3 Jurassic World versus Fury Road comparisons

So it turns out that Mad Max: Fury Road is way better than Jurassic World.

#1. Villains

In this corner we have Indominus Rex. The Indominus Rex is a genetically engineered dinosaur (technically all Jurassic World dinosaurs are really) designed to draw mass appeal by being bigger and scarier than other dinosaurs. Unfortunately, it also develops super powers and goes on a rampage around Jurassic World, killing people in its path.

And in Fury Road we have Immortan Joe, a God-King obsessed with breeding the perfect human being. Immortan Joe has an army of mutant War Boys and a fortress called the Citadel from which he rules. He’s forced to lead out his army to recover his lost wives.

The thing is, Indominus Rex is actually the victim of Jurassic World. She was created by scientists to be monstrous solely for the entertainment value. She was then locked up and isolated from the world for her entire life. It’s not her fault that she’s exactly what her creator’s wanted her to be, in that sense she’s a tragic character. The movie plots her rise up to freedom and revenge, then follows her being beaten down and killed by other dinosaurs. In retrospect Indominus Rex has more in common with the heroes of Fury Road than the actual heroes of Jurassic World. She’s a character struggling for agency in a world that has imprisoned her and our heroes must beat her down.

Jurassic World is about a world that is thrown out of whack and the desperate struggle back to the status quo. Immortan Joe, on the other hand, IS the status quo, and it’s about the desperate struggle to break out of it. So in a way the two movies are opposed. By the end of Jurassic World, the park is abandoned, but the forces that created the park are still very much in place. By the end of Fury Road, God is dead and his corpse is strapped to the hood of that truck. Things will never be the same.

#2. Heroines

In Jurassic World there’s Claire who is superficially analogous to Furiosa. Claire is the executive who runs Jurassic World, serving the wealthy Masrani in a way not dissimilar to how Furiosa is the Imperator of Immortan Joe.

Only there’s one immediate and vital difference: Claire never rebels against Masrani and the forces behind Jurassic World. She’s content in her role and in Jurassic World. The only problem Claire has is somehow integrating in her family in such a way to please her sister. Claire really isn’t the Furiosa of the movie because, it turns out, Idominus Rex is Furiosa. Claire simply isn’t furious enough.

Claire also suffers as kind of the butt of the jokes throughout the movie. She abandons her post as the head of the park to go rescue her nephews (which she really doesn’t succeed in doing), which kind of renders the human “villain” of the movie into a much more positive light. The only thing she really seems to acquire by the end of the movie is (a) a boyfriend and (b) a newfound respect for the concept of family.

Whereas Furiosa breaks free of a monstrous system, rescuing people as she does so, and then, later, turns around and takes the fight back to that system. It would be as if Indominus Rex managed to escape the island, but then goes back to free the island from humans.

#3. The Maxes

Owen is probably the closest thing you get to Max in Jurassic World. Objectively, Owen is kind of a smug self-satisfied guy who harasses Claire and trains velociraptors. It’s kind of funny that it’s Owen who talks about trust and respect in relationships with velociraptors, but doesn’t respect Claire at all. Owen is an ex-military velociraptor trainer. He gets to be the guy in the movie whose warnings get dismissed out of hand by the people in power, then he’s the guy who gets to do cool action hero things in the movie.

Max, on the other hand, is a former policeman who has been adrift in the Wastes. All he wants to be is left alone. He’s an incredible jerk at the beginning of the movie, clearly willing to let people die (though it’s important to note that the one person you’d think he’d 100% kill is Ucks and he doesn’t), but later comes around to helping them fight for freedom and redemption.

Both Max and Owen start off their movies as kind of outsiders and antagonists. But whereas Max is redeemed through his actions, Jurassic World thinks Owen is just fine. I suspect that the people who gave the initial outcry about Fury Road and it’s feminist agenda would have found Owen and Jurassic World to be much more satisfying. Owen is basically always right (or so assumes the movie) even when he’s wrong. Owen also, like Claire, is happy in the world he lives in. He also serves as a romantic interest for Claire, but I didn’t really buy into that throughout the course of the movie.

