Mad Max: Fury Road

The recent resurgence in more visceral action movies has been a quiet delight. Movies like The Raid: Redemption, Dredd, and John Wick all told straightforward stories that enabled their badass heroes to plow through as much action as possible about 100 minutes. That allowed their filmmakers to focus on stunt choreography and practical effects, making those movies more thrilling than a thousand Man of Steels, even with less than half the budget. Well that silent revolution just got a whole lot louder with the amazing Mad Max: Fury Road, and I hope we’ll be seeing many more films of this ilk in the years to come.

To be fair, director George Miller has been bringing the thrill of extremely dangerous stunts to theaters since the first Mad Max crashed into theaters in 1979. That first movie is OK, but it was the second one, Road Warrior, that always stood as the best in the franchise. Road Warrior had a simple arc too: Max wandered into a messed up situation, saved the day, then disappeared back into the wasteland. Mostly it was about hilarious biker/dominatrix gangs, killer boomerangs, and some of the best car stunts you’ll ever see. Believe it or not, that movie has a more complicated plot than Fury Road.

Fury Road is the story of Max (now played by Tom Hardy wielding another unusual accent) escaping a gang that captured him along with a group of women led by Furiosa (Charlize Theron), the only person we’ve met so far who is a match for Max. Almost the entire movie is Max and Furiosa driving away in their massive truck, the War Rig, as they are chased by evil gang leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, returning in a new role from the first movie) and his wacky acolytes and allies.

The joy in watching Fury Road is watching all the vehicular carnage unfold – and I know that’s what I said about Furious 7 but it’s different here. Furious 7 was built around giant moments – like cars jumping between skyscrapers – but to get their it had to do that whole break-in scene. Fury Road is just the chase, it is, as they say, all killer no filler. You might see the most ridiculous car crash of all time, but you won’t know when it’s coming and the movie will keep moving before you spend too much time thinking about it. It is relentless spectacle, but it works because George Miller knows what the hell he’s doing.

I read somewhere that Miller worked with his cinematographer to make sure all the shots in action scenes had the focus in the center of the frame. That way he could cut quickly between shots without disorienting the audience – our focus would never change even though the shot did. I’m not saying that’s the reason this movie works, but it is emblematic into the forethought put into Fury Road. After all, Miller has been making movies for a long time and was working on this one for at least the last 10 years. I’m glad it paid off.

Anyway, it’s been more than a month since Fury Road came out and I’m kind of itching to go see it again in 3D. A little more than a week before this movie came out, I saw the Avengers battle an army of robots on a flying city. I’ve seen the Transformers destroy Chicago, Superman level Metropolis, and the giant evil Enterprise crash into San Francsisco, but somehow a bunch of cars driving through the desert feels like the biggest movie I’ve watched in a long time. Madness.

Ex Machina

Ex Machina has the best dance scene of any movie I’ve seen this year. Intrigued? Good, go seek it out. It’s theatrical release was almost two months ago, but it’s still playing in some theaters and will debut on some streaming services later this month. Still not sure it’s worth your time? Let me try to convince you.

Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a young geek who works as some sort of programmer at a giant tech company that’s a little bit Facebook, a little bit Google. He wins an amazing prize: the opportunity to spend a week with Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), the company’s eccentric CEO, in his remote mountain home. When he arrives, Caleb discovers that Nathan wants his help testing his latest breakthrough: artificial intelligence. Specifically, he wants Caleb to conduct a version of the Turing test on the humanoid robot Ava (Alicia Vikander).

Despite the hard sci fi setup, Ex Machina is careful to never get too caught up in science or ethics, with Nathan often chiding Caleb for speaking like a scientist rather than a person. This is an Alex Garland film after all, so the specific details were always doomed to play second fiddle to broader emotional and philosophical themes. The story Garland wants to tell is a psychological thriller, with Caleb becoming increasingly paranoid about Nathan, Ava, the facility, and even his own humanity.

This is Garland’s first directorial effort, but it slots in comfortably next to the other movies has written. It’s another sci fi movie that shows a future where humanity is going down a dangerous path, where the most dangerous thing is people giving into their instincts, where nature is presented as amazingly beautiful but inaccessible. That I compare Garland’s first work to those of Danny Boyle is meant as a compliment, and I can’t wait to see more from the guy.

