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cantinflas wrote:Mad Max: Fury Road

Of course it's just a trailer, but the amount of CGI and slow motion is dispiriting. The kinetic power of Mad Maxes 1 and 2 came from simply attaching a camera to the front of a car and letting that car go hell for leather.

An obvious complaint ... I know.

bdsweeney wrote:

cantinflas wrote:Mad Max: Fury Road

Of course it's just a trailer, but the amount of CGI and slow motion is dispiriting. The kinetic power of Mad Maxes 1 and 2 came from simply attaching a camera to the front of a car and letting that car go hell for leather.

An obvious complaint ... I know. :roll:

Allegedly, 80% of the movie is practical. The director spent years on location find tuning all the stunts. Of course, the huge electrical storm is CG, but that's not really something you could do any other way.

Oh, and the trailer was incredible. I can't wait.

All I saw was teal and orange with that trailer.

Looks amazing. Very excited.

I'll miss that 35mm grain, it just won't have the same raggedy quality as digital :(. I'll miss Dean Semler too, though of course John Seale is a perfectly worthy replacement. Hopefully Miller and McCarthy will be every bit the pairing they sound like on paper. Miller won't ever top the hyperkinetic thrills of the second film, but almost no one has. Though his claim this will mostly be done practically has uneasy echoes of what Spielberg said before the lackluster fourth Indiana Jones film came out, I have faith in Miller and hope this will be a throwback 80s action film done properly.

I saw a work print of this at AMC Burbank over the summer. I would say 80% of it is CGI. I personally thought it was really bad. Weak story with some really pointless scenes, random flashbacks that shouldn't even be there. Tom Hardy doesn't exactly do much in the movie (Theron and the other actors do most of the work) and there was just unfinished CGI builds all over the place, to the point where some actors even had tape and markers and green screen cut into the film. That said, what I did like about it is the energy - A bit like Shoot Em Up. It's very very long, but if they cut out most of the pointless drama and romance they could have a killer action film, even if its mostly CGI. The atmosphere is really cool and dark as well. The audience seemed to go crazy for it though.

Damn, and there are so few things in life I was looking forward to .

Mad Max: Fury Road continues to look amazing, with perhaps the most dynamic visual aesthetic of a studio action film in years.

Tom Hardy has said he's signed on for, potentially, a further three films so (unless this is common practice?) it sounds like they're really confident with what they have. I'm trying to be cautious, but I have become very excited about this.

It's common practice, but I do know Warner is very happy with the film, too.

With 82 reviews in, this has a 99% on the Tomatometer and an average score of 9/10. I'm certainly convinced to see it. Can anyone remember the last action film, let alone reboot/sequel, to get this level of critical praise?

MRAs are boycotting because of the film's purported strong female characters - wait'll they get a load of Pitch Perfect 2!

The Dissolve gave the film 5/5 stars, which I believe is only the second time they've done that for a new release outside of Her.

mfunk9786 wrote:With 82 reviews in, this has a 99% on the Tomatometer and an average score of 9/10. I'm certainly convinced to see it. Can anyone remember the last action film, let alone reboot/sequel, to get this level of critical praise?

MRAs are boycotting because of the film's purported strong female characters - wait'll they get a load of Pitch Perfect 2!

When did men's rights activism become a thing? Sometimes I feel like the most sheltered person in the world.

mfunk9786 wrote:With 82 reviews in, this has a 99% on the Tomatometer and an average score of 9/10. I'm certainly convinced to see it. Can anyone remember the last action film, let alone reboot/sequel, to get this level of critical praise?

MRAs are boycotting because of the film's purported strong female characters - wait'll they get a load of Pitch Perfect 2!

The Avengers in 2012 got 92%. But, yeah, the reviews are off the chart good. The only "rotten" one is a UK tabloid that still praises the action, but felt the story was too threadbare, which is probably the least of the concerns for most viewers going in to such a film.

I've just returned from an early screening.

It felt like a modern version of the first two films, with all the weird comic-book bizarre vehicles, sexually perverse villains and wild chase scenes. As much depth as the previous films which is to say, it's all about how it looks rather than any major character depth or thought. It's more about looking good and bringing a new scene to the table to show something we haven't seen before in an action film about crazy custom cars rolling through a desert.

I think it's only major problem is it's not nearly as raw as the first two, probably because it was shot with a bunch of go pros and the day and night sequences have an awful orange and teal tint that I thought was just limited to film posters, but it's here and makes the night scenes look about as realistic as the scenes representing night in Murnau's Nosferatu.

I enjoyed myself, but if anyone here is a detractor of action films I do not think it will change their mind.

I believe Miller said it was shot day for night, so that probably accounts for some of the look of the night scenes.

it was shot with a bunch of go pros

It was shot with six ARRI Alexas, and a dozen or so Canon 5D's for crash cam footage.

Anthony Thorne wrote:

it was shot with a bunch of go pros

It was shot with six ARRI Alexas, and a dozen or so Canon 5D's for crash cam footage.

I stand corrected. thank you.

captveg wrote:

mfunk9786 wrote:With 82 reviews in, this has a 99% on the Tomatometer and an average score of 9/10. I'm certainly convinced to see it. Can anyone remember the last action film, let alone reboot/sequel, to get this level of critical praise?

MRAs are boycotting because of the film's purported strong female characters - wait'll they get a load of Pitch Perfect 2!

The Avengers in 2012 got 92%. But, yeah, the reviews are off the chart good. The only "rotten" one is a UK tabloid that still praises the action, but felt the story was too threadbare, which is probably the least of the concerns for most viewers going in to such a film.

That has an average score of 8/10 and 92% - while that's nothing to shake a stick at, it's still not on the level of Mad Max Fury Road, which is currently better reviewed on average score than most Best Picture winners and better in percentage of critics on board, too. The closest comparison re: universal praise that I can find at the moment is Boyhood which shares similar statistics. I've just never seen anything quite like it in the genre since the idea of aggregating reviews in this fashion began.

The whole "average score" thing on Rotten Tomatoes seems decidedly flawed. I remember The Lego Movie scoring 100% at one point, and thereafter very high 90s, but if you looked at the actual reviews you'd see that most of them were only three out of four stars or four out of five. In other words, they were all clearly good reviews, but there were hardly any that individually gave it 98 or 100%.

That said, Fury Road really does seem to be getting proper raves in terms of text as well as numerical scores.

But I think that's why they added the "average score" in addition to the percentage. For example, the average score for The Lego Movie is 8.1/10, but the percentage of critics who liked it is 96%. So there's more of a consensus on it being a good movie than evidence that it's a great movie. What's boggling my mind on this (and I'll let it go after this, promise) is that Mad Max Fury Road is firing on both cylinders. Not only are critics pleased with it, they seem to be convinced that it's action film pantheon-level great or beyond. I did not see that coming.

I'm sure I'm treading out the obvious, but Rotten Tomatoes really only seems to cater to people who want to read a percentage. A film could receive unanimous reviews of "slightly better than average" and get a 100%. It's a better qualifier to how many people thought it was good enough or not rather than calculating how good a film should be perceived as.

I've tried to ignore those sites and just read regular critics opinions to get an idea of what I'm getting into when I see a film, but I've heard people chatter around the office about Rotten Tomatoes ratings more than what they felt was interesting in a film.

I haven't been paying attention to that site but every review I've come across have been perfect scores and absolute raves from established critics. I was shocked by some because not only were they praising the action but they were throwing around words like "masterpiece" and "work of art," which I haven't seen for a genre movie in a very long time.