Max isn’t a love interest, and you get the sense that Max can never be a romantic interest for anyone. Owen is a good guy in a way that’s easy to be the good guy. He doesn’t lose anything by being the good guy and he gets the girl! It’s much harder for Max to be a good guy, and he does it for much less. All Max gets by the end is the satisfaction in knowing that hey, maybe he’s a little redeemed.

By that I mean that Owen doesn’t have to fight himself. Owen doesn’t have to fight the world. All Owen has to do is fight rebellious dinosaurs that will, at worst, kill him. Max has to fight his desire to survive and he has to fight against all of what remains of civilization in his world. What awaits Max is at best death, but probably a long torturous existence that he can never escape. At the end of the movie, Owen gets to go home and hang out with his girlfriend. At the end of Max’s movie he has less than he started with at the beginning of the movie.

In an incredible change of topics: Mad Max musings on Mad Max

Thinking about the endings of all the Mad Max movies:

1. His family’s murder avenged, Max takes to the wasteland, a broken man, to become a drifter..
2. Having defeated Lord Humungous, Max is left in the desert to become a drifter again.
3. Having bought the children time to escape, Max is left in the desert to become a drifter again.
4. Having helped defeat Immortan Joe, Max takes to the desert to become a drifter again.

The nice thing about #4 is that at least this time Max clearly had the choice to stay behind. Every other time, it seems like Max had nothing left. Max, the perpetual loner, time and time again steps up to sacrifice himself to help others, and it leaves him in worse shape than when he started.

In Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Max loses his car and his dog. In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Max loses all his possessions again and is left in the desert. In Mad Max: Fury Road, Max loses all his possessions again and his car gets destroyed (twice). He does reclaim his jacket and some gear from Bullet Farmer, though, so he’s better off than #3.

I think it’s interesting because Max doesn’t want to help people initially. He just can’t help himself. And no matter what happens in the movies, he survives to the next movie. Which is why the voiceover description of Max in Fury Road is so apt:

A man reduced to a single instinct: survive.

Max is perpetually burnt out and wrecked, but no matter what happens to him, he can’t lose that part of himself that wants to help people.

Fury Road was hard for me because Max was initially such a shadow of his former self. He’s nothing more than, as George Miller described him, a mad dog. The moment Max shows up in Fury Road is like 20 minutes in, when Furiosa jumps into the truck and they make eye contact and he hands her a gun. I was like, “There’s Max!” And suddenly there he was, 100% on the hero’s side, 100% willing to go to the mat for people he just met because it was the right thing to do. It’s a pretty powerful moment in a movie full of powerful moments.

You have to wonder why Max doesn’t stay at the Citadel. For once, in the Mad Max Cycle, Max has a real opportunity to stop being a drifter. Not only that, Max could do a lot of good in the Citadel, since he was once a former lawman and could help bring about the change of society that the Citadel will undergo.

I think it’s because of the epic nature of Mad Max’s existence. He’s kind of like Odysseus, perpetually wandering the world, trying to get home. Odysseus could have given up a long time into his journey and just stayed in many places, but he kept going because Ithaca was where he belonged. Max could have given up but I think he keeps moving because his home has been destroyed, so he belongs nowhere, he’s unmoored from existence. He leaves the Citadel because he believes he does not belong there. He wanders because he cannot conceptually understand the idea of stopping.

Just kind of thinking of Thunderdome & the future

As Mad Max: Fury Road to Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and so it makes me wonder if Mad Max: The Wasteland is going to be Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The Road Warrior was a chase movie, whereas I’d describe Beyond Thunderdome as more like a Yojimbo movie. From what I recall, and what I read from wikipedia, Thunderdome has Max coming to a place called Bartertown. I think there are fewer vehicles in Thunderdome because it’s set a decade or more after The Road Warrior so there’s much less gasoline. But honestly it’s been years, I really need to just watch all the movies.

So Bartertown is kind of how I imagine Gasoline Town (in Fury Road) would be like. It’s a community built around a methane refinery and ruled by an uneasy alliance between The Master and Aunt Entity. Max wanders in and becomes at a pawn that Entity can use to defeat The Master. But Max reneges on their deal and is exiled into the desert to die.

