend not to, it has to be said.

And that’s all the specific story beats I think I’ll mention. I will say that the film is quite surreal in places and while the main flow of the plot is fairly simple, the absence of a lot of logic to both the setting and the way people who populate these two places behave is less easy to get a handle on... for example, both towns seem to be holding an opposite relationship with the mechanics of time which seems like a complete nonsense and adds the fragmented feel of the plot in places. And there are some weird dialogue choices too. Cage is at his most ‘stylised over the top’ in this one (more so than on something like Willy’s Wonderland, reviewed here) and in one scene, where people are crowding around him, I’m pretty sure he repeats the dialogue that Jesus says to the lepers in the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. The film is also peppered with what can best be described as ‘allegorical reappearances’ of dead characters at key points, which possibly happens more in a non-Western culture product, I’m guessing.

The strangeness of the film is coupled with some gorgeous cinematography, it has to be said. For example, the colours in the first three scenes of the movie are like watching one of McG’s Charlie’s Angels epics. Starting off with as much of the opening bank heist as they want to show before a full reveal later in the story, the heist has a small shot of colour but is mostly done with cold, clinical white. Then we cut to a scene of Bernice getting some sex workers out of town and the whole thing is done with bright reds, yellows and oranges. This is followed by another scene where she wakes up in the ghostland town and it’s all teal and orange for a little while.

There’s lot of action and the film is never once dull, it has to be said. And some of the violence is very much 1960s chambara action but every now and again the director will punctuate this with something a little special in terms of artistic expression. For example, there’s a lovely, beautiful piece of expressive, violent choreography where a swordsman gets run into one of those big paper lanterns and his head goes inside. The lantern is in the foreground of the shot so we can’t see his head but when a guy comes up behind and stabs him in the head or neck, the explosion of arterial spray is shown to be filling the inside of the lamp. So stuff like that, where something old is presented in a new way, keeps you watching.

I was thinking about the aesthetic of the film once it had finished and... it’s like the kind of ‘straight to video’ movies you’d see on the rental shelves of a local video store in the 1980s. Such as those low budget, post-apocalyptic science fiction action films where the cast and crew try their best to make the most out of a tiny budget and so it looks a little disjointed in places and doesn’t always quite follow through on all the plot elements... but it would have its own feel and a certain kind of appeal to it. This movie is like if a director had been given a much larger budget but still tried to stick to that kind of stylistic impetus to deliver something slightly out of kilter with what an audience is expecting to see these days. Which is kind of nice and, for all I know, the setting of this movie is indeed supposed to be post-apocalyptic... so there’s that.

Prisoners Of The Ghostland is a fun slice of action cinema which is a little over the top in places and is quite surreal to boot but, also quite gorgeous looking. A place where the tropes of genres such as post-apocalyptic sci-fi, chambara and spaghetti western are blended to give the audience something which feels both familiar but also a little alien. If you’re a fan of the kind of roles Nicolas Cage has been taking on over the last ten years or so, you’ll probably love this one. Certainly something which would play well in an all-nighter screening of movies, for sure.

Carriers

Trip Tease

Carriers
USA 2009
Directed by David and Àlex Pastor
Paramount Pictures

Warning: Spoilers may infect all readers and,
also, it’s an extremely short review... sorry about that.

Sometimes you just want to watch a movie, any movie, which reflects the current times in which you are living. So, for me, any kind of post-apocalyptic viral infection movie is game right now, to remind me that we are all in the same boat and, you know, as something I can get hints and tips from on how to survive because, if my own government keeps reacting to this stupid Coronavirus disaster in a way which makes it more protracted and less reversible, we might all be in the same situation the characters in films like this find themselves in at some point very, very soon.

So Carriers stars Chris Pine as Brian, Piper Perabo as his girlfriend Bobby, Lou Taylor Pucci as his brother Danny and Emily VanCamp as Danny’s friend Kate (that's Sharon Carter to all you MCU fans). They live in a world were a lot of the population has already died out from an unnamed virus and we join them, already on the road, in a stolen car as they are on a cross country road trip for a few days, to get them to a beach that Brian and Danny used to love as kids. Now, to me, this sounds like a bad idea to begin with. I mean, what do you do for petrol if you need it? Well, the answer seems to be you get lucky (or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint of how various things go down here) and steal it by force from other travellers who you, somehow, might meet on the way. Which seems pretty silly, especially when you realise just how bad things have gotten.

