I always enjoy listening to George Miller chatting about his life philosophy (he's regularly on the ABC) but am generally less enthused by his movies (Mad Max (1979), the premise of Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), etc). Apparently I saw this one before but I don't remember.
This time around I felt like Roger Ebert must have felt when he finally understood David Lynch via Mulholland Drive (2001): the relentless action of the first movement is all too much and yet when things slowed down I felt that every moment spent on the plot was wasted. The reason is that Miller does a huge amount of character development through interaction and not dialogue. And fashion, let's not forget that. This must be Nicholas Hoult's finest performance. Shot by John Seale. #182 on the IMDB top-250 list. What a blast.
The dreck that Florence Pugh makes me watch. The main problem here is that she's so much better than everything else on the screen; perhaps it is time she took a leaf from Clint Eastwood's playbook and sunk her MCU winnings into her own production company.
This movie's purpose is to get a team together, much like earlier MCU instalments, Suicide Squad (2016), Justice League (2017), etc. Getting in the way is the need to acknowledge general eye-rolling exhaustion with this stale property. The writing room's solution was to smoodge Pixar's Inside Out (2015) with a Cube (1997) multiverse into something very emo. The superman thing initially put me in mind of Matthew Goode's Ozymandias in Watchmen (2009) but really it's a humourless reheat of Iron Man 3 (2013) or Age of Ultron (2015) with a dash of that Guardians (2014) zaniness. So, not entirely fan service, just mostly fan service.
On the civilian side we get Geraldine Viswanathan (same-same as she was in Drive Away Dolls (2024): a relatable Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha type?) playing baddie Julia Louis-Dreyfus's personal assistant. The Kierkegaard regurgitation is cringey, and there's way too much "exposition" with "finger-quotes". Were these scenes from a Seinfeld reboot?
It took me a while to recognise Lewis Pullman; he has the same eyes and sheepish grin as his dad Bill. Perhaps he'll be President one day! (Later I found out he was in Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)). The homage to The Matrix was lame. Settling his personal (brain chemical) issues with violence was lame. Not being asked to factor huge numbers was lame. So much lame.
Manohla Dargis. I did not enjoy David Harbour's showboating. Flo's doing her own stunts, just like Tom Cruise ... therefore Mission Impossible beckons? Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue. Hannah John-Kamen really did get a numpty of a character.
I've seen a few of Miyazaki's movies (Howl's Moving Castle (2004), The Wind Rises (2013)) but somehow not this, his masterwork. The art is gorgeous. I can't say I grasped the whole mythos; I think it's a Japan-ified Wizard of Oz. There's a small homage to it and to Pixar as the young girl makes her way up a path. The humour is fantastic. #31 in the IMDB top-250.
Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2012. Alice in Wonderland. Kamaji is a great invention. (It was the hopping light pole that I took as a homage to Pixar.) This "ma", the emptiness between actions, is exactly what George Miller omitted. Elvis Mitchell made it a Critic's Pick. Apparently now a stage production.
