More Fury Road Test Screening Reaction
Right at the end of July, another test screening was held for Mad Max: Fury Road. This was the second test screening this year and the second version of the movie shown. The first test screening was shown in April and that was a longer movie, at over two hours. Here is some more reaction, plucked from social media.
So thanks to Dark Shape (thanks again Shape!) I also got to see this. Non spoilery thoughts from an uber Mad Max fan:
Tom Hardy is as good as you are hoping he is as Max. More primal and physical than Mel. For a Bond comparison, if Mel is Connery, they jumped right to Craig with Hardy.
Charlize Theron as Furiosa is every bit Hardy’s equal and a great new addition to the Mad Max canon. She almost steals the movie.
FX weren’t totally finished, but most of them seemed background/scope related. The car stuff seemed totally real. Maybe there was some finished FX work in the car stunts but I could not tell.
The plot does a good job of telling a new story but with most of the Mad Max tropes. Story wise I’d break it down as 50% Road Warrior, 15% Thunderdome, 5% OG Mad Max and 30% its own thing.
The movie is fucking bugnuts, especially in regards to Immortan Joe and the villains. Total George Miller craziness. So much so that I wonder if non fans will “get it”, but Shape seemed to like it, so that’s a good sign.
Im sequel/reboot terms, it’s akin to SUPERMAN RETURNS where you could take it as a sequel but there are minor continuity issues. For the function of the franchise, it works as a reboot.
Even in it’s unfinished form, I am secure in awarding this the honor of being the second best MAD MAX movie, after ROAD WARRIOR.
Oh, and rating wise it’s PG-13. Plenty violent, no real gore.
I think if the younger generation latches on to it, they will prefer it to ROAD WARRIOR
I am very curious to see how this takes with people who weren’t Mad Max fans already. I believe it has the power to convert, but I readily admit to being blinded by my own fanboyism on this one.
This cut had a bunch of voice over in the beginning and end, and as Shape said, a lot of it was bad. At one point Max referred to himself as the man “watching in the shadows”, which is dumb because he’s in the desert and there are hardly any shadows. But the producers (or whoever they were) warned us that the voice over was very much a work in progress. The voice Hardy uses as Max is good and not Bane-y.Oh, and there were flashes of “apocalypse” footage, really quick cut news reel stuff, in the credits.
ROAD WARRIOR is the clear model here, which you can tell from the trailer. They’re trying to give you a sense of who Max is and what his backstory might be, and they haven’t quite nailed it yet. But I’m confident they will.There is actually very little reference to anything that could be construed as referring to any of the past films, aside from extremely brief “flashes” that are frankly confusing and that I imagine will be cut. But if I wanted to place it in continuity, it would be post ROAD WARRIOR, pre THUNDERDOME.FURY ROAD feels very much of the same world as the original trilogy, which frees you to take it however you want in terms of sequel or reboot. If you want to imagine the events of MAD MAX or THE ROAD WARRIOR taking place in this Max’s backstory, it’s pretty easy to do. If you want to see it as a reboot, that’s even easier. But it’s not like trying to reconcile the Tim Burton Batman continuity with the Nolan one or anything. Like Miller says, it’s very much grown from the same material.
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