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Fury Road for the Fifth Time

I don’t even know what to say here. I’ll listen to the soundtrack and dig up some fanart and see if anything comes to me.

[two hours later] Okay, here’s what I’ve got:

-Furiosa brought Max around using only 7 words - visual story telling -Pacing and editing in the service of character -Coherent Action Cinematography -Artistic Cinematography -Use of Color

Furiosa brought Max around using only 7 words - visual story telling

I’ll take a guess here and say I bet George Miller is a marvelous actor’s director. Obviously the casting is spot-on - but you don’t get performances where every flick of the eyes or slight cringe of the shoulders or freeze-in-the-headlights tell the story in the way that other movies rely almost solely on dialog to do...without fantastic direction. Example: Furiosa’s handling of Max is a massive relationship interaction almost sans dialog that could have been pages of dialog in most other movies. Forgive an extended break-down - I’m just having a great time here. In every section below, imagine how other movies would have the characters narrating, explaining, pleading, ordering - so much belabored language could have been thrown at turning Max around - but no, not here.

She starts at ‘this guy is an absolute wild card we cannot afford - executing him is the only option.’ When he had the out-and-out chance to kill her though...he didn’t do it. This gives her a totally new set of options to reframe the situation, and she goes through them one by one. [does she ‘exposition’ any of this to the wives? nope.]

When she has to adapt to the reality of ‘he’s got the rig, we’ll die without it,’ she looks for possible handles on this guy, and ends up hitting on the critical one ‘he’s an animal in a trap (the muzzle being the most horrible, visceral element to him). I’ll offer him a way out.’ Once they’re all back in the rig, she makes good on her promise and with non-threatening body language hands him a file. It’s hard to resist an inkling of trust at that kind of integrity. [and here we have our one direct line on ‘dude, would you calm down? we’re not going to kill you, you don’t have to kill us. we can figure this out’ but, you know, without any expository dialog. ‘you want that thing off your face’ is frankly manipulative, rather than conversational]

When she reaches for the start-up switches, he assumes she’s going for a weapon - and sure enough there’s one under the dash. Considering her actions in this scene, I doubt she was going to pull it on him just now though - it would have put them in a stand-off and destroyed any chance of deescalating him (increasing their danger). She lets him take it. [does any one remark on trustworthiness or suspicion or trust? nope.]

She then puts up with his panicked sequester of all weapons (played for humor, but really structured like ‘a stray on the verge of fear biting’ as someone insightfully pointed out). ‘I’ll wait him out for a while, see if he calms down when allowed some element of control.’ Her approach sets the tone for the choices of the wives - they put up with his panicked attempts to cover every angle. They, too, wait him out (with an air increasingly disbelieving nonchalance, all things considered). Max gets visibly calmer throughout this scene as he’s given space to sort himself out. [does any one reach out to calm Max verbally? or even in eye contact? nope. all action-based story telling.]

When Nux screws up the fuel pod, her strategy pays off - Max has stopped panicking enough to assess strategic options. He’s still holding a weapon on her, and he actually goes through the fuss of reflexively taking the bag of guns with him (which is kind of hilarious), but it’s clearly a better idea for her to drive and him to fix - a better deployment of skillsets - so he acts on that. And she lets him. Staying in control of the rig is her preference, I’m sure - but letting Max feel competent is the right move here psychologically as well. It’s one more way to give him back agency and get him further calmed down. So Max has a job - now he’s part of the group. [no one remarks on this, no in-cab-while-Max-is-gone discussion among the women, nada. in any other movie 5 extra minutes would have been wedged in here for dialog]

In the same scene he finally gets the muzzle off, and boy does that transform him. He walks back up the rig like he owns the thing - his terror is almost completely dissipated. He arrives back at the cab, gun back in hand, only to come in on this scene of chaos. What to do? By the time they’ve shoved Nux out the door, Max is no longer holding a gun on anyone. He could have taken advantage of the chaos to take over completely...but emotionally he no longer needs to in order to feel safe. Again, her plan of solving for “terrorized” rather than “terrorist” was shown to be the right call. [not even ‘you okay?’ let alone ‘glad you helped, ready to stop pointing guns yet?’ dialog]

Furiosa’s next move in handling him is undoubtedly born of necessity (her plan is kind of fucked - she’s trailing 3 war parties and knows she’ll end up making a run for it) - but it also follows from deescalating Max, giving him her trust in small ways (file, not waving guns in his face though he surely didn’t find them all), engineering the interactions with him to calm him down etc. The next step would have to be giving him critical work and trusting him to do it. Giving him complete control of the rig is going pretty far, but what choice does she have. She gives him the start-up sequence - and though he starts the scene with one last attempt to feel safe by holding a gun on someone (Angharad), by the time she’s back in the rig she arrives to find him loading her rifle and handing it to her without hesitation. Her fleeting smile to herself as she sees he’s fully engaged with her rather than alienating himself from her is a work of fucking masterful acting on Charlize Theron’s part. [ugh, I shudder to think of the phantom dialog possibilities here starting with ‘I’m trusting you’ and going to ‘how about not holding a gun on Angharad’ arguments and ending with ‘you really saved our bacon’ - I mean, can you imagine? terrible]

How much direct dialog is used to bring Max around? It starts and ends with, ‘You want that thing off your face?’

