Hacker Cinema
Mad Max
1979 · Film · 91 min
Part of Mad Max Collection
Directed by George Miller
In the ravaged near-future, a savage motorcycle gang rules the road. Terrorizing innocent civilians while tearing up the streets, the ruthless gang laughs in the face of a police force hell-bent on stopping them.
24 positive8 negative1 mixed97 neutralfrom 130 commenters
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136 comments on Hacker News
Yeah, Star Wars more or less killed sci-fi as we had known it. I liked the weird Logan's Run, the depiction of class stratification in "Soylent Green", the banality of corporate control of "Rollerball".
The idea of a computer virus in the film "Westworld" was, to me at the time, something out of left field. (And speaking of Michael Crichton, "The Andromeda Strain" was "intelligent" sci-fi and we enjoyed it.)
"Mad Max", though it came after "Star Wars", drew inspiration from "A Boy and His Dog", "Deathrace 2000"…
A Golden Age for sure.
> Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.
Star Wars, Enter the Dragon, Game of Death, Mad Max, and many Bond films are fun counterexamples.
Mad max is a documentary, don't believe their lies
I had a lot of fun reading the articles about Gas Town although I started to lose track of the odd naming. Only odd because they make sense to Steve and others who have seen the Mad Max, Water World movies.
I promptly gave Claude the text to the articles and had him rewrite using idiomatic distributed systems naming.
Fun times!
It used to be the case that movies had to be made carefully, with the intended look in mind when they were shooting it. Compositing, etc aren't new, as we both know, but the way they're used has changed; they're used far more than ever before, with important design decisions about the look of the movie deferred to the very last minute ans everything up to that point done in such a way to facilitate making late last minute changes. This is absolute poison for cinematography as an art. Very few big budget movies made in recent years has any artistic merit for this reason. Producers now feel like they have the technology to make all the decisions that, by technical and logistic necessity, the directors/cinematographers would have to make themselves years ago. And the producers are just assholes with money, they cannot make art.
With respect to Mad Max, I think it aged like a fine wine. I didn't first see it when I was young, I saw Road Warrior first. But Road Warrior and everything after it is very camp. Mad Max is more grounded and feels like a commentary on our times, not pure fantasy spectacle. I think the best time to watch Mad Max was the 70s, and the second best time is probably today. In the 90s or 00s it wouldn't have hit right.
Exactly - they've been doing paint outs and composite shots forever! It doesn't feel fundamentally different to do it "on a computer," to me. They aren't using it to show off, just to make the scene look how you'd expect it to.
They've also been doing color grading forever - digital just makes it way cheaper and easier. Before, you'd have to do photochemical tricks to the film, and you would use different film for different vibes.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot, which leads to that design-by-committee feeling. That sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room' is the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like. But that's not really a failure of CGI itself - that's a failure of vision, right? If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
I have watched the original Mad Max, and it was pretty alright. If I had watched it at the right age, I probably would have imprinted on it.
> paint-outs
Predates computers, they used to paint out wires and whatnot by hand and it usually looked just as good.
> Compositing
Predates computers. They've been doing it since forever with miniature overlays, matte paintings, chromakey, double exposures, and cutting up film negatives with exacto blades.
> color grading
Literal cancer which ruins movies every goddamn time. The fact that they shoot movies with this kind of manipulation in mind changes how they use lighting and makes everything flat with no shadows, no depth, everything now gets shot like a soap opera. This also applies to heavy use of compositing too. To make it cheaper to abuse compositing, mostly so the producers can "design by committee" the movie after all the filming is done, they've destroyed how they light and shoot scenes. Everything is close up on actors, blurred backgrounds, flat lighting, fast cuts to hide the lazy work. Cancer.
I'm talking about Fury Road too BTW. It's crap. Watch the original Mad Max, not Road Warrior, then watch Fury Road. The first is a real movie with heart and soul, the world it depicts feels real. The latter feels like a video game, except it somehow comes out looking even less inspired and creative than the actual mad max video game that came out at the same time.
But yeah, they made some real weird cars for the movie. That's fine I guess. The first movie didn't need weird cars, it had this thing called characters. Characters who felt like real people, not freaks from a comic book.