It’s gotten so terrible by the point that we join the four travellers that they’ve made up a set of rules to get them by, which are roughly summed up as follows:

1. Avoid the infected at all costs, their breath is highly contagious. 

2. Disinfect anything that they’ve touched within 24 hours. 

3. The sick are already dead, they can’t be saved.

So, yeah, a road trip to a favourite beach seems fraught with peril, if you ask me.

And the film does what it does, hitting all the expected points along the way. Chris Pine plays his character as an absolutely angry, low intelligence idiot. Literally the last person you would ever want to be stuck with if you were trying to survive the leftovers of a pandemic. The other three seem mostly level headed but this doesn’t stop them from occasionally, often inadvertently, breaking their own rules and getting heaps of trouble piled on them. And on their road trip, they reluctantly find themselves in a position to try and help a father (played by Christopher Meloni) and his dying, infected little girl get to a hospital which is ‘supposed’ to have some miracle cure (yeah, you can guess how that one pans out), come across a bunch of aggressive survivalists, hide from groups of people who hunt others and so on and so forth. They also kill innocent people to further their cause for the next full tank of gasoline and, inevitably, leave their own companions behind at the first sign that any of them are infected, putting them in a position at some point where one brother has to kill another so the pointless road trip can be continued.

The actors are all good and, while not remarkable, the film is competently put together and I had no complaints. There are also some nice little nods to science fiction movies from the past such as Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior and A L I E N, among others I’m sure I didn’t pick up so, yeah, it’s an okay watch. The only real problem the film has is that, by the time two of the travellers finally make it to the beach, the objective of the trip has lost all meaning and there’s a point in the last ten minutes of the film where you really wonder why the characters are trying to fulfil that story arc at this point. So, by the end of the film, it all seems pretty pointless and downbeat. And, I get that this is kind of the point anyway but, you know, I already got that vibe from the start of the movie. It feels like there was never any progression to the story for the characters to be let down by at the end. I think there needed to be more of a point to their quest because, really, the disappointment voiced by one of the characters at the finish could easily be met by the audience with a collective shrug and the response... well yeah, what did you expect?

And with that... I don’t really have that much more to say about Carriers. As post apocalyptic movies go, it just feels kinda empty and undeveloped in many ways. It’s not something that’s going to haunt me at any point or even linger in my memory for much longer than me writing this review, I suspect. But, it is entertaining enough to the point that it held my interest for the short running time so, yeah, it’s certainly not a total loss. I wouldn’t recommend anyone go out of their way to watch it but I’m not giving up on finding another post-virus apocalypse movie that I can recommend. The hunt continues.

A Quiet Place

Womb Of The Blind Dead

A Quiet Place
2018 USA Directed by John Krasinski
UK cinema release print.

Okay, so this one’s pretty amazing.

I’ve said this before on here but... remember how David Lynch’s Wild At Heart starts with Sailor Ripley repeatedly bashing in the skull of someone on a brass railing and the sound and fury of that moment sets up just how dangerous and spontaneous he is (even though he’s pretty much the hero of the film)? Similarly, remember how Steven Spielberg starts off Jurassic Park with a sequence which really shows you just how dangerous a velociraptor can be? These are two scenes which set up the potential of certain elements of a movie to teach the audience to be afraid and to make them anxious that there’s a possibility the film-makers are not going to be pulling any punches here. Anything bad could easily happen.

Well, this is what the new post apocalyptic sci-fi/horror movie A Quiet Place does within the first ten minutes or so of its running time. The film is directed by John Krasinski and stars both him and his real life wife, the always incredible Emily Blunt, as Lee and Evelyn, the parents of a family of survivors after ‘something bad’ has happened to the planet. And, if they don’t want something equally bad happening to them they have to be, as Elmer Fudd in a Bugs Bunny cartoon would say... “.... vewy, vewy quiet!”. And, like those two classic examples I just gave, the writers here find a similar way to let the audience know just how dangerous the threat to these people is.

