Fury Road flamethrower guitar

[Inflames626]

I haven't read the article, but here's a piece on how they came up with the flamethrower guitar guy: https://guitar.com/features/guitar-o...max-fury-road/

My drivel below:

So the Mad Max franchise is one of my favorite things. Partial to Mel over Tom so far (sorry not sorry). Tom had a better movie, bigger budget, and better technology, but Mel is Max just like Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones.

After Max creator George Miller passes, I imagine the franchise will come to be like James Bond, with fans having their favorite Max actors, as well as endless debates over what is and is not canon considering the loose continuity of both franchises (for example, the death of Bond's wife from George Lazenby's On Her Majesty's Secret Service is referenced in Pierce Brosnan's The World is Not Enough, I believe).

I was pretty impressed with Fury Road, which functioned as a stand alone reboot even though, if you follow the comics, it is a direct sequel to the Mel Gibson movies (the Interceptor appears again after Road Warrior because Max rebuilds it after Thunderdome in the comics, after which the War Boys capture it and it becomes the Razor Cola, only to be destroyed again by Furiosa in Fury Road).

I consider Fury Road a very loose Road Warrior remake with Furiosa being more of a Max character than Max himself, whereas Max himself remains as something of a bystander or surrogate for the audience. I would have preferred something focusing more tightly on Max himself like the first film, but I don't think we'll see a 1970s style exploitation film like that again from the franchise. Just car chases.

Max is also a product of late 70s/80s Australia, and I prefer to see the films stuck in that time frame. It doesn't make sense to see smartphones and Toyota Corollas in Mad Max even if the world is starved for gasoline and car chases in gas hog V8 cars make no sense.

Depending upon how much you see Miller as being influenced by the works of Joseph Campbell, Max is probably going to pop in and out of these movies as kind of a folk hero with little attention paid to age, past injuries, and other things that cause plot inconveniences. (For example, in Road Warrior he is blind in one eye from the Interceptor crash and retains a dilated pupil in Thunderdome, only for this to be disregarded in Fury Road. His knee injury from the first film also doesn't seem to give him much trouble by the Fury Road final fight as he jumps from vehicle to vehicle.)

Considering Miller was an emergency medicine doctor before he was a filmmaker, Max's realistic injuries (as well as people with various visually striking medical problems like gout and dwarfism) are one of the hallmarks of the franchise.

With that said, I don't really like this "whatever works for the plot" approach. What makes the Max character interesting to me over the Clint Eastwood Man With No Name character is Max's fragility and tendency to survive situations by dumb luck, not skill. Outside of a car, he is actually rather ordinary. This is reinforced by Furiosa's besting him at various points in Fury Road. His skill is humorously implied, though, when he destroys a bunch of bad guys off screen with no real explanation as to how. At the same time, Max's beat down of the huge Nathan Jones in Fury Road seems out of character for Max, though, who is 5'8-5'10" at best.

I'm not sure how they're going to put Max into Furiosa considering it will probably be 10-20 years before Fury Road, but if Miller sticks with Campbellian conventions it won't really matter. I am guessing it will be a cameo at best. I'd just prefer a little more concrete continuity.

The open endedness of the franchise does make for some very rich and interesting fan fiction, though, going as far as Max having a cameo in Fallout: New Vegas.

I'm hopeful the upcoming Furiosa will be a good film, but I don't think it will be much of a Max film. Mad Max: The Wasteland is due out as well, but considering Miller is in his 80s I am concerned that he will not be able to finish it, especially with his physical, hands on style of directing car chases with practical stunts and effects instead of CGI.

On Campbell's influence on Miller's storytelling: https://jcf.org/notes/george-miller-...max-fury-road/

Didn't mean to go off on a rambling tangent, but I dig the films. I don't go to conventions or anything, but I enjoy continuity and plot speculation, especially considering the striking visual nature of the films and their tendency to drop in small Easter eggs when least expected.

Thanks for reading.

[Hsb]

Of all the MadMax movies, Fury Road has been my least fave, to me, it was just one really long car chase. Yeah I know more went on but thats how it felt. Now the whole guitar thing was kinda fun throughout the movie

[Chistopher]

2nd one was the best one

[Inflames626]

I dig the outlandish steampunk style of parts of it--like as time goes on and things get worse the gangs get crazier. The guitar thing was part of it. Just over the top fun nonsense, as was the pole vaulting between cars.

I've read people compare the movie to something as crazy as Wagner's interpretation of Goethe's Ring Cycle.

In the original continuity Max is in his early 20s in the first film. The second one takes place maybe 3-4 years later. By Thunderdome they had to artificially age the 29 year old Gibson to look 40 with a very bad wig. So presumably in Fury Road Max is in his 40s if you take it as a direct sequel.

The nuclear war was originally supposed to happen between 1 and 2, but was later changed to between 2 and 3 (he needs to use a Geiger counter to get into Bartertown).

The reason Thunderdome had a lighter tone is they were aiming for a PG-13 rating to get the film to do well in the U.S. This was in 1985 not long after the MPAA created its ratings system. They were doing away with the Tarantino-style 70s exploitation angle of the first film, and 2 was about as much of a perfect action movie as you could get. 3 had to be different.