This part actually reminds me of Fury Road: Max finds a community of children who have been growing up alone in the desert. They worship the messianic Captain Walker character (the captain of the airplane that carried the children) who left long ago promising to return. They mistake Max for their messiah. This exploration of religion and its forms really reminds me of Immortan Joe who uses religion as a tool, where as “Walker-ism” is a more organic religion spawned by fundamental misunderstandings. It’s interesting to me that Max attains a somewhat legendary quality about him in the sense that he’s obviously almost a mythical figure to the people he influences.

Max and the Children end up breaking The Master out of Bartertown and damaging the methane refinery, before the Children leave on an airplane, while Max remains behind, fighting the forces of Aunty Entity. Later in the future we see that the Children have founded a civilization in the ruins of Sydney, Australia.

It’s weird, I don’t remember liking Thunderdome but I love Fury Road so now I want to revisit it. Fury Road really deviates from the pattern set by Road Warrior and Thunderdome. In the second and third Mad Max installment, the movies always end with a narration from the perspective of the distant future, of a people remembering Mad Max in their new civilization that they owe to him. Fury Road doesn’t do this, it ends with the birth of a new civilization (based on Furiosa’s leadership) and as she’s ascending she sees Max leaving.

I actually like the way Fury Road handles it. It’s similar to the other movies in that the leader of the new civilization thinks of Max, but I figure we don’t need the leap to the future. Not that it’s bad, but I think I don’t need to be shown twenty years in the future to know there’s hope, you can see it in the present. I think it also kind of depresses me knowing that Max is likely dead by the time of the future jump.

If the Max movies keep going as a pattern, then perhaps Max will find a city of people and get enmeshed in the politics of that city, which seems less viscerally satisfying as a giant chase movie, but George Miller has already surprised me once. I’m in. Just make the Mad Max movie and I’ll be there.

Like… there sure are a lot of ladies in Mad Max, amirite Tom?

Listen, dawg, I’m never not going to have SPOILERS when it comes to Fury Road.

I ended up watching this specific part (9:46) of this interview because of this one question that was referenced on twitter.

It’s interesting listening to George Miller’s impression about feminism in Mad Max: Fury Road. It ties into an old question about how much intention is in the writer’s mind when it comes to themes in their work? I’ve spoken to one guy, who also happens to be my roommate, and he says he’s very aware.

For George Miller, however, everything appears to just come logically out of the story he wanted to tell. He wanted to tell a chase story, and since he didn’t want to tell the story of one man stealing another man’s wives, it was logical then that a woman was stealing the wives. And obviously, what kind of woman would do such a thing? She’d have to be, given the universe, a Road Warrior. Meanwhile Max stumbles into the story, in George Miller’s terms, as a mad dog, and Furiosa and Max clash and have to come to some kind of alliance. So obviously Furiosa, again, has to be fierce and a warrior.

Like, it sounds like there was no feminist agenda, it just seems to me that the feminism is a logical outcome for a team trying to make a good movie. Of course the Wives would play a large part in the story and take risks and die, to make them the centers of the conflict but to not develop them would be, perhaps ironically, objectifying them (the very thing Immortan Joe was doing). Of course Max would defer to Furiosa, because Furiosa is the mastermind behind the scheme, whereas Max literally has no plan beyond “run fast”.

Of course Max would hand over the rifle to Furiosa, because she was raised among snipers. He didn’t know that, but he was next to her when she was sniping bikers out of the air and Max never struck me as a rifle guy (which makes sense again because Max was a police officer, and unless he was SWAT or something he probably wasn’t much of a rifle guy).

Like… I think all of it came down to George Miller and the team wanting to make a great movie and not compromise the story or the characters. There were a lot of women characters in the story, so naturally women had to do a lot of the carrying of the movie. A movie with something to preach is really hard to make good, and we’ve all seen dozens of “strong female characters” through the ages. But I think a great movie just organically has great themes, and a movie about rebellion against an oppressive tyranny will naturally have to have people struggling for equality and humanity, and oh guess what that neatly dovetails in to?

4 Characters that are the titles of their movie

Trying to think of my favorite movies with the name of the protagonist in the title, or at least the name of a major character.