The film is given a deliberate, documentary style ‘validation’ by setting the scenes on screen in typography as Day Number ‘x’. So we’re given the number of days since the family have been struggling to survive (along with other survivors in nearby places) since things went wrong. What went wrong, is something you pick up quite quickly, in some ways, from early on in the film. At some point, starting when people started mysteriously going missing but then escalating... big insect-like creatures have wiped out most of the population of the planet. Are they mutations of some sort? Are they aliens? Well, just like the traditional stance of something like a post-Romero zombie film, we never actually find out. The film-makers do just the right thing here and never explain the threat. They just set it up as the thing which makes this thriller work and... well, it really does work.

Okay, so these big, fast insect things are basically blind but they hunt by sound and, physically, their whole head is, more or less, one giant ear. You understand this even though hardly a word is spoken throughout the movie. Most of the dialogue, such as it is, being done through subtitled sign language. This, of course, re-enforces the necessity throughout for almost total silence and this also, naturally, gives the filmmakers ample ammunition to scare the audience silly with sound. For example, there’s a scene fairly early on in the film where somebody accidentally overturns a lighted lamp and, frankly, the noise of this scared the life out of me. So it’s certainly an effective tactic.

Now, I’ve said before that horror movies can still work well when they’re following the genre rules and clichés associated with them, as long as they’re executed competently and... A Quiet Place is no exception. The film is fraught with peril and it’s also so well timed and constructed that, even though there aren’t really any surprises here, it’s done just right and I don’t mind saying my heart was in my mouth for most of the film. The suspense in the movie is almost unbearable and intense and I was so pleased with this movie that I didn’t mind the clichés set up to build the foundations for the scares straight from the start.

So... okay, let’s look at those clichés then.

Well, number one is that we have one of the children, the daughter of Evelyn and Lee, called Regan, who, it turns out, is totally deaf. It’s a testament to just how good the movie makers are that they can set that up very early on in the first sequence just with the sound design (you'll know what I mean when you hear it, if you see this in a half decent cinema). Big shout out to the young actress Millicent Simmonds, by the way, who is absolutely phenomenal in this role. So, yeah, we have a deaf character which the audience immediately understands can be a danger in this situation... she can’t hear if anyone, including herself, is making any noise to attract the creatures. So you know the director is going to milk that for all its worth.

Cliché number two, which you will see from the trailer, is the ticking time bomb in Evelyn’s womb. Evelyn is pregnant and is due very soon... babies are noisy things and so you can pretty much figure out that the baby is going to be coming along at the absolute worst time possible for our characters. There will be consequences.

And the third cliché is the potential ‘magic bullet’ solution to all the troubles the characters find themselves in. There’s a point where someone is given something... and I’m trying to avoid spoilers here... and you just know that this is going to turn out to be the possible salvation/turning point away from mankind’s extinction. And I have to say, in hindsight, once you figure out just how these creatures work, you might wonder why the heck nobody thought of this earlier, before humanity got into this situation in the first place. It’s a pretty obvious thing but, heck... since we don’t know enough about how things happened at the beginning of the catastrophic events that kickstart this whole plot, who’s to say if there was any time for the population of the planet to sort this out? Lets humour the writers here and say there wasn’t.

So, yeah, full of obvious things, this movie but, like I said, so perfectly put together and executed that I really don’t think anyone is going to mind too much. The film is so scary I was really glad I took my blood pressure pill before going to the cinema, I can tell you. It’s also wise in the way it’s been edited and especially in what’s been omitted, I suspect. I know the trailer has a fair few things in it which don’t quite make it into the movie and, given my slight criticisms, some of those cuts were probably quite wise... it’s best not to know too much of what has gone on before to get the characters into this situation in the first place.

Added to all this, we have a Marco Beltrami score which is typical of his excellent horror work and which really drums the scares into you... playing on the nerves in exactly the right moments to elicit the most adrenalin rushes as you watch. I’m really looking forward to the upcoming CD release of this so I can hear those grating, atonal, nerve shredding tones away from the movie.