I also can’t wait to see more from Oscar Isaac, who one again steals the show. He seems to be the best part of every movie he’s in, so I can’t wait to see him reunited with Gleeson in Star Wars later this year. As for ol’ Domhnall, I kind of felt like he was hitting similar beats to those of his character in Frank, but more serious: a loner who thinks he’s a genius who struggles to handle it when he is confronted by a real genius. Alicia Vikander is not someone who I was aware of before this movie, but she certainly did an amazing job realizing Ava. I can’t say much more without spoiling it, but her role works because of the way she plays it. Ditto for Sonoya Mizuno who brings wonderful physicality to Kyoko, the mute housemaid.

So yeah, Ex Machina‘s pretty sweet. It’s a movie about four characters in one location that hooked me on an intellectual level and kept me going by making stuff get crazy and intense. It’s not on the same level as Under the Skin, but I could see this movie having a similar trajectory – not a ton of money at the box office, but people start realizing it’s awesome when it makes some best of the year lists this December. Will it make mine? Maybe. It’s on there right now.

Agents of SHIELD Season Two

Of all life’s big questions – who am I, why am I here, what do I believe in – undoubtedly the one I’ve spent the most time wondering is which super power I would have if I could pick one. Maybe that’s why I’ve stuck around as the guy enjoying the MCU while everyone else got bored and left, only to occasionally pop in just to see if I’m OK. This stuff is important to me, probably too important. And it’s because I care so much that I started watching Agents of SHIELD, though it’s not the only reason I keep watching. That’s because this year saw the show flirt with being truly good, before ultimately settling with being highly entertaining.

That might sound like what a praised the last half of the first season Agents of SHIELD for, but it’s different this time. Those episodes worked because something exciting happened in Captain America: The Winter Solider and we got to see the effects of that play out on TV. With that gone, I was afraid the show would revert back to being as difficult to sit through as it had been before, and for the first few episodes of this season, it kind of looked that way.

It picked up some time after Hydra’s attempt to destroy SHIELD was thwarted, with Coulson directing the new, underground version of the organization toward defeating Hyrda and figuring out the mystery of the alien stuff inside him and Skye. The team added some new members in Bobbi Morse (Mockingbird from the comics) and Lance Hunter (snarky British guy who was annoying at first, then really fun) and spent the early days going on missions and running away before the US government could catch them. It was OK. And then Inhumans started showing up.

Inhumans are people who posses inside them the potential to have super powers as long as they are exposed to magical alien gas. They are a result of aliens interfering in human development a long time ago and it can be argued that every Marvel super hero is technically inhuman. But in practical terms, they are a sub-group in the comic who are due to come to prominence in the MCU, especially since they can’t use mutants. That they debuted on this TV show is a big deal.

Agents of SHIELD is always better when there are more super powers on display, so having inhumans automatically makes the show better. But they also gave the show something to worry about that is important to the MCU without being tied directly to it. While playing off Winter Soldier made the show fun last year, this year Age of Ultron barely made a dent on the show. And that was OK because the show had its own story to tell.

At the center of that story was Skye, the character that needed the most work following season one. Fortunately, the writers put that work in, building Skye up into an agent who could hold her own in the field before revealing that she was really Daisy Johnson, a.k.a. Quake, and giving her sweet vibration powers. More than the cool power scenes though, the show also made Skye a surprisingly tragic figure by linking her “birth” as an inhuman with the death of a member of the team and introducing tons of family drama in the form of her long lost parents. Speaking of which, Skye’s dad is played by Kyle Maclachlan, who is the best thing to happen to this show (sorry, Patton Oswalt).

While the first MCU show, Agents of SHIELD has yet to reach the highs of its siblings Agent Carter and Daredevil (which reminds me, I should write something about Daredevil). But I always looked forward to it on Tuesday nights this year, which was a nice change of pace. I’m excited to see where it goes from here, and happy that ABC decided not to break up the ensemble by doing that ill-advised spin-off. Everything has started to click, the best thing to do is leave it alone.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I’ve consistently praised Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for it’s willingness to use sequels as a chance to explore other genres. Iron Man 3 was a dark comedy crime movie, Thor: The Dark World plunged completely into sci fi fantasy (I think I said it was like Lord of the Rings meets Star Wars), Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a spy thriller, and Guardians of the Galaxy basically was a space adventure movie starring characters who are only technically super heroes. Avengers: Age of Ultron bucks that trend hard, as if writer-director Joss Whedon set out to make the most comic book-y comic book movie of all time. Luckily for us, he’s maybe the only guy on the planet who could actually pull that off.