So, I understand correctly that all websites and services want protection from DDoS attacks, and that's basically their number one concern. The second is caching in different parts of the world. So, it's caching and DDoS. But at the same time, nobody wants to use CloudFront from AWS because it’s not that simple yet. And it’s more expensive, while Cloudflare is free. So, what should we do about all this? This won’t do. We’ve created a gigantic bottleneck that controls the entire internet, just like in the movie Mad Max, where he controlled the only source of water. That’s wrong. And we all fell for it like fools. So, the question is, what can be done in this situation? Are there reliable competitors? Are there any fault-tolerant systems for this? The whole problem is that our DNS, and with Cloudflare, they proxy it. So, if their proxy goes down, everything falls apart. What should we do about this?
> Disney? Meh - they've got Andor and that's really it.
I like this post about how The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Mad Max and Harry Potter are all valuable IP written by somebody that appears to have never heard of Marvel comics, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Simpsons, any Pixar film, Avatar, The X-Files, or The Bachelor.
I miss car crashes - realistic crashes like in Mad Max 1, not explosions or rollover on a hidden ramp. I guess cars are too expensive these days to crash them for a movie.
- Mad Max is not a great example of anarchy, as the last couple of movies featured a government led by an autocrat (haven't seen the other ones)
- The Play Store being bad does not mean the App Store is not also bad
- How do you know most of the world likes the authority of the App Store? Is it not more likely that most of the world are ignorant of its rules, and assumes a free and open marketplace?
> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_the_nuclear_sponge_theory_really_work/ https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/
Lol, "Private" - until it someday is surprisingly purchased/acquired/enveloped by Microsoft, and added to Gamepass.
That's the headline I thought this was tbh - are any of us actually expecting like anything else out of EA?? Uh, Cod, EA Sports, Madden, FIFA.
Fr. We'll get more sports games, COD, and some you know movies themed market manipulated IP tie-in games, like the however many Mad Max type were... such games are only sometimes decent and very rarely worth $50-$100.
EA has invested all their energy maximizing profits and that has worked well but those micro transactions are like all coming from such predictable near dribble... the rest of their development has long been skewed to games that create "platforms" for micro transactions, along with the significant shift to mobile,
EA is kinda like a very well funded, well established, well equipped, super elite "Paper Tiger" - $50 billion status quo.
You don't need to drive far, just get on a US highway and there is dangerous litter every few hundred meters. In extreme cases it goes down to few dozens meters. Sometimes it was like driving in some Mad Max movie.
Like wine, and investing generally, it's the argumentum ad crumenam, problem.
The problem with movies is they're worse bets than startups and so big productions are the primary ones that get distribution and marketing. Kind of a self-reinforcing power law distribution that leads to a few getting most of the money.
The tiny ones need to find cleverer ways to get free marketing Richard Branson-style and try to include at least one celebrity.
Examples of shoestring budget success stories:
- Napoleon Dynamite 400k USD (2004) (680k USD today)
- Mad Max $200k AUD (1979) (760k USD today)
- Fruitvale Station 900k USD (2013) (1.24M USD today)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail £ 175k (1975) (2.5M USD today)
- Easy Rider 400k USD (1969) (3.5M USD today)
- Mean Streets 500k USD (1973) (3.6M USD today)
In every movie except the first one (where society was starting to collapse, it hadn't fallen yet) the question of "where's the gas" is a major plot device
I'm not going to sit here and argue Beyond Thunderdome is high art or anything, but kind of the whole point of the Mad Max films is not just to comment on resource scarcity and control but to make them the call to action for everything in the story. You're asking "who's making all the gas" because that's exactly what George Miller wants you to be thinking about.
The gas was being refined from crude oil in Gas Town. This was explained explicitly in both modern Mad Max movies, but in fairness I haven’t seen the old ones.
Water world at least had some tanker to explain where all the gasoline were coming from.
Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.
Don't forget Picnic at Hanging Rock!
I really love Peter Weir -- I don't think all of his movies are amazing, but many of them are, and they're all really ambitious and unique. He never rests on his laurels. (Reminds me in that respect of George Miller, director of Babe and Mad Max)
Disclaimer: I don't own a Tesla or $TSLA or otherwise engage with Musk or his business ventures. My observation is apolitical.
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I stopped reading here:
> Fictional concepts such as Mad Max’s tanker-based War Rig are often the inspiration for real-world creations like Ford’s custom-built F650 Supertruck, a tractor-trailer sized monstrosity that can carry 120 gallons of fuel, tow 30,000lbs, and be reinforced with bulletproof armor. The truck is how insurgent fighters get around war zones and what storm chasers use to run down tornadoes.