#4. Dredd

Dredd is about a bureaucrat who blindly follows procedure. What I think is interesting is that the portrayal of Dredd casts him as a sympathetic character, especially when compared to the corrupt bureaucrats he encounters. Dredd may be ruthless and inflexible, but he’s never corrupt. I think it’s great that the movie ends with Dredd fudging the rules just a little bit, showing that underneath his attempts to suppress his humanity, a spark of an idealist still burns.

#3. John Wick

John Wick is a monster in his universe. Seriously, he is one evil dude. The thing that keeps him from being despicable is that while he is a killer who cannot be stopped, he doesn’t kill people for no reason. An important element of the John Wick storyline is that John Wick is in the right. He is the wronged party and while his actions are monstrous in scope, they are also apparently acceptable within the limits of his world.

#2. Jack Reacher

Jack Reacher is a fully despicable character in my book, but the movie doesn’t seem to realize this. It’s this disconnect, and the fact that the movie is actually a good action thriller, that elevates this movie to greatness. Jack Reacher is a kind of Libertarian Batman, who cannot be restrained by your laws, man. He towers above the pygmies that make up all of mortal humanity, obeying not the laws of ye lesser men, but the higher Jack Reacherean Law. Oddly enough, what makes Jack Reacher palatable to me is just how seriously he takes himself. Jack Reacher could never be caught farting, for example, because he would then kill himself. At the same time, Jack Reacher thinks he’s hilarious, but hilarious in Grandpa’s idea of a cool guy kind of way. This is a wonderful movie.

#1. Mad Max: Fury Road

Max has an interesting arc. He starts off as he describes himself: a being reduced to the single instinct to survive. He’s not heroic at all, and in fact is basically one of the bad guys. But through the course the movie he regains his humanity and basically becomes Mad Max again, and goes from a feral human to a straightup badass hero. It’s an awesome journey and while it might be fast it’s only because Max has no time for angst.

Mad Max: Beyond Thunder-DUNE

Guys, I know you won’t believe this, but I saw a lot of Dune in Mad Max: Fury Road. I will bet you $55 that someone in this production read God Emperor of Dune. Now, I might be the guy who talks about Dune all the time, but I might also be right, so hear me out.

SPOILERS SPOILER SPOILERS

#8. Hydraulic Monarchy

The concept of Hydraulic Monarchy is that the rulers of a society control and important substance like, say, water. The basis of their power is that they can cut the population off from the supply of that thing. The Mad Max Earth appears to suffer from an extreme lack of clean water so Immortan Joe’s literal hydro-monarchy is obvious here. Immortan Joe turns the water off and on at a whim, thus controlling the masses.

In God Emperor of Dune, Leto II is the last source of Spice in the universe. He can deny people access to the Spice which is a death sentence for many if they’re cut off. Immortan Joe and Letos’ governments are both based on control of an essential substance required for survival.

#7. Religion

Immortan Joe has constructed a religion around himself and uses this religion as a secondary method of controlling the populace, specifically his mutant half-life War Boys. He portrays himself as an immortal to his War Boys, and promises them glory in an afterlife, conditioning them to sacrifice themselves eagerly at his whim.

In Dune, Paul Atreides harnesses the power of the religious Fremen, placing himself at the top of their religion, to turn them into weapons for him. Later on in God Emperor of Dune, Leto Atreides continues this tradition by declaring himself a god, and raising an all female army called the Fish Speakers who are warrior fanatics willing to die at his command.

Both Immortan Joe and Leto II portray themselves falsely as immortal gods to their followers, and use that religion to control an army of zealots. In this case I see the War Boys as both the Fremen and a kind of reflection of the Fish Speakers.

#6. Breeding

Immortan Joe has isolated full-lives humans from the population and is obsessed with the idea to breed a “perfect” human. The two sons we see in the movie are portrayed as either flawed mentally or flawed physically. A son is born to him that a doctor declares “perfect” but is killed in the escape attempt of the mother.

Both Dune and God Emperor of Dune have eugenics in them. In Dune the Bene Gesserit are trying to breed the kwisatz haderach, a man who is sort of a singularity of abilities, and through him control the universe. In God Emperor of Dune, Leto has been breeding humanity for rebellion, creating finally Siona, a human being who cannot be seen, and therefore not controlled, by psychic beings.