So, yeah... I saw this on a day of preview screenings of the film at my local cinema on Easter Monday but it should be on general release in cinemas tomorrow and I would heartily recommend this to anyone who is either into horror movies or who doesn’t mind balancing on the edge of the cinema seat for an hour and a half. This is one of the scariest, well made genre pieces I’ve seen for a while and I’m really pleased I got to see this one on the big screen. Do not miss A Quiet Place... you’ll be holding your breath.

Mad Max - Fury Road

Furioser and Furiosa

Mad Max - Fury Road
2015  Australia/USA
Directed by George Miller 
UK cinema release print.

Okay, so the reason I just spent some time over the last few weeks watching the Mad Max Trilogy (reviewed here, here and here) was so that I could bring myself up to speed on the latest installment, Mad Max: Fury Road. Now there has been a lot of good word of mouth on this film with some people even suggesting that it’s similar to the cinema of Kurosawa in its execution and influence... well, it’s really not ‘Kurosawa good’ and I wish people wouldn’t evoke my favourite director every time they want to say they really quite like something.

On the other hand, this is certainly an okay film and, for the most part, it follows through in the spirit of the first two films of the original trilogy... so there’s that. Also, I needed to see this one in IMAX 3D... not because I was particularly bothered about seeing the spectacle on an extra large screen, but because there was no way I could pass up the chance to ask the person in the box office for a ticket to IMAX MAD MAX... it had to be done and it was worth the six quid extra on top of the Unlimited card to be able to say that phrase out loud to someone.

The film does, however, truly look quite spectacular, even using the cliched orange/blue colour scheme that the director plumped for in this one. And it’s full of action.... perhaps a little too much for many people’s tastes. I know one lady, for instance, who labelled it a kids movie due to the lack of both emotional content and story. Personally, I didn’t think the movie lacked a strong emotional element at all... and it had a heck of a lot more of that than in the original trilogy, especially in terms of the chemistry between Max, played in this one by popular actor Tom Hardy, and the new female action hero Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. It helps the ‘action movie shorthand’ if you have two really good actors doing these things, of course.

Yes, there is a lack of anything but the simplest mission objective of a plot but, although I can understand the irritation of that to some people, it’s certainly one of the strongest links between this and the first two movies... which also shared a common lack of vision when it came to the story telling, although not to the detriment of either film. If you read my review of the third movie, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, in fact, you’ll find I was citing the more complicated plotting as one of the reasons why that film didn’t really work too well in terms of spiritual continuity with the others. This new film is a lot more like Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior in terms of content...although the visual style is a world apart. I’ll get to that in a minute.

What we basically have in this film, and why it fits right into the Mad Max universe that Miller has created and maintained all these years, is the last 20 minutes or so of that second movie stretched out to make one, long car chase of a movie. There’s hardly any let up or pause between set pieces and this does make it a little more weaker as a film in some respects, than one or two of its predecessors. That being said, I got a real feel that this is where Miller wanted to take the Mad Max films all along and you have to remember that modern cinema has changed a lot in the intervening years since the original trilogy. Back in the day it was probably cinematic suicide to make one long movie which was just, basically, a big chase scene. These days, when action films just keep getting more and more over the top in their execution and with audiences demanding the kind of visual overload that goes with this style of presentation, I suspect the director finally felt like he could make the kind of movies that he always wanted to and...  in the way he wanted to. So...

The good
Well, the colours are fantastic, despite the aforementioned predominant hues... and it’s a real eye candy movie in terms of both the colours and the inventiveness of Miller’s post apocalyptic vision. There’s some beautiful lightning in a scene where Max, Furiosa and their cargo of beauties (I won’t bother to explain that, go see the film) are driving at night  and so everything is washed in blue light, even Max and Furiosa in the front two seats. In the back seats, however, the ladies who are accompanying them, have a lamp on and that creates a contrasting set of colours in the back seat of the vehicle... all pitched against the other colour scheme within the same frame. So that’s really good. And the surrealistic element of the landscapes and the kinds of Daliesque people who inhabit them are pretty interesting too.