The linked articles make no mention of the F-650 Supertruck. All I could find with a quick Google search regarding these use cases are Hiluxes/imported F-150s and domestic customized F-350s respectively. There's also nary a mention of said trucks being inspired by latter-day Mad Max films. Inquiries via Kagi's LLM facilities confirm my conclusions.
Why bother writing any of this if it simply isn't true? Such glaring falsities don't inspire confidence in the more substantial parts of the article... there's more than enough wrong with the Cybertruck to write about without resorting to whole-cloth fabrications to make the point.
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
Mad Max, obviously, Night of the Comet, The Quiet Earth, A boy and his dog. I think the early 80s was a good time for the genre.
Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and that other Charleton Heston movie with zombies that I can’t remember (not a huge fan of zombies)
The Road is a fairly recent movie that fits.
British TV had Space 1999, lots of early Doctor Who and an attempt at the Tripods series by John Christopher. By far my favorite was “Survivors” written by Terry Nation - who needs zombies when you’ve got actual problems to deal with!
The Autobahn is like a Mad Max movie nowadays. Turn signal? What's that? I'm just gonna pop into your lane when you're going 50 kph faster than me.
You are saying reality and fake reality are alike, because hey can you spot the difference?
Whole effin' Matrix movies premise was about that, remainder of human civilization rather went to suicidal fight than go back to more comfy fake illusion of reality.
When I watch videos from friends or generally people, I am interested in their actual experiences, not lies they try to push about how they wanted their experiences to look like. That's frankly pathetic, you may of course not share the same view but luckily its dominant view in this world.
When Mad max movies made most of their fights in real desert and it showed, god damn I had huge respect for all involved, thats an art. Green background just doesn't cut it.
You also recharge in same way looking at phone wallpaper (or look at it in VR) of some mountains of forest, or actually being there and touching the trees and rock? One is cheap fake junk, another is proper awesome reality that makes you feel alive like nothing. Can't grok why the fuck do I need to even explain this to somebody, my 4 year old son gets it very well.
In a way The Mad Max movies remind me of the Zelda game series in that they'll have recurring characters and themes but aren't really hung up on canon and will cheerfully contradict each other.
Furiosa made me realize that this kind of storytelling, one that relies on worldbuilding and often prior-worldbuilding is the (or a) current way we approach movies. I mean pretty obvious considering the primacy of superhero movies, but worth accepting to better understand what's going on.
I've come to believe that one of the interesting aspects of the Mad Max movies is that often (not always) director George Miller makes them using the current popular language of cinema -- Mad Max and Road Warrior were Ozspoitation, Thunderdome (though admittedly not entirely his vision) was a Spielbergian blockbuster. Furiosa works wholehearted in the current vogue, building off and elaborating Fury Road. Not judging really, just observing. It's where we are now.
I'm going to check out Mad Max for that! My show off my home theatre sound / Atmos go to movies are Edge of Tomorrow, Dune, and the newer Blade Runner.
Not to mention most people are going to shell out $$$ for a nice large TV. At that point, might as well spend a few extra $$ and buy a surround sound.
Maybe it's just me, but a lot of theaters set their volumes to LOUD. I've found it better to just watch movies at home (save for that rare movie you HAVE to watch in theaters, like Mad Max) and spend the remaining $ on building out my HT.
>I think a Mad Max style post apocalypse type situation wouldn't come about until maybe 30 years after a full nuclear war. As disease and civilization continue to deteriorate over time eventually I can see much of the word getting to that state.
This sounds exactly like Mad Max. If you remember, in the very first "Mad Max" movie, civilization was not completely gone yet: Max was a policeman, but civilization was in tatters and murderous biker gangs ran wild. The later movies showed civilization being completely gone.
Fury Road made sense. The fact that Furiosa is set in between the original Mad Max and the time of Fury Road kinda says "cash grab" to me. No real logical reason to insert this fifth film between films 1 and 4 other than "we don't know how to continue the storyline with something new, so let's just bridge the gaps".
There are a lot of reasons for this, but for me, a big thing is how absurdly long movies are now. I look at movies and at this point will reject some that just feel like they will take too much time.
I saw Furiosa, it was fine, but it was about a half an hour longer than it should have been.
