I think MMFR is one of the best-made bad movies ever... (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, June 01, 2016, 17:33 (3097 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

MMFR deserves all the credit in the world for delivering an aesthetic style, a look, a certain energy, and nailing it out of the park in each and every way. The commitment to perfection across all aspects of the production shows, and it is truly impressive. But I also think it is a completely flat, meaningless, boring story with no characters worth caring about. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that people praise MMFR for its "strong female characters"... there isn't a strong character, male or female, within 100 miles of that movie IMO. It's not overtly sexist, and it drives home a message of equality in the most simplistic way possible, so it does deserve a shred of credit there. But people go on about Furiosa like she's the standard all female characters should now be held up against, when in reality she's as flat and 1-dimensional as everyone else in the movie.

*spoilers from here on out*

The film relies on nothing but the most obvious manipulative tactics to try and make us care about any of the characters. They don't do anything to make us care about any of the women trying to escape, but they're all beautiful and being held captive by people who look like monsters, so that's all the development we need there, right? And then they go ahead and kill the pregnant one(who we don't care about aside from the fact that she's pregnant) just to make sure we really hate the bad guy, but again, he looks like a monster so we already know we're supposed to hate him.

There's also the skinny dude who flips sides more times than I can count, for no apparent reason beyond the fact that he finds one of the pretty girls pretty. And then Furiosa, THE STRONGEST FEMALE CHARACTER OF ALL TIME, gets her 1 and only moment to show any strength of character since the start of the film, but instead she gives up and decides to lead the other women to their deaths out in the desert until Max talks her out of it.

It makes my brain hurt lol

This is so weird. I'M the guy who complains about the lack of character development and cartoon characterizations in action movies. I got exactly what I wanted from MMFR. Allusions to the main characters' past, telling details about the principals, and a sense that this world had its own logic that was completely different than my own. I saw enough of the iceberg is another way of putting it. To tell more in a movie so devoted to dramatically showing would have been out of place. I didn't know a lot of explicit details about the characters' history, but I had no doubt that George Miller had notebooks (or hard drives) in his house full of that history. You could tell. His vision of the world sold it and the characters in it. There's an analogy to practical effects here.