Vesna Kurilic

Disclaimer: Some people, when they take a sabbatical, announce it on schedule and keep professional about it. Me, I’m just like “here’s three months of radio silence due to work-and-life obligations, hope you didn’t mind too much”. It’s funny, though, what it was in the end that brought me back from the dead… (No copyright infringement intended, fun, fandom and fury purposes only.)

It’s been a while since I’ve had as much fun at the movies as last night, watching Mad Max: Fury Road for the first time. Sure, there was Katniss (there will always be Katniss), thank goodness, and there must have been something else, before her, but honestly, all I could think of was some tennish years ago, with the SW prequels, and how I used to walk home from the cinema carrying Ani’s hatred in my veins and jumping at the crossroads because everything was too slow and too static and too… mundane.

Going home last night, I was almost floating, like I had overdosed on helium. (Similar to what I felt after the first Bruce Banner movie, with all the jumping and the stuff – a long time ago.) It’s hard to say which parts I’ve loved the most, it’s easier to say which parts I didn’t, which were surprisingly few in number – I have a few fiction allergies, and ‘breeding’ as an idea in itself is definitely one of them.

When it comes to reasons why Fury Road knocked me out of my shoes… It’s not just the Master and Commander parallels (too many to mention – and a single point of divergence, lack of characterization in Fury Road vs. layers upon layers of character details on HMS Surprise), although I’ve had fun noticing them. It’s not even that it’s one hell of a long car chase, probably the best I’ve seen so far, although it helped knowing about it before seeing it onscreen. (It was as wonderful as car chases get, with a side of Tom Hardy, which always helps.) It’s not even that I’ve never been a fan of Charlize Theron’s and that I could be pleasantly surprised at her character being the central one in this movie (also, greased forhead? Nice!) It definitely helped that petrolpunk keeps popping up on my fandom radar as one of the most overlooked and least understood subgenres. The thing that probably made it a most pleasant cinematic experience is the simple fact that my heart beats faster when things go boom. (Oh-so-much-boom. And then some more.)

But there was the boy, too, the one with dreams of chrome. The one with new horizons in his eyes. (How much further can a simple fangirl go before someone yells, with a lovely British accent, spoilers?) There were the seeds. The storm. The engines. The whole “we-are-not-things” wonderfulness. The endless adrenaline rush. (It’s not called a hangover in vain.)

It’s funny, looking back a few months, when I’d first discovered about the future existence of this movie, to think what I had been looking forward to. (That’s the problem with judging movies by their trailers, which more often than not have nothing to do with the finished product.) Well, guess what – I got what I wanted and so much more. Because there will never, never be enough great explosion sequences in high-budget movies (especially not sci-fi ones). There will never be enough artistic sandstorms. There will never be enough movies which make you feel like you could do anything, and everything, with your bare hands only. (Remember this article, from a couple of years ago?)

Sure, I could’ve wished for something different in the movie, in one detail or the other (one deja vu too many, from a fangirl’s point of view). But, all in all, there are just two things I can think about right now – next Wednesday, when I’m going to treat myself to another trip to the cinema for a rewatch (yup, this one’s a keeper) and this September, when Legend comes out. ‘Cause, all in all, it has come to my attention that it’s highly unlikely you’ll see a bad movie if you’re sticking with Tom Hardy, no matter how small his role in it (don’t let the title of Fury Road deceive you – it’s really got nothing to do with him).

Have a great week, revheads – and let’s hope that by the next Full Moon (next Tuesday, go figure) I’ll be able to understand even more obscure Australian terms used in this, one of the loveliest of lovely postapocalyptic movies…