It's 148 minutes long. For comparison, Mad Max was 93 minutes long, The Road Warrior was 96 minutes long, Beyond Thunderdome was 107 minutes long, and Fury Road was 120 minutes long.
The Mad Max movies weren't really blockbuster movies. They kind of appeal to a niche and not a more general "Action"-enjoying movie crowd.
can't wait for the articles about how the movie flopped only because of a female lead. /s
There weren’t generations between the collapse and the film. Style of the old characters may have started off in “normal” civilization. Given how many cars there are today, how the cars in mad Max tend to be simpler/older cars and how everything is Frankensteined together, the technology seems plausible. Compare to Cuba, where people are still driving around in 60 year old classic American cars.
Also consider how many people live now and their resources and assets, compared to the world of mad Max, where perhaps 1% of the humans remain. It implies a lot of junk.
If this were a Mad Max movie (#4 opening soon), viewers might speculate about storylines for non-AM comms.
Short and quick example:
Today I mentioned on the local /r/australia subreddit that it was 45 years ago this week that the film "Mad Max" had been released.
Now "Mad Max" is a famous and well-known Australian film. You'd expect that there would be some interest in that.
This is what happened to that general-interest post:
post reply Just ICYMI, "Mad Max" was released 45 years ago this week. from AutoModerator[M] via /r/australia sent 17 hours ago This post has been removed as an empty / very-short self-post. Chit-chat is best submitted to the daily thread. I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns. contextfull comments (1)reportblock usermark unreadreply As I said above, censorship merely for the sake of censorship. What's the definition of 'very short'? Two words? Ten Words? One hundred words? One thousand words? Once you put the reason for a post, why should you need to add more unnecessary words to prevent it being "disappeared"?
As can be clearly seen, there is no REAL reason for removing this post.
Next time I have a another 'too short' post, I will try an experiment and add about 10-15 lines of extraneous material to pad it out. See if that changes things.
> Mad MAX was released 45 years ago this week
In a couple of years will became a documentary. US is working hard to achieve this.
Not many people are familiar with the original Mad Max movie, for some reason - the second two have much more recognition.
The first one is really quite a different type of movie.
Hollywood milking things for so long that the entire thing resembles anaemic dogshit is as old as Hollywood. Big budget films with stupid stuff because tons of people are involved is also as old as Hollywood. Dune, Alien >=3, Æon Flux, etc. etc.
Sometimes a bad film is just a bad film for all the reasons bad films have been around for 100 years, and that's it. This entire "zomg bad film + female character = woke mind virus!!11" is just silly.
Also Harrison Ford is 81. He's old. Almost old enough to run for presidency. It's physically impossible to make films with Indie like it's 1982. They tried that with Robert DeNiro and unintentional comedy ensued.
Oh, and I heard all of this bollocks with Mad Max too, and that did well enough. Again, sometimes a bad film is just a bad film.
This would be a great plot element in a post-apocalypse film. Mad Max meets The Coal Miner's Daughter.
I didn't like the Mad Max movie either, but isn't that a bit much?
Before non-fossil energy sources were significant, one of the points the statistic it proved was that peak oil scenarios hurt well before you "run out" of oil completely[0].
Today, the statistic is still relevant because we've got other ways to make energy-dense portable fuels from renewables.
[0] unless you can substitute oil for another energy source, which was only sometimes part of those discussions, the rest of the time it was "prepare for collapse!" with images from the original Mad Max films.
What is this the it looks scary crowd for cars now. I thought that was just about gun regulation that the scarier the gun the more dangerous it is even when an identical gun in all things but shape is less scary.
Cars aren't covered in bubble wrap and safety foam on the outside for many many decades they were all steel on the outside now due to mileage regulations they are making them more out of polymers and plastics and aluminum. Those corners aren't razors and even if they were more rounded it's going to hurt like a son of a bitch to get hit by a car. They're making it out to be like it's a chariot from the Ben-Hur movie or something out of Mad Max.
Getting pasted by that thing as a pedestrian is going to be the same as getting pasted by an Escalade or a Land Rover defender which apparently meets the European pedestrian impact rating.
Hey, why not? We're already fighting to make "Mad Max", "The Matrix", and "Terminator" into reality. What's one or two (dozen) more dystopian / apocalyptic movies made real? Might as well, since it's clear that our "leaders" intend the death of all living things in the quest for infinite profits. Feels like our planet's leadership has been infiltrated by "Star Trek" Ferengi.
