Category: Movies

Direct Beam Comms #49

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, MoviesPosted on

Mad Max

I’ve been thinking about the chronology of the Mad Max movies for a while now. At first I couldn’t make sense how they all fit together, it seems like while the fist three movies do fit together nicely the fourth Mad Max Fury Road does not. But I think it’s possible to figure a way for the all four Mad Max movies to fit together chronologically.

Mel Gibson as MAx
Mel Gibson as MAx

Let’s say that the first Mad Max movie takes place in year one of this timeline. In that movie let’s assume Max is aged 23 — or how old Mel Gibson was when he played that part. The next movie Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior was released two years after Mad Max and I think this still fits well with a logical chronology. Here, we’re less than five years after the world’s fallen apart leaving some of the last remnants of humanity to fight over an oil refinery. The only question is if people would really start dressing the way they do in just a few years — the good group in mostly white and the bad in black leather. But stranger things have happened.

One question comes with the third Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. While this movie was released four years after the second film I feel that it takes place much further in the future than that. Here, gasoline has all been used up and people are forced to get around via animal power — be it via camel trains or powered by methane harvested from pigs. In the movie Max finds a group of lost children living in a desert oasis who are so far removed from civilization that they’ve forgotten what civilization even really is. They get their history via a View-Master with the last adult of the group having left/died years prior.

The thing is — to get to this point I feel that decades would have had to have passed between the time civilization crumbled, sometime between the first and second movie, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. These kids would have had to have been alone for quite some time to have been young enough to have never been taught it. And since some of them now are supposed to be late teens early 20s it would mean decades at the oasis.

Which still fits with the overall timeline. This version of Max is a lot older and more grayer who could conceivably be a guy in his 40s even if Gibson in this movie still has a babyface and good looks.

Tom Hardy as Max
Tom Hardy as Max

So, if the first three films do fit together, where does Mad Max: Fury Road fit?

Actually, I think it actually fits quite well with the overall timeline. In this movie there are characters called the “War Boys” who have created their own language and worships autos as deities. And there are other characters who don’t know what TV was or what channels were. The main commonality in the movie is that both of these groups have people no older than 20-somethings in it. And if we assume that they were all born shortly after civilization fell, or sometime just before Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, we can assume that this movie takes place around 20 years after that or in the same general vicinity of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

If that’s true, Max in this movie would be a guy in his early to mid 40s which closely fits with Tom Hardy the actor playing him in Mad Max: Fury Road. Though Hardy wasn’t in his 40s then, he was in his late 30s, which still fits really closely to this fictional timeline.

So, I don’t think that this is a different version of the Max Max character than what’s come before or that this isn’t Max but the “Feral Kid” from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior now standing in for his hero. To me, in all the movies Max is Max is Max and is all supposed to be the same guy and this all fits with the overall timeline of the Max Max universe.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1953: Robert Beltran, Chakotay of Star Trek: Voyager and Night of the Comet is born
  • 1963: Terry Farrell, Jadzia Dax of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is born
  • 1977: Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiers in theaters
  • 1990: The mini-series IT premiers on TV
  • 1994: Star Trek: Generations opens in theaters

The Legend of Tarzan (2016) movie review

CategoriesFeature, Movies, ReviewPosted on

Grade: B

It seems like every few years one of the movie studios or TV channels decide to give the Edgar Rice Burroughs character of Tarzan a go. Some of these adaptations like the Disney version of Tarzan were successful and some like the 1998 Tarzan and the Lost City were not. So I’m happy to report that the latest Tarzan movie The Legend of Tarzan is one of the more successful films based on the character in memory.

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Instead of telling the origin story of the Tarzan character again, the creators of The Legend of Tarzan give us a new Tarzan adventure while still showing his backstory of being raised by apes via flashbacks. This time, Alexander Skarsgård stars as the title character who prefers to go by his given name “John” thank you very much. Transplanted from Africa, John now lives on his family’s estate in England and is married to Jane (Margot Robbie). Lured back to the jungles of Africa to go on a sort of goodwill tour, instead Tarzan along with American George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) find that Belgium is in the process of enslaving the Congo and it’s only a matter of time before lead henchmen Leon (Christoph Waltz) is able to bring in enough troops to complete his plan. It’s up to Tarzan, George Washington and Jane along with a tribe who were once close to Tarzan and Jane as well as a bevy of animals to stop Leon and free the Congo.

I feel like I’m familiar with the Tarzan character while at the same time not being too familiar with the actual source of Tarzan. I’ve read loads of Tarzan comics, seen Tarzan TV cartoons, watched many of the Johnny Weissmuller films and more modern Tarzan movies too. But I’ve never read any of the original novels so I come at Tarzan only knowing of other’s adaptations of the character. Which with The Legend of Tarzan might be a good thing. I don’t have many preconceived notions on how Tarzan is supposed to behave/act and don’t notice inconsistencies between this movie version of the character and the original.

I thought this 2016 version of Tarzan was more better than bad, and I liked several ways how they handled the character than what I’ve seen before. Like, Tarzan can’t exactly talk to the animals, but has a kinship with them and is able to us them via their natural instincts towards his own ends. And I also liked how Tarzan is the ultimate outsider — he’s not really at home with the apes who raised him since he’s not an ape and he’s not at home with mankind since he was the one guy on the planet who was raised by wild animals.

The story of The Legend of Tarzan surprised me as well. I’m usually good at figuring out how movies like this are going to end and how the third act is going to play out. And very early on in The Legend of Tarzan there’s a big third act battle that’s set up so I knew how the movie was going to end. Or at least I thought I knew how it was going to end. When The Legend of Tarzan actually got to this big battle it didn’t happen the way I thought, and in fact the movie ends up going in a completely different direction which was much more satisfying on where I thought the movie was headed.

If there’s one thing that I didn’t like about the movie it was how much of it relied on computer special effects. I really can’t ding The Legend of Tarzan for using computer effects to create all of the animals from apes to lions to wildebeest to crocodiles since working with live animals is always fraught with the unknown, and working with live animals that can easily kill an actor doubly so. But so much of the The Legend of Tarzan backgrounds from jungles to port cities to savanna were so obviously shot in a soundstage with artificial backdrops placed in that this really stood out to me. When the movie was on location and there were actual actors walking across actual Africa The Legend of Tarzan was breathtaking. But most of the time with these artificial backgrounds it was not so much.