As someone who has written several comics himself, Joss Whedon understands The Avengers and the kind of stories that people expect from the super team. I am sure that it was Whedon who decided to do a version of the “Age of Ultron” story – because who else could have been pushing for this relatively obscure villain to be the centerpiece of the biggest sequel of all time (until the new Star Wars comes out). More than that, he knows that outside of the fighting and the powers stuff, what people enjoy are watching these characters play off each other. And this movie gives you a chance to see how just about every conceivable combination of these characters would turn out.

Tony Stark is still definitely the star of this franchise, slightly more than even other-guys-who-got-sequels Captain America and Thor. Avengers-only characters like Hawkeye and the Hulk are given more fleshed out subplots – I especially like that Hawkeye got some cool moments after the first movie shafted him – but don’t expect much screentime to be given to anything that doesn’t tie into the whole saving the world thing. Even at two and a half hours, there are so many characters that it still feels like there was a lot left on the cutting room floor.

Much hoopla has been made about Age of Ultron‘s portrayal of Black Widow, which to me is a bit of a mountains out of molehills thing. There definitely seems to be reason to worry about the way that Disney and or Marvel feels about female super heroes, but I don’t think that’s anywhere on screen here. Black Widow kicks as much ass as anyone else on the team, and her romantic subplot is compelling – another tragic chapter in this woman’s story about wanting to be a good person. Plus, Black Widow isn’t even the only female super hero in the Marvel Universe, there’s Peggy Carter (on a TV show no one watched, apparently), Agents of SHIELD‘s Mockingbird and Quake (that’s a TV show definitely no one watches), and Scarlet Witch (who spends a decent chunk of this movie as a villain)… Let’s hope that Captain Marvel movie gets here real fast.

Speaking of Scarlet Witch, she’s in this and OK. So is her brother, Quicksilver, who my dad called Speedo which is pretty good. The third new Avenger is Vision who is great but barely in the movie. I guess they didn’t want to get you confused between him and Ultron? Oh yeah, Ultron. He’s an evil robot who wants to save humanity by destroying it, I guess. Kind of like Skynet, but if it was more pulpy and melodramatic. But the end result is about the same: super heroes get to fight basically an infinite army of terminators.

The one kind concerning thing about the first Avengers movie was how the big action sequence at the end was like a well-done version of the end of a Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Age of Ultron is full of big fights and none of them feature a giant sky laser, so I’m happy to report that we don’t have to worry about that comparison this time. In fact, I would say that, in general, the action in this movie is some of the best we’ve seen in the whole franchise – even if it was a shift back to the CG violence which made me miss the more brutal style of fighting from The Winter Soldier. Really, the only action problem I had was that there was so much of it. You will see every single Avenger kill hundreds of robots over the course of these 150 minutes, which disarms the admittedly limited tension of these battles.

That’s another thing – we all know there are so many movies in the pipeline that pretty much everyone is safe. More than that, Ultron starts the movie as a terrifying monster, something that seems impossible to defeat, but the more time I spent watching him get beaten up, make jokes, and come up with weird plans, the less threatening he felt. I get that he’s supposed to be like an evil mirror image of Tony Stark, but he’s also an alien AI – why wasn’t that more reflected in his behavior? Ultimately I was disappointed by the character, and I do worry that Marvel still has yet to find a good villain who isn’t related to Thor.

Whedon cut his teeth making beloved, nerdy TV shows and I’m just now realizing that’s why he is so great as part of the MCU, because Marvel has brought the serialized delight of television to cinema. Phase Two wraps up this summer with Ant-Man, the twelfth Marvel movie, and Phase Three is supposedly 10 more movies that will keep testing everyone’s super hero fatigue through 2019. I’m not saying super hero movies need to stop at that point, but I hope that all the creative people involved remember that the best TV shows knew when to call it quits and the endless nature of comics is what makes them so damn impenetrable for everyone else. Avengers: Age of Ultron concludes on a message of change, new adventures, and hope – don’t ignore that.