The month of May saw the release of two geek-friendly sequels, one the swift family-friendly follow-up to a billion-dollar superhero all-star assembly, and the other the long-awaited continuation of a gritty post-apocalyptic revenge saga whose previous entry came out thirty years ago. Avengers: Age of Ultron and Mad Max: Fury Road are both aimed at the same action/adventure fanboy crowd, but the two movies—and their respective promotional campaigns—couldn’t be more different in tone and execution.
Everybody expected Avengers: Age of Ulton to open huge and amass a sizeable profit, even with its ludicrous $250M production price tag, but what I wasn’t prepared for was just how dispiriting the whole affair would turn out to be. I enjoyed the movie’s shiny visual effects and dweeby humor, and the screenplay allows every Avenger his or her moment in the spotlight, but its overall immediate impact lasted about as long as a fart in the breeze.
Did I truly pay for and watch the actual movie, or am I merely recalling the bombardment of Age of Ultron pre-release trailers and television commercials?
Most corporate studio movies nowadays are both dispensable and interchangeable, and you forget all about them the second you emerge from the dark of the matinee; true to form, I struggle now to recall anything specific about Avengers 2, other than the images spoiled in the ubiquitous trailers and the blatant tease for the third and fourth installments, Avengers: Infinity War – Parts I & II. There’s something vaguely and horribly calculated about the whole enterprise that makes the film feel as though it was designed and constructed entirely by computer.
And as for the imminent Avengers 3, don’t get me started on ranting against the already tedious and money-grubbing studio practice of splitting an overlong screenplay into separate movies.
I cannot overstate, then, what a refreshing and seemingly revolutionary relief it is to find Mad Max: Fury Road to be not only a full-blooded, full-throttle, slam-bang action epic, but also the type of film that will get under your skin and haunt you long afterwards. When was the last time you saw a movie that was so good you wanted to purchase another ticket before the credits were even finished scrolling?
Ultimately, Fury Road is an instant action classic along with its predecessors, a Master Class in pulse-pounding action, astonishing stunt choreography, visceral cinematography and razor-sharp editing, and a rich and fully realized world that warrants and rewards repeated visits.
But did I say it was merely a slam-bang action epic?
What I meant to say is that Fury Road is a titanic achievement, an old-fashioned grand-scale spectacle for the ages, made in the old-school spirit that favors tactile props and ballsy stunt people over pixelated visual effects. Simply, it is the fiercest and most wildly inventive work of sustained cinematic velocity since forever—or at least since The Road Warrior. It puts soulless contraptions like Avengers 2 to shame, and unlike Marvel’s rapid-fire show-them-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink ad campaign, the slow-burn restraint of the Fury Road trailers promised fans something truly spectacular without actually spoiling anything.
Tom Hardy may lack the bonkers paparazzi circus appeal of Mel Gibson, but the actor acquits himself nicely as Max, underplaying the mythic “Man With No Name” archetype with grunts and gestures instead of verbose dialogue. Charlize Theron is a great foil for Hardy, and her steely character, Imperator Furiosa, is among the most strong-willed and emotionally complex inhabitants of the Mad Max universe. Among the film’s many sly winks to devoted fans, the actor portraying the main villain Immortan Joe is the same guy who played the bad guy biker in the original 1979 Mad Max.
Aussie director George Miller, at the ripe age of 70, handily and readily schools the tribe of young action/epic moviemakers cranking out Hollywood’s blockbusters du jour—Joss Whedon, Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich, Brett Ratner, Bryan Singer and Matthew Vaughn. Those young guns could all learn a thing or two (or two thousand) from seasoned masters like Miller and other top-tier action maestros such as John McTiernan, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Richard Donner.
Nowadays, it seems there’s a new big movie every weekend, and if that movie doesn’t burst out of the gate right away with a hundred million opening weekend box office haul, and then manage to hold onto some of the 2nd weekend ticket sales, it’s considered a disappointment and quickly drops off the radar.
If Fury Road isn’t quite a billion-dollar world-wide cash cow like Avengers 2 or Transformers 4 or Fast & Furious 7, it’s at least become what folks used to call a word-of-mouth sleeper hit with legs—it has performed better than expected, and people are still discovering it in theaters weeks after most other films have typically come and gone.
The week-to-week box office drop-off for Fury Road has been noticeably less precipitous than for other films and so it’s being viewed as a solid success, earning glowing critical raves (currently the film rates a staggering 98% on Rotten Tomatoes), taking back more than double its production budget in worldwide ticket sales, and just recently earmarked for another sequel (Mad Max Part 5 will be subtitled “The Wasteland”, and I truly hope the next film arrives in swifter succession than did Fury Road, but I suppose that all depends upon the weather).
Moving on, the month of May also saw the arrival of another needless remake of a perfectly good 1980s classic. How do I feel about yet another updating of a cherished childhood favorite? Fuck you, Poltergeist remake, fuck you very much right off the bat. That’s
how I feel. No, I won’t be seeing this movie, and it’s got little to do
with the new entry sullying my memory of the original, as two
increasingly woeful sequels did that quite thoroughly on their own. No, I
won’t be seeing the new Poltergeist because I’m sick of the perpetual cycle of remakes, reboots and rehashings in their entirety.
Every now and then, we get a surprisingly good remake, but most of the time the rehash is a glossy but witless exercise in corporate profiteering, made with the latest digital technology but minus the magic of the handmade original. If these bottom-shelf remakes and retreads are good on any artistic level, it’s only accidentally and through no intent of the people involved, who are typically employed only to succeed on a fiscal level. The canned shocks are all the same, the sudden bursts of blaring scary music are all predictable down to the millisecond, and the prefabricated sight of scary faces distorted by computer animation whooshing directly towards the camera at full charge no longer makes me pee in my pants.
As for a new imagining of Poltergeist in particular, no amount of digital spit and polish could ever improve upon the lighting and optical effects and the crude but effective puppetry of the 1982 original, and I doubt the new actors, earnest as they may in fact be, can recapture the chemistry of the original’s Freeling family.
One of my most frightening childhood nightmares involves Mom being electrocuted by the doorknob of her children’s bedroom, and the hand-animated lightning bolt forms a giant white hairy lion-skull-demon as large as the doorway that growls and roars and lunges at Mom. I realize the demon is merely an oversized muppet perched in a wind tunnel, but I believed in it because it reacted plausibly to the wind and the light and because I felt connected to JoBeth Williams as Mom, and I don’t have to suffer this remake to know that nothing in the new movie will look or feel quite so real to me.
So, yeah: Fuck you, Poltergeist remake, fuck you right along with the Psycho remake, the RoboCop remake, the Red Dawn remake, the Footloose remake, the Annie remake, the Total Recall remake, the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, The Thing prequel, and all the other stupefying and needless rapings of my dorm-room VHS shelf.
And as to the upcoming remake of Point Break—just fuck you, too.
