There has been a lot made about Mad Max: Fury Road and for a movie that mostly consists of car chases, crashes, and explosions, the film has given us a lot to talk about. Critics have, justifiably, gushed about the practical special effects and others have latched onto the movie’s sexual politics. Those are all relevant topics and worthy of discussion but there is one thing most outstanding about Fury Road: it is a summer movie spectacle that maintains the voice of its creator.
There is no shortage of movies dominated by chases and explosions. Traditionally confined to the weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day, the summer movie season is expanding to include April and March (see: the April release of Furious 7) with a brief respite before the holiday season which now mixes Oscar-bait dramas with family friendly spectacles (see: the upcoming December release of Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens). But even though about half of the year is full of big budget action movie releases, what is most overwhelming is how generic these movies have become.
A few years ago Jimmy Kimmel Live! broadcast a parody trailer for Movie: The Movie, which crammed together a bunch of celebrity cameos and utilized all of the clichés of motion picture trailers.
More recently Red Letter Media did something similar with the online video “All Trailers Are the Same!!!” which cut together content from actual trailers to show how repetitive and unimaginative movie marketing has become.
Aside from what these clips reveal about the way trailers and television spots are produced, they also reveal something about the state of movies, especially the big budget tent pole productions that major studios seem increasingly interested in (at the expense of everything else).
Consider the major film franchises active at the moment: the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the X-Men, The Fast and the Furious, Transformers, Star Trek, Star Wars, and The Hunger Games. If you hadn’t seen these movies before and an image or clip from any one of these titles was juxtaposed with an image from another, unrelated title, would you be able to tell the difference? Probably not.
Movie fans, especially of the sci-fi and horror genres, often complain about digital visuals but get enthusiastic about practical effects. A lot of that is rooted in nostalgia but whether the image is created on set or in post-production should not make a difference. After all, the CGI Gollum of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is far more convincing than some of the practical puppetry in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Focus ought not to be on holding onto traditional methods but in utilizing whatever techniques create the most convincing results, meaning that the illusion overcomes our disbelief.
And yet the problem in contemporary Hollywood spectacles does seem to be directly linked to the use of computer generated images. The movies produced in the heyday of the practical effects era, which include the original Star Wars, Star Trek, and A Nightmare on Elm Street movies as well as Blade Runner, Alien, Evil Dead II, Brazil, The Fly, and The Thing, contain images that are unique to that particular film. These movies were made by filmmakers who were able to cultivate and retain a signature visual style. That meant that each time viewers went to the movies we were treated to radically different images even when the subject matter was quite similar (see: 1984’s The Terminator and 1987’s Robocop).
In today’s marketplace of epic superhero movies and rebooted sci-fi classics, the look of the films has been homogenized. The visual style has flattened across Hollywood and the imagery of different movies in different franchises made by different people for different studios all look the same. Why that’s happening is unclear. It could be that because so much is done in post-production the look and style defined by the major computer graphic shops (Industrial Light & Magic, Weta Workshop) has been imitated by everyone else. It may also be pressure to duplicate success, which is why virtually every sci-fi epic since 1999 looks like the Star Wars prequels and every sword and shield fantasy movie released since 2001 looks like The Lord of the Rings. But whatever the reason, the more we go to the movies, the more it seems like we’ve seen it already.
This brings me back to Mad Max: Fury Road. There’s plenty in it that is familiar from both the Mad Max series and from other post-apocalyptic movies as well as from action cinema in general. But the style of Fury Road is distinct. It’s recognizably George Miller’s movie. That, along with the care that Miller and his crew have put into the art direction and staging the set pieces, makes Fury Road stand out in a crowded field of Hollywood spectacles.
There was great concern last year that people weren’t going to the movies. 2014 had the lowest number of ticket sales in nearly two decades. It wasn’t that people didn’t want to go to the movies. But what incentive do they have to go to the theater and shell out for ever increasing ticket prices only to see unimaginative rehashes of movies they already own on DVD? But let the artists off the leash—or at least give them a responsible amount of slack—and encourage them to use their creativity and they can make something that has novelty or at least gives viewers a reboot or a sequel or a remake that is truly better than the original.
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