There’s “real” as in, “practical special effect versus CGI,” and then there’s “real” as in, “Nobody would ever really make that, unless they were specifically making something that looked cool for a movie.”
Much as I loved Fury Road, there’s an argument to be made that a lot of the cars fall into the latter category.
The certified canon by the director graphic novels confirm Fury Road is set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Australia. Immortan Joe is the name one Colonel Joe Moore gave himself after seizing the citadel, the bullet farmer was another military man who served under him in the campaign to take the citadel and the People Eater was a man Joe discovered by Joe’s roving war band is the one who told Joe about the citadel and its underground water supply. There were other people who held the citadel before Joe and controlled its water, he became ruler when he killed them and took over the citadel.
There’s a bit of retconning going on with the chronology. There are 4 canon graphic novels relating to Fury Road, one about Immortan Joe (also has a section on Nux), one about Furiosa, and two about Max. The Max ones confirm a link between Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road. In the Max graphic novels, Max competes in a tournament in Gas Town, winning the tournament gets him a V8 MFP Pursuit Special (to replace the one he had lost years before.)
Some issues with this is that none of this makes sense unless Max is about Joe’s age. Max obviously is 25-30 years younger than Joe. Since we know that in the first Mad Max movie, Max is around before the fall, and we know that based on Joe’s chronology Fury Road is set decades (at least 30 years, possibly more) after the fall Max’s age simply doesn’t work. One way would be to say that while the graphic novels link Thunderdome to Fury Road, they don’t explicit link the earlier movies. So it’s possible it’s a “different universe” than those two movies, with Max’s chronology being shifted later down the line, and the new universe is heavily “inspired” by the first, but isn’t exactly the same.
The simplest explanation is they just didn’t want to cast a 65 year old as Max, but wanted to keep a connection to the original trilogy so they did so without ever explaining any of it.
Devil-laden, though. Go to the west coast, hang around with the quokkas.
I didn’t know till just now what the chronology of the books was, but everything I’ve read online about this says that Fury Road is “connected but the timeline is loose” which sounds like a weaselish way of saying what you said and additionally from a different source the opinion the movie was quite possibly a sequel to the game (not sure what that means exactly)
Which also applies to the original trilogy. The best guess is that Road Warrior happens ~5 years after Mad Max and Beyond Thunderdome 13-15 years after that, but neither movie makes the chronology clear. (Given that it was only 6 years in the real world, being ~20 years in universe suggests Max ages really well (only getting some blatantly fake grey hair), if you want some sort of handwave for how he can be Tom Hardy in Fury Road.)
I think the problem is that the kind of guys who would make those cars to use in real life can’t afford it on their own, so the best they can do is hope someone wants to make one for a movie.
The blu-ray bonus feature on the cars themselves leads me to believe that the guy who actually built the cars would be happy to drive one or all of them around himself.
I’ve also heard the director describe the series as a number of folk tales about The Road Warrior. IOW, they are non chronological stories told by an unreliable narrator.
And those who can afford to do it on their own have a little voice telling them that actually doing so wouldn’t be good business sense.
I just watched it a couple days ago, and thought it was pretty cool for what it was.
But what’s bugging me isomething I’ve been mulling: how did Max’s plan make any sense? It strikes me that how heavily or lightly defended the Citadel was, was irrelevant: what mattered was whether they could convince the people inside to lower the platform and bring them up. Right? But Max was very clear that this was their big chance because it would be so lightly defended. And Joe’s “wives” seemed to be in vigorous agreement.
If they’re beaten down and used to obedience, seeing the dead Immortan would be a big shock to the system, and they might reasonably turn to the most obvious other authority present – in this case, another high-ranking figure they probably were used to obeying: Furiosa.
All they needed was someone to start turning the wheel (or whatever) – the instinct to obey and conform would probably take care of the rest, and once Furiosa and everyone is up at the top, they’d be in total control, I think.
But I’m not saying the events at the end of the film didn’t make sense. I am saying Max’s original plan didn’t make sense. What happened at the end was more of an improvisation.
Sure, that’s reasonable.
It made sense in that it was the only plan they had. The other alternative was to drive out into the endless salt flats and wander around until they ran out of supplies. Given that it probably takes 3-4 days to drive the length of Australia, I have to assume that the oceans receded somehow and it was now connected with Asia.
Although I don’t understand how a dozen people could transport “160 days” worth of supplies on motorcycles or why that was considered a better option than keeping the War Rig.
Then again, this is a world where gasoline is so rare that people fight over it with armies of turbocharged V-8s and monster trucks carrying guitarists shooting napalm.
Right, and where those women somehow survived for years despite the wetlands having become a poisonous swamp.
And delivering the scarce resource of water by deluging a crowd of people.
It makes less sense than inviting Bruce Banner into the center of a major metropolis. But hey, the city is flying, we’re fighting robots, and I have a bow and arrow! None of this makes any sense!
Stranger
To be fair, I don’t think the water was scarce for its controller, and dispensing it that way seemed to be kind of a purposefully dominant dick move on his part.
Also, the water that those people would actually manage to scoop up probably wouldn’t keep them alive for long. Unless those splashes into the crowd were frequent, but it seemed like a semi-rare treat. So it doesn’t make any sense, no matter how you look at it.
The dissonance of resources like water and fuel being scarce, and at the same time being wasted frivolously, runs through the movie. See: Flame-throwing guitar. Also, the scene where the wives are cleaning themselves off, where they don’t seem to be particularly concerned about conserving water.
Doesn’t matter: The logic that this movie runs on isn’t strictly logical logic. It’s thematic logic. (If that’s even a term. If not, then, hey, it is now. ;))
Agreed, but my complaint is about something within the movie’s internal logic.
It’s those V bastards stealing our water.
Also the timeline. Assuming based on the actors ages, Max and Furiosa are about the same age. We first met Max as a young adult before the world totally went to shit, and yet Furiosa was “taken as a child” from her “tribe”.
Also her given name is “Furiosa”.
And she has an advanced prosthetic hand.
Although in a way, it is kind of neat how Fury Road does appear to be set in a sort of nonsensical “not too distant future” from the late 70s/early 80s.