Here, like in the religion, we see a little subversion of these ideas from Dune to Fury Road. Immortan Joe’s obsession with breeding a perfect human, and the way he goes about it, are clearly derivative of the kwisatz haderach eugenics of the Dune series, and even more reflective of an Emperor trying to secure his legacy, a la God Emperor of Dune.

Immortan Joe would clearly place his “perfect” child at the head of his religion and further secure his ruling elite over the masses around the Citadel, thus doubling back on the religious parallels.

#5. Environmentalism

Dune is an environmentalist novel in some ways, from the 60s. You see a lot of the ideas from Dune transported to Fury Road. First there’s the obvious scarcity of water, and the perpetual desert that the people seem to inhabit.

“As the world broke each of us in our own way were broken,” says Max. In a very 60s way I think the director was showing that the environment determines the trajectory of our lives. I think that George Miller is reinforcing this by showing a world incapable of supporting life and alternately dead or poisoned. Immortan Joe is the symbol of an old dying Earth, twisted and mutated.

It just comes down to the simple idea of scarcity, and what that scarcity (through environmental damage) drives people to.

#4. Specialization

This is not immediately obvious but it’s something I think is there. In Fury Road we see that there are several societies that are specialized around a few commodities. The Citadel pretty clearly is focused around water and agriculture, the Bullet Farm farms bullets, and Gasoline Town makes gasoline.

We see the same kind of specialization in Dune: the Spacing Guild provides transportation, the Tleilaxu make genetically altered creatures, and the Bene Gesserit provide education. I think this is an organic outgrowth of the world of Fury Road, since each monarchy we see is clearly like the hydraulic monarchy of Immortan Joe, just the commodity that is controlled is different.

#3. Bene Gesserit

The Bene Gesserit were an all woman society devoted to education, religion, and the kwisatz haderach breeding program. The Vuvalini of Fury Road are another all woman society I think often referred to as the Many Mothers, which I think echoes the title of Bene Gesserit women: Reverend Mothers.

The important connection here is that the Vuvalini, without meaning to, are the source of the Fury Road kwisatz haderach. They are also the guardians of the seeds (for a new world) and possess a high level of skill, which I think is a kind of symbolic stand-in for Bene Gesserit powers. The Bene Gesserit karate of Dune is morphed into the Snipers of the Vuvalini.

#2. Kwisatz Furiosa

Though Immortan Joe had a “perfect” baby boy, that boy was not the kwisatz haderach. If anything, that boy represents the flaw in Immortan Joe’s scheme to breed the perfect human, because he was blind to the fact that the kwisatz haderach of the Fury Road world could have been a woman. And that woman is Furiosa.

The kwisatz haderach of Dune was the fusing of the masculine and feminine into one being. Furiosa, in Fury Road, is both kind of a War Boy (a kind of mutant warrior for Immortan Joe and physically “flawed”) and also a warrior woman of the Vuvalini and a whole-life. The reason why she rules in the end is because she’s the kwisatz haderach.

If Immortan Joe represents the corruption and death of the Old Earth, Furiosa is the hope of a new world, not “perfect” in the eyes of the Old World, but alive and more importantly: perfectly human. She’s human in that she never lost her ability to be compassionate. She retained her humanity in a world of madness, and that’s what Immortan Joe never understood, the perfection he sought was physical, but Furiosa’s perfection is quasi-spiritual. Furiosa is the redeemer.

“Who broke the world?” asks people in the movie, but Fury Road is really about, “Who will fix the world?”

In Furiosa is a world that is different but it’s a world with a hope for a better life for everyone.

#1. Mad Duncan

If Furiosa is the kwisatz haderach, then who is Mad Max? I argue that Mad Max is Duncan Idaho, the man of many lives. The unwritten rule of Dune is that every Dune novel must have a Duncan Idaho, and the Mad Max universe I think (given the name at least) operates much in the same manner. Moreover we need Max and Duncan.

Max and Duncan are our connections to the old world. Max, despite his madness, at his core is still a good guy in a way we can recognize. He is from the Old World but, unlike Immortan Joe, represents a good guy from the Old World. He never bought into the madness of the New World. That’s ultimately why Max is crazy, because he’s sane in an Old World sense. The fact that he didn’t go crazy makes him the craziest person on Mad Max Earth. In Mad Max Earth, Immortan Joe and his War Boys are the sane ones.