Visual story telling in this movie extends all the way to the acting taking place almost without dialog pertinent to a crushing pace of character/relationship development.

dropkicks in one of the excellent film-theory threads said they wanted to slap down the script for Fury Road on the desk of every screenwriter in the biz with ‘what is your excuse now??’ wrt writing women as people. I feel the same way about, well, everything else.

This movie is a master class in visual story telling - a masterwork of the genre.

This is how visual story telling is done.

Pacing and editing in the service of character

How is it that in a movie so balls-to-the-wall action, like seriously the most actiony action movie I’ve ever seen, we get so many moments where the complexity of each character is apparent on screen? There is nothing wasted in Fury Road - everything moves the story forward, both cinematographically and in character beats. The pacing gives every character beat both enough room to breathe and enough momentum to contribute to the relentless forward motion. If a movie this driven can feel like it has stillness, space, time, and also character reveals in almost every direct-intent action of each character...then what the fuck have I been watching in all previous experiences of media, exactly? okay, I’ll rein that kind of question in...but srsly. It’s that overall question that makes me say over and over that Fury Road will redefine film, once everyone gets the chance to freakin’ catch up :)

Coherent Action Cinematography

Is there anything I could possibly add to the many articles we’ve all read or bonehandledknife‘s ongoing film-theory break downs? I can only thing of one - that the center framing was used for in-motion elements that crossed static elements, which is where one would usually put one’s focus in the edit. I think I’m looking at the characters, but the center point is yanking my eye to the side even from some out-of-focus zone, pulling me into the framing for the next beat. So the center framing wasn’t just a way to guide us from cut to cut - it was a way to guide us from static elements to moving ones, or from one depth-of-field zone to a new one. Way cool and not something I’d have noticed before all of these great discussions! [bonehandledknife, I welcome any of your awesome analysis here!]

Artistic Cinematography

As I was just discussing in a back and forth, the Plains of Silence scenes were lit and composed in a voluptuously artistic way. bonehandledknife pointed out that they are composed as paintings (or as still photography) - to lead your eye around the frame, rather than letting movement serve that function. Instead of center framed, this is more classic golden ratio framing.

It creates even more of that sense of stillness that the story beat calls for, and adds a depth-of-field the movie cannot usually afford to have, with distinct foreground, middle ground and oof background objects. The camera is still, or pans slowly. The zoom level takes in most of our character’s bodies a lot of the time - framing for beauty and a sense of space rather than tight shots as we’re used to in conversational or concentrated emotion scenes - I’m thinking here of the conversation about the satellite among the wives & vuvalini, and the conversation between Max and Furiosa. Space, depth of field, almost full body shots - such calm composition for poignant and painful moments among the characters. It gives these emotional scenes room to breathe, and that gives them even more impact.

Use of Color

Continuing with the above thoughts on the night scenes - color added immensely there as well. The day-for-night section ranges from almost-black purples back-lit with aquamarine swaths for the sky, with every shade of cyan where delicate grayscale would be in a monochrome of the scene. Lighting for highlights gave the color extra depth and definition. Whatever Miller did (in post? in camera?) to give the actor’s eyelights their magenta/purple-fringing effect was simultaneously otherworldly, spooky and gave a very subliminal ‘the light may be arty, but the lens was real’ feel. I loved it.

The decision to overexpose for later detail in the shadows was brilliant - the texture on the war rig and on everyone’s clothing is gorgeous, unlike anything I’ve ever seen in dark shots like this.

I could go on and on about the day-for-night work - it absolutely captivated my eye and my imagination.

Daytime colors: If you’ve seen the BTS footage, you know the sands of Namibia have a lot more gray in them and that our actors were liberally dusted in that slightly brownish gray dust. The skies are striking, but they aren’t a hyper-real teal. The choice to color grade the movie to bring up the land to an ochre that leaves your lips dry with dust and a sky that stands above the ground like a swath of surreal paint, takes a geography with almost mythic classical lines and hits you over the head with it. aaaugh - color in the service of form, I was overwhelmed from my first viewing.

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