> The same movies are shown in Scandinavian cinemas
Maybe it's better now but Scandinavia has had their moments of censorship keeping those "same movies" out of theaters. Sweden banned The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Mad Max, and even ET (for ages under 11). Norway banned Ichi the Killer, I Spit on Your Grave, and A Serbian Film.
Explain to me why Fury Road belongs on that list? I personally found it one of the singular worst most disappointing films I have ever seen.
In my opinion Mad Max was a master piece of exploitation cinema and the most realistic of the bunch.
The Road Warrior pushed it a bit further and was at least plausible. I think it's the best of the series and one of my favorite movies of all time.
Beyond the Thunderdome is tough. They destroyed the Interceptor early and Miller seems to not understand the importance of a car as a character. I think reusing the actor from The Road Warrior in a different roll was a confusing mistake and some parts were pushed to the edge of silly. On the other hand, the homage to Lord of the Flies was beautifully done and somewhat made up for the other deficiencies.
Fury Road was a completely implausible comic book that delved into the silly to a ridiculous degree. But even worse, it was not a Mad Max movie other than it copied The Road Warrior in much the same way the 7-9 star wars sequels copied Star Wars.
Edit: I will also say that after seeing the film I was shocked it was Miller. I assumed it had been passed off to some hack and was made purely for the benjamins.
> The real world isn't like a Mad Max film.
I see you've never driven in Los Angeles...
> whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing.
You're joking right? No one wait for you to clear the street. Hell most driving start advancing when you're going to be clear by the time they make it to you.
> What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up?
Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes. They'll just do it faster and harder.
The real world isn't like a Mad Max film.
> I would definitely take the Turkish way of shrugging off rules
Having lived most of my life in Turkey, it gets old really fast.
For one thing, there's a certain culture that is a mixture of extreme fatalism, not giving a shit about anything that doesn't immediately benefit you, low respect to other people, and the worst part of it, seeing other people who care as weak, unmanly and naive, that is so pervasive in Turkey.
When this culture is given a lax rule structure, what you get is a chaotic, every man for himself, free-for-all place devolving further and further into a low CGI Mad Max movie. Only reason why it still hasn't completely collapsed into chaos is because people are still afraid of the punishment. If you think I'm exaggerating, next time you're there ask a restaurant owner if you can smoke, right under the no-smoking sign and pay attention to what they say: do they tell you that'd disturb other customers? or do they tell you of the ₺20k fine they got that one time and they can't let you because of that.
I can tell for you as a lived experience that significantly more people in Turkey cut in lines than people in Germany. Why do they do that I ask myself, the only explanation I could find until now is because fuck you, that's why. If you were as cunning, as manly, as bold as they are you'd be at the front of the line, but you aren't, so fuck you. They know there won't be repercussions for that action, and that's the only bar to clear for them to do it.
Maybe this way of living fits some, I myself find this despicable. I know that cutting in lines is not the most important metric for life quality in the world, but I fully believe it seeps into everything else in the society and over time makes it unlivable.
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Even in an imaginary ideal environment, if act of obeying existing rules is debatable, there'll be the problem of everyone considering themselves as a sufficient authority on making judgements with a limited context and a huge bias on interpretations that benefit them. At one point it just makes sense to ask people to use the right channels to push change instead of 80 million people making individual judgements on every issue every day and hope for the best.
I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks.
We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery life is a real concern, and current Wintel laptops just don't compete.
Energy concerns are real (as depicted in the George Miller-directed films mentioned above), and it may be the case that the premium paid for Apple Silicon-based devices is actually a bargain.
My brain parsed that first as "less nutritious grasshoppers." Ew!
Speaking of the accelerating impacts of the carbon climate crisis -- esp on ecosystems and the food supply -- I've been building an educational comedy adventure game [SB: see below] (set about 80 years in the future) which makes several assumptions about the food supply as a core premise. Assumptions not unlike those in the films Mad Max or Idiocracy.
Namely that several new types of artificially grown/manufactured food are created and promoted. Among them, a fictional slimy, fruity white "slurm" drink and a mystery meat-like goo named "glerm." Both or which smell and taste awful, of course, yet are loaded with healthy nutrients and vitamins. Most importantly, easy to mass produce and distribute, esp in a world with poisoned soils and degraded logistical infrastructure.