Actually, I say it’s MIller’s post apocalyptic vision but one of the people who wrote it and drew concepts for it, back in the 1990s as it turns out... but still with his story and ideas being retained now due to production problems in the long road to... err... Fury Road, is comic book artist Brendan McCarthy. I used to read his work in popular British comic 2000AD and, although he didn’t create the comic book character I am about to cite, it has to be said that the look of the Charlize Theron character Imperator Furiosa does owe a visual debt to Mean Machine Angel from the Judge Dredd strip in the 1980s. In fact, the film is so action packed (at the expense of everything else) and colourful that I believe it would be fair to say the whole movie is infused with a comic book sensibility and so McCarthy’s involvement in the project does explain certain things, in that sense. In terms of design and colour, it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad Max.

There’s a scene in this where Max has to give Furiosa a makeshift blood transfusion with a needle and so, at one point in the proceedings, it gets to a point which I can only describe as having a Fury With A Syringe On Top moment. Yay! I nearly used that for the title of this review but I didn't so, forgive me, I had to work it into the text somehow.

The Bad
Well, when I reviewed Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome I moaned that the cinematography in that one, utilising lots of camera movement, was out of keeping with the often static shot set ups of the original two films. Alas, this film embraces that kind of moving camera vibe to it all the way through... but I think I can forgive it somewhat because, for one thing, it’s more or less just one long action sequence and so moving camera is appropriate. Also, like I said, modern action cinema is a different beast to the celluloid milieu that Miller was filming in back in the 1970s and 1980s and, though I prefer that slower approach to film, I can’t fault Miller’s choice to go with what he’s done here.

The Ugly
Okay... so there’s been a lot of talk about where this film fits into the original chronology, with even George Miller citing it as a reboot. That being said, I think it’s obvious, to me anyway, that it’s a natural sequel to the third movie and takes place after that. More or less the same opening explanation (and footage) of the current state of the post-apocalyptic future our main hero finds himself in that graced the opening of the second movie, in most prints, is used here. But the character still has his leg brace due to wounds received in the first movie, he still has the iconic jacket with the left arm now stitched up where it was torn and he has long hair like he did in the third movie at the start of this one... so I reckon it’s just a natural sequel, The thing that did confuse me were the constant, dream-state flashbacks to people in his past, his family apparently, who didn’t look or sound anything like that in the original movie. So that’s kind of confusing.

All said and done, Miller carries on the films with what is, ostensibly, a wagon train Western that has various nasty bad guy elements representing the chasing Indians and Max, Furiosa and their crew as the good old cowboys of the piece. Junkie XL’s score is noisy but serviceable, even though it’s not in keeping with either of the composers who scored the original trilogy, and there’s also a character relationship between Max and a ‘bad guy turns good guy’ which holds a similar dynamic as that between Max and the Gyro Captain in the second movie... so that’s a nice bit of character building stylistic continuity for you, if you are looking out for that kind of stuff... and much more convincing than the cheap audio/visual echo of the music box from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, which has been almost half heartedly, it seemed to me, inserted into the film to check a box.

All in all, it’s not the best of the Mad Max movies (I’d rate it second or third best, although I can’t quite figure out my preferred order of that one just yet) but it’s certainly not a bad film and it’s way better than Mad Max: Bungee Jump Dome... so there’s that. I was certainly entertained by it a fair bit, even if I was a tad disappointed in the overwhelming emphasis on the spectacle of modern action cinema. However, I’m really glad it’s getting such rave, if somewhat baffling to me, reviews and I think it’s a nice pay off for Miller who really deserves this success. It’s certainly a film I’ll be revisiting again on Blu Ray in the next year or two and I think most people will be behind this one. And they’ll get no arguments from me.

Mad Max @ NUTS4R2
Mad Max
Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome

Thunder Woman

Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome
Australia 1985
Directed by George Miller & George Ogilvie
MGM Blu Ray Region B

So I finally watched the last movie in the original Mad Max trilogy... but this seemed like something completely different to what had gone before and, frankly, didn't seem nearly as sympathetic to the style of the previous two movies as it perhaps might have been. Turns out there’s a couple of good reasons for this which I was unaware of when I was watching this thing.