Tina Turner was meant to be a sympathetic villain, who, like Max, was an otherwise good person who had to do bad things to survive. In the event Turner turned it down, they wrote the role for Jane Fonda.

I dunno who we'd put in that role nowadays. Rihanna? Taylor Swift? The Rock? Someone likable offscreen surprisingly playing a role against type.

The Peter Pan/Lord of the Flies aspect of it with the tribal kids was something Miller turned into a Mad Max film. At first, Thunderdome was supposed to be another movie. Emil Minty (the boomerang kid from 2) said as a child during his audition he imagined the children of Max's world having lost their parents in a plane crash, and this made its way into the Thunderdome script.

They borrowed a lot of things from other movies popular at the time for Thunderdome as well: Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark with the foot chase scenes, a cutesy feel with the kids being similar to Ewoks from Return of the Jedi, and so on. It reminds me of The Goonies a bit as well. Even Max seems to find it silly during the Captain Walker aboriginal storytelling sequence.

Thunderdome was odd because Miller was struggling at the time. His friend and Max co-creator Byron Kennedy had died in a helicopter crash while scouting locations for Thunderdome. So, Miller was distracted during production and only directed the car chases. George Ogilvie directed the conversational scenes (including the funny weapons check at Bartertown, which features the weapons of Max's dead enemies from earlier films as Easter eggs. These include Wez's crossbow from 2 and Bubba Zaneti's C96 Mauser that he shot Max in the knee with in the first film. Like most Max stuff, it isn't explained how he got these but just accepted as a given.)

Ultimately the movie's tone was softened because Max was supposed to find redemption by sacrificing himself for the kids escaping in the plane. Turner's Aunty Entity supposedly recognizes this humanity in Max as being like her own and spares his life out of respect for his sacrifice (dumb luck salvation again). Jedediah the Pilot from 3 was not the same person as the Gyro Captain from 2, but both were played by Bruce Spence.

Presumably, the parts of the rebuilt Interceptor were on the camel wagon when Max was robbed at the beginning of the film by Jedediah.

The dumbest part of the movie? The monkey with water. There's dumb luck but that's stretching it too much.

But we get our catchphrases "Bust a deal. Face the wheel." and "Two men enter. One man leaves." Two had "Just walk away," and Fury Road had "What a beautiful day." Furiosa has Chris Hemsworth saying, "Do ya have it in ya to make it epic?"

Another Easter egg--if you watch Immortan Joe's car closely during Fury Road you'll find an MFP (Main Force Patrol) badge on the dash--Max's old unit from the first film.

I thought Fury Road had too many guns, though, considering how tightly guns are controlled in Australia and the ones in circulation tend to be old. In the Road Warrior Max barely has any bullets and people are forced to use crossbows. By Fury Road everything is an arsenal.

Furiosa trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJMuhwVlca4

The trailer says: "45 years after the collapse." This probably doesn't mean 45 years movie time--Max would be an old man. It means, literally, Mad Max (1979)-Furiosa (2024) = 45 years.

Similar to how classic Bond is set in the 60s, I hope they keep Max in a 70s-80s stagflation OPEC oil crisis time capsule and don't try to update it like Daniel Craig's horrible James Bond. Furiosa was an attempt to do this, I think, but she's a pretty well written character, so it doesn't come across as politically correct pandering.

I didn't see much of an emphasis on Max's mental state after the first film. Gibson's Max seemed to be Sad Max instead of mad. Hardy's Max will probably put his own spin on the character by showing more PTSD tendencies. They definitely underused Hardy's acting ability. He couldn't even pull off an Australian accent, whereas Gibson had lived there since he was a teenager.

And this leads me to alternate Max casting choices. In their primes, possibly: Russell Crowe, Gerard Butler. A younger Max: Ryan Gosling. An interesting choice by a friend: Karl Urban from Dredd and The Boys. Those guys are all a little too tall though. Robert Downey Jr. is real life friends with Gibson and would have made a good choice I think, and he can do accents.

The scrapped 2001 Gibson sequel would have been a real treat, I think. He was at the height of his career off Braveheart and The Patriot and wasn't yet too old to play Max again. Unfortunately 9/11 caused the Aussie dollar to collapse and the film became too expensive to make.

As for Gibson, he ruined his own career post 2006, which was a shame. Gibson would be a great director to do a Max film in a Clint Eastwood vein.

Sorry, rambling again. I hope the movie trivia interested some.

[Inflames626]

The non-canon (thus far) plot for the 2015 video game would have been an excellent film itself.

Ultimately MM canon is kind of like The Terminator. It is whatever you want it to be, and is hopefully taken from the good ones (1-3, some ideas from Salvation--Christian Bale was a great John Connor).

[solspirit]

This is interesting, I'm not sure if it's been posted or not.

https://www.mtv.com/news/9dfq3e/mad-max-fury-road-guitar-player-doof-warrior-colin-gibson