{"id":4633,"date":"2015-05-20T20:10:05","date_gmt":"2015-05-20T19:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=4633"},"modified":"2015-05-20T20:10:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-20T19:10:05","slug":"visions-of-the-future-mad-max-and-tomorrowland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/visions-of-the-future-mad-max-and-tomorrowland\/","title":{"rendered":"Visions of the Future: Mad Max and Tomorrowland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mad Max: Fury Road<\/a>, is just demented.<\/p>\n

In a good way. <\/p>\n

George Miller returns to his 1979 character, essentially re-imagining him, this time played by Tom Hardy. The film is very high concpet. Max is chased through the desert with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and a group of women the crazed leader of the “War Boys” uses for breeding that Furiosa has rescued.<\/p>\n

An opening act sees Max captured and then used as a “blood bag” for an unrecognisable Nicholas Hoult’s Nux. But Max is soon free and we then simply get one massive chase sequence. <\/p>\n

But that really does the film a disservice. The action is clearly done “in camera” as much as possible, with CGI souping it up a bit. It’s obvious because there’s a lack of physicality to the massive destruction sequences in your run-of-the-mill superhero fare. However much programmers try to build in a bit of randomness to the physics models of their worlds, it never quite feels real. It’s hard to pin down why – and it’s not simply that the setting is unbelievable (Mad Max’s setting is pretty unbelievable). <\/p>\n

The first Mad Max film I saw was actually the third in the series, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome<\/a> and I remember trying to build some models at the time. I used Airfix tank model parts, and built them onto Corgi London buses, applied spray cans of sand coloured paint, and voila! <\/p>\n

In Fury Road, we have a converted oil tanker. Furiosa is supposed to be doing a run to collect gas, but she scarpers, looking for the almost mythical Green Place.<\/p>\n

Cue mayhem, with a production design on steroids. Best of all has to be the vehicle carrying four drummers and guitar player hung in front of a car mounted rack of speakers and giving the whole thing a musical accompaniment. <\/p>\n

In fact, the film is edited to its music gorgeously. The action is simply told, and expertly handled. Lesser directors find the audience losing the plot a little and struggling to keep up with what’s happening. Not so here, where we always know where we are. <\/p>\n

Overall, a pumped-up B-movie with an A-movie budget. I hope it does well.<\/p>\n

Tomorrowland<\/a> – or more properly in Europe, Disney’s Tomorrowland: A World Beyond, for copyright reasons – is a new film from Brad Bird. It opens with George Clooney’s Frank Walker trying to get us up to speed, interrupted by Britt Robertson’s Casey. And that’s because it’s a complicated story.<\/p>\n

As a child, Walker had gone to the 1954 World’s Fair in New York to present his rocket pack invention to a sneering Hugh Laurie. A young girl his own age, Athena (played by a wonderful Raffey Cassidy), gives him a pin badge and says that he should secretly follow. He goes through a water ride and gets transported to… well… somewhere else. <\/p>\n

The vision of the future that we see is a wonderful world of jet packs, hover trains, vertical swimming pools and space travel. The production designers (again) went mad, and in a delightful way. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile in a present day, Casey is trying to save her father’s job, and the NASA space program, by delaying the destruction of a Florida launch pad. She’s caught and spends a night in the cells. On coming out she finds a strange pin-badge. Touching it takes her to another dimension and a fabulous space city – but only for a limited time. <\/p>\n

What then follows is a dimension hopping race around the US, as Clooney’s now adult Walker reluctantly gets involved with Casey, and the still child-like Athena.<\/p>\n

There’s a great action set-piece in a Sci-Fi collectors’ shop in Houston, and we have evil smiling androids, and all sorts of technological do-das. <\/p>\n

At times the film reminds you of The Wizard of Oz, and at others of Home Alone. The cast are all excellent, especially the younger cast members who have quite a job on their hands.<\/p>\n

If the story sounds complicated… well it is. But then if the audience can understand Doctor Who then they’ll understand this. I’m not quite sure I bought into the film’s overall ethos, but it has its heart in the right place. And it’s a smart film, which is to be applauded.<\/p>\n

I must admit that it wasn’t until afterwards at a Q&A, that I realised that Tomorrowland is an actual Disney theme park ride (I’ve never been and have no desire to ever go), otherwise I’d have said that it was nice to have a film that wasn’t based on a franchise. Whether this becomes one is another question. Good half-term fun for those not quite old enough to see Mad Max.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mad Max: Fury Road, is just demented. In a good way. George Miller returns to his 1979 character, essentially re-imagining him, this time played by Tom Hardy. The film is very high concpet. Max is chased through the desert with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and a group of women the crazed leader of the “War […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[43],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4634,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions\/4634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}