A riot: Gwar meets Pasolini meets Cirque du soleil

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2015)

Okay, no reason to mince words. This is a riotous success in what it does and how it upholds the legacy. How unexpected that the original filmmaker came from animated penguins and obscurity a few years back to barrel through superhero-dominated Hollywood with all this verve. Where others see no story and just another action fest, I see exhilarating freedom from the formulas of Marvel and Nolan.
How samey for example to have dragged our feet through another origin story, setting down some convoluted saga. How boring to have turned Max into another 'chosen one' saving the world. We get instead a man spat out by the dust, a schmuck buffeted around, a grunt along for the ride; Hardy's reimagining of Max is great. Instead of the same dishwater look as any other apocalypse these days, we get colorful swirl. We do get a few plaintive looks and music, but few.
The new Terminator we got this year, the latest stab at an Alien with Prometheus, they miss the whole point thinking we wanted someone to smear some more with the mythology. It was never the myth and explanations, always the immersion in a world. Mad Max benefited from never having a sturdy mythos, a Skynet or Weyland Yutani, we just roamed around the sands and came upon odd bits of world. Another enclave here, a Gas Town somewhere, things that just exist around for no deeper point.
And the same sense of avoiding the trivial extends in another way. The film is a long chase practically, they could have just made a Fast and Furious rig crashing through desert. Instead the film is a pendulum that swings to the edge and back, and in the movement we soak up different tribes, worlds, oddities of custom and ritual, details that show someone lovingly tinkered with its world. How great e.g. that we don't need to have sophomoric explanations about Valhalla or the spray paint, we see all that we need to know in action.
Sure, it's what GWAR is to music, provided you only look at it as a piece of gnarly show business. For me it evokes a bit of Pasolini; exhilarating spiritedness as a way of moving beyond the familiar limits of vision, toothless peasantry flocking to divine water.
It's important for me to see works that jolt from the routine of fictions, enliven. It's why I seek Herzog and Pasolin. And there's a whole flying circus around the chase this time, chainsaw-wielding acrobats on poles et al. It's what Verbinski tried for in Lone Ranger. And those vehicles! It's all very wondrous to me even in this gnarly shape. I can appreciate the work it took, actual work you do with your hands and have to choreograph around bodies (instead of a Marvel team doodling away on computers), to construct all these rigs and film in Africa.
How do you go from this to staid Tarantino in a few months? Only bringing him up as someone who likes to skirt the absurd. I imagine him, Verbinski, Scott, Snyder, the Marvel makers, paying their respects to this guy. This is the most furious comeback of a franchise I have seen.