And like Duncan, who serves the Atreides, Max serves under Furiosa. It’s important to realize that Max lacks something, and this lack is one of his greatest flaws: Max has lost everything and so has nothing to fight for. He’s been worn down to an animal level of survival. Max the human is dead.

But Furiosa resurrects Max. In Furiosa Max finds his humanity again, and that’s why he has to be such a jerk in the beginning of the movie because the Max we expected was dead. Furiosa gives Max a cause and with that cause we seem him morph from an aimless animal, to a crazed slave, until at last … a Road Warrior.

Max had power but no direction. Once he had a direction we see him grow increasingly heroic until at last he’s fighting at Furiosa’s side, because Furiosa, unlike Max, never lost her humanity. And that’s why Furiosa rises while Max stays behind. Max is not of the New Furiosa Earth, he’s from the lost world. He’s a ghost haunted by ghosts. There’s no place for him in Furiosa’s World.

Max represents the last vestiges of the goodness of the Old World acting as the midwife for the hope of a New World.

In which my roommate doesn’t know anything about Mad Max

My roommate doesn’t know anything about Mad Max, so here’s a pretty short summary.

So first there was Mad Max (1979):

It’s about a cop in a post-apocalyptic future (though there’s some civilization still remaining at the time) who ends up avenging the murder of his family.

After Mad Max came The Road Warrior / Mad Max 2 / Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981):

The continuing journeys of Max as he travels the wasteland, coming into conflict with Lord Humongous and his horde of nomadic raiders. The post-apocalyptic setting has progressed to a much more recognizable wasteland.

After Max defeats Humongous his story continues with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985):

In this one Max ends up going to a settlement, Bartertown, ruled by Tina Turner (Aunty Entity), and gets caught up in a conflict with her and her forces. He ends up allying with a group of savage children who mistake him for their messianic savior figure, Captain Walker. It’s a pretty strange story, though I don’t remember all the details.

So now we’ve come to the remake/reboot Mad Max: Fury Road (2015):

Which looks like sort of an origin story for Max. I suspect it’ll be set around the same era as Road Warrior, since it appears to be after Max’s policeman period, but before Max is old enough to be Beyond Thunderdome. Max and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) appear to team up to fight Immortan Joe and his horde of raiders.

It looks pretty good to me.

Fury Road Warrior

I was watching a trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road and it made me look up the old Road Warrior trailer.

“Go-juice” is a good word for gasoline.

I remember really liking this movie. Specifically, I like the aesthetics of Max’s costume, his dog, and his car. Unfortunately, only two of these three things survive the movie. I was really hurt by the death of the car really.

You can see that a lot of the Road Warrior went Fury Road:

Max, or the Road Warrior because I don’t think he’s named in this movie, encounters a fortified settlement around an oil well or refinery, I don’t remember which exactly. The settlement is besieged by a creepy guy named Lord Humongous and his horde of post-apocalyptic hooligans. Road Warrior runs the siege and cuts a deal with the settlement: he’ll help them escape if they give him all the gas he can carry.

And, while he’s kind of mercenary in his attitude, after a crazy adventure he delivers them a truck that they can use to move the settlement out. He leaves, but then is jumped by the bad guys, his car (the amazing car) gets trashed and his dog dies. He is rescued but is wounded. The settlement guys are kind of dicks to him, but agree to his request to drive the truck.

What follows is a running battle, with Road Warrior fighting off the hooligans until the truck crashes and you discover that the settlement had filled it with dirt in order for Road Warrior to draw off the horde. It’s kind of a downer ending really, and doesn’t really endear me to the settlement people who were kind of jerks anyway.

I want to see Fury Road but I’m getting burnt out on post-apocalyptic horror worlds. Like, running out of water and oil? It seems like a little too close to the truth sometimes. I mean “mega-droughts” are a thing and could be a thing for the next decade in California.

Anyway, Road Warrior is a pretty good adventure movie. Not necessarily as good as say Die Hard or Back to the Future, but definitely one of the best in the genre.