Test audience screenings 7/30 & 12/8 (Spoilers)

[kennerado]

wow.

[blackmocco]

Yep, sounds about right.

[biolumen]

More thoughts from a couple of folks on the Chud forums who caught the screening. The first guy goes by the name Sebastian OB and is a big MM fan.

So thanks to Dark Shape (thanks again Shape!) I also got to see this. Non spoilery thoughts from an uber Mad Max fan:

Tom Hardy is as good as you are hoping he is as Max. More primal and physical than Mel. For a Bond comparison, if Mel is Connery, they jumped right to Craig with Hardy.

Charlize Theron as Furiosa is every bit Hardy's equal and a great new addition to the Mad Max canon. She almost steals the movie.

FX weren't totally finished, but most of them seemed background/scope related. The car stuff seemed totally real. Maybe there was some finished FX work in the car stunts but I could not tell.

The plot does a good job of telling a new story but with most of the Mad Max tropes. Story wise I'd break it down as 50% Road Warrior, 15% Thunderdome, 5% OG Mad Max and 30% its own thing.

The movie is fucking bugnuts, especially in regards to Immortan Joe and the villains. Total George Miller craziness. So much so that I wonder if non fans will "get it", but Shape seemed to like it, so that's a good sign.

Im sequel/reboot terms, it's akin to SUPERMAN RETURNS where you could take it as a sequel but there are minor continuity issues. For the function of the franchise, it works as a reboot.

Even in it's unfinished form, I am secure in awarding this the honor of being the second best MAD MAX movie, after ROAD WARRIOR.

Oh, and rating wise it's PG-13. Plenty violent, no real gore.

When asked how close in quality it was to MM2...

Pretty damn close. I think if the younger generation latches on to it, they will prefer it to ROAD WARRIOR

I am very curious to see how this takes with people who weren't Mad Max fans already. I believe it has the power to convert, but I readily admit to being blinded by my own fanboyism on this one.

He did have a problem with the voiceover.

This cut had a bunch of voice over in the beginning and end, and as Shape said, a lot of it was bad. At one point Max referred to himself as the man "watching in the shadows", which is dumb because he's in the desert and there are hardly any shadows. But the producers (or whoever they were) warned us that the voice over was very much a work in progress. The voice Hardy uses as Max is good and not Bane-y.

Oh, and there were flashes of "apocalypse" footage, really quick cut news reel stuff, in the credits.

ROAD WARRIOR is the clear model here, which you can tell from the trailer. They're trying to give you a sense of who Max is and what his backstory might be, and they haven't quite nailed it yet. But I'm confident they will.

On the flashbacks...

I'm not even 100% convinced they were intended to be his family. The little girl called him "Max", not daddy. I think it may have been implying that he failed to help other people in the wasteland at some point. That has been a theme of the other films.

When asked about where it stands in the trilogy...

There is actually very little reference to anything that could be construed as referring to any of the past films, aside from extremely brief "flashes" that are frankly confusing and that I imagine will be cut. But if I wanted to place it in continuity, it would be post ROAD WARRIOR, pre THUNDERDOME.

FURY ROAD feels very much of the same world as the original trilogy, which frees you to take it however you want in terms of sequel or reboot. If you want to imagine the events of MAD MAX or THE ROAD WARRIOR taking place in this Max's backstory, it's pretty easy to do. If you want to see it as a reboot, that's even easier. But it's not like trying to reconcile the Tim Burton Batman continuity with the Nolan one or anything. Like Miller says, it's very much grown from the same material.

On box office potential...

There's no way FURY ROAD is going to compete with the big names, but if the marketing is strong I can see it making RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES numbers. Good enough to rekindle interest in the franchise, which is all I think the studio is hoping for. The attitude in the screening (and likeley coming off Comic Con) seemed like they knew they had a decent movie on their hands.

The other guy goes by The Dark Shape and FR was his first MM movie. He liked it but didn't say much citing the NDA he signed.

These shots were not in the cut of the film tonight.

On the voiceover...

Biggest issue is that they need to drop the voice-over. It's completely unnecessary and -- at the end -- distracting in its awfulness.

On the flashbacks...

I'm fifty-fifty on the brief flashes of his family. I think the quick frames actually work well during big action scenes, but you spend the whole movie expecting some sort of pay-off that never arrives.

http://www.chud.com/community/t/146538/ ... discussion

[Stamper]

Nice. AICN talkback is full of people thinking their review is a plant. Not sure about that, but it's certain that this movie will rock.

I think the PG-13 talk there is full of crap. PG-13 is the new R. This is not a zombie film, and due to the times, you will probably not see a rape scene in it. Live with it.

This is going to be a badass had PG-13 film in 2015. 1981 is gone, it's the past. You can't go back. Max Max is about the future and how it reflect on today. Not the past.

[Taipan]

Thanks, biolumen!

I guess the bad voice-over sounds something like from MM2: The Lost Version.

And in this maelstrom of decay good, brave men were battered and smashed. Men like Max roaming the highways in the name of the law, who became a lover, husband, father. (...) He wandered out into the wasteland. And here he would learn (...) that the fire which burns in the heart of men will endure. Hope survives.

LOL

[TheGoose]

Whatever happened to the "History Men". Weren't they supposed to be serving up word burgers or something?
I hope they don't have Max do the narration in the final version, as the character isn't really known for being verbose.

[BRC1974]

These shots were not in the cut of the film tonight.

I actually liked those two scenes in the trailer.

[Mad Max RW]

Nice. AICN talkback is full of people thinking their review is a plant. Not sure about that, but it's certain that this movie will rock.

AICN has a long history of being tricked by frauds. In recent years even their founder, Harry Knowles, reviewed a fake Prometheus script thinking it was real. He also reviewed (and lied about seeing in theaters) a bootleg version of Drive which contained a totally different soundtrack he referenced in his article. The place is a total mess and it's normal for their talkback community to second guess everything.

[blackmocco]

Hate to be the nitpicker but the 'thumbs-up' scene is in the movie.

[blackmocco]

Nice. AICN talkback is full of people thinking their review is a plant. Not sure about that, but it's certain that this movie will rock.

AICN has a long history of being tricked by frauds. In recent years even their founder, Harry Knowles, reviewed a fake Prometheus script thinking it was real. He also reviewed (and lied about seeing in theaters) a bootleg version of Drive which contained a totally different soundtrack he referenced in his article. The place is a total mess and it's normal for their talkback community to second guess everything.

Plus most of AICN's community are smarmy, arrogant pricks who hate everything.