The first being that this was initially conceived as the story of a group of children in a post apocalyptic environment who would be found by an adult... which is pretty much the second half of the movie as it currently is. It wasn’t until a later stage of the script writing, however, that it was decided that the adult who finds them would turn out to be Mel Gibson’s, somehow strangely iconic, Mad Max character. So the pitch of the original story was never, in its original version, intended to follow on from the style of the first two films or even have Max in it... until it later took that direction.

Secondly, the producer of the first two films and friend of George Miller, Byron Kennedy, died in a helicopter crash scouting locations for this one. I guess this obviously had an effect on Miller and so he only handled the action scenes in this movie (and I can hazard a guess as to exactly which big sequence he did get involved with but I’ll get to that a little later)... the bulk of the film being directed by George Ogilvie.

Now, I don’t know for sure whether the film would have turned out radically different in style had Miller been directing the whole thing but, what I do know is that it noticeably doesn’t match the feel of the first two. Maybe because there was a bigger budget with American money in it... I don’t know... but it feels a heck of a lot more polished and, strangely and perhaps because of it, feels the most dated of the three films. You can tell just by looking at this one which decade of cinematic history it comes from.

The film feels different from it’s predecessors straight away because, as a standard credit roll starts, we have the first of two Tina Turner songs written for the film playing over these credits... which completely shifts the tone of this installment and pushes it into 'magical 1980s land' straight away... I’m surprised there wasn’t a load of break dancing inserted into this film somewhere, too.

After the credits we have another thing which took me out of the whole Mad Max feel of the saga... sweeping panoramic helicopter/plane POV style shots... this just seems totally out of place here. This is then followed by what is probably the strongest sequence of the movie, bar the final, obligatory chase scene and it’s a little scene of a vehicle being driven by camels followed by a pilot and his son disabling the driver with a dropped rock, stealing the vehicle and then heading into one of the two main locations of this film, Bartertown... where the Thunderdome of the title resides. When the driver of the camel towed vehicle wakes up he is revealed as Mel Gibson’s Max and he goes to the post apocalyptic town in search of the people who took his car.

Max now looks completely like the “star” version of Mel Gibson we all know and recognise but they’ve still kept certain elements of his look relating to injuries received in previous installments... they’ve also gone and given him the “full Elsa Lanchester” make over when it comes to a less toned down version of the double white hair streak in this one... as opposed to the single streak he had in the second movie. Gibson also carries a mauser for a few shots, which would have added greatly  to the whole iconic look of the character if he'd kept it all the way through but... this leaves his possession pretty early in the film. Which is a shame, really, because it’s a definite wink to Westerns like The Great Silence, which I suspect Miller would probably, judging from his directorial output in the trilogy, have been a big fan of.

Bartertown is a tough place to get into and looks vaguely like it belongs in a Conan movie but Max manages to cut a deal with the main leader of the town, Auntie (played by Tina Turner), so that he can get all the transport and gasoline he wants in return for killing half of a two man team that make up, together, the more powerful leader (although not in name) of Bartertown. The two in question are the midget Master (who runs the power in the community) and the giant henchman whose back he rides, Blaster (the two together make up... Master Blaster... this film is so 1980s).

Tina Turner is pretty iconic in herself, thanks to her costume, which hastwo  additional series’ of hoops circling through each ear.What this means is that, every time you see her looking straight on at the camera, the two sets of hoops on either side of her face form these striking, vertical patterns which are totally reminiscent of the headdress of an Egyptian queen or Pharaoh... which I thought was a nice touch with the costuming carrying an almost subconscious echo of her status as the official leader of Bartertown.

Max’s deal ultimately leads to a big fight scene, halfway through the movie, which may have looked good in the 1980s but really is just two geezahs in a big dome/cage (sorry... I meant the Thunderdome) trying to catch, punch, cut and mutilate each other while hanging from big bungee wires... this is so camp and laughable it’s unbelievable and I can’t imagine Gibson sitting still for this kind of thing these days but... hey... the 1980s.

All well and good but when Max holds back from killing Blaster, once he sees his face and understands a basic home truth about him, Max is thrown out of Bartertown into the desert with no food or water, to die... wearing something which largely resembles the exact same head masks that the Autons used in certain scenes of Doctor Who: Terror Of The Autons actually (reviewed here) ... so I’m guessing it must be a traditional mask design which has passed me by and not hit my radar anytime over my life (either that or George Miller is a closet Doctor Who fan).

And then the story goes somewhere completely different and this is another tonal jump for the saga because, in the second film which ties into the first, everybody is after the gasoline as a resource they need to survive and, although that particular carrot still holds true in this one... in this film it’s just a secondary driver to a more complex plot. That is to say, it’s not a single “do this to get that” mission kind of story... it goes all over the place. So when Max is rescued by a bunch of children who think he is the second coming, in the next half of the movie, the story almost splits into two separate things which the writers then try and tie back up in the end with an almost “tacked on” sequence where Max has to take a small group of them back to Thunderdome and then escape all over again, this time with various custom vehicles in hot pursuit. So the single mindedness and purity of the first two installments is jettisoned for something which is overly complicated and flashy... at least comparitively, in terms of being a Mad Max movie. It’s also a whole sequence of film which has a heck of a lot in common, both visually as well as in terms of the attitude of the content, with The Lost Boys from J. M Barrie’s famous story Peter Pan. I can’t help remembering an interview which Tina Turner gave at the time this movie was released. I probably saw this interview on something like Film '85 (as it would have been then) and Ms. Turner was asked what it was like working with Mel Gibson. I think the answer at the time was something along the lines of “Mel Gibson is a little boy/captures his inner child” etc and now, having seen the film, I wonder if she was latching onto the bizarre thematic element of the second half of the movie when she was contemplating her answer.

It’s during the last 20 minutes that the film finally starts looking, and feeling, like a Mad Max film again.... with the inevitable chase sequence involving a load of custom, weaponised and armoured cars chasing Max and whoever he happens to be with, this time escaping in a train which suddenly seems to have a bizarre track stretching out into the desert. I’ve got no idea what’s going on here or why this track would even exist but I’m not going to let logic get in the way when this is the only half decent part of the movie. I’m guessing, and it is only a guess so please let me know if I’m completely wrong here, that this is the sequence of the film which is well and truly directed by George Miller. The stunts and high speed shenanigans are reminiscent of the similar scenes in both Mad Max (reviewed here) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (reviewed here) and the ending to the chase is typical in that it leaves Max more or less exactly where the endings of the previous two had left him... a lone cowboy wandering the prairie plains to fend for himself and be a force of righteousness in a lawless land. Actually, as if the Western metaphors aren’t enough in this one, there’s even a scene in the first half of the movie, in the Thunderdome, where Max is announced as... The Man With No Name... so the writers of this are still, very much, wearing their influences on their sleeve, it seems.

One other thing that keeps the tone of the movie straying too far into proper Mad Max territory is a change of composer. This one isn’t scored by Brian May as the previous two were and, of course, it therefore has a different feel. This one is, in fact, scored by Maurice Jarre and it’s very hit and miss, at least in the sound mix in the movie, but contains some nice “metal percussion” elements and it’s quite appropriate to the images it’s supporting... it just feels a little too polished, again, for a Mad Max production but, definitely, works for what it was written for... so that’s a good thing, at least.

And that’s about as far as I’m riding with this one. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome really didn’t feel like it was a Mad Max movie at all for most of it’s running time and certain scenes, like the silly bungee jump fight scene, really shouldn’t be seen on anything outside of old TV episodes of It’s A Knockout, as far as I’m concerned. A competently put together movie, for the most part, but nothing too special and certainly not up to the level of the first two in the series. The fourth installment, sans Gibson in the title role, hits British cinemas in less than a week, at time of writing, and from the trailers, it looks closer in tone to the spirit of the first two movies while, at the same time, also looking terrifically overpolished for something to sit comfortably, shoulder to shoulder, with any of the movies in the original trilogy. Still, time will tell on that and you can be sure I’ll be reviewing it on here as soon as I’ve seen it. Please come back and have a read... if you’ve got a few minutes.

Mad Max @ NUTS4R2

Mad Max

Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Mad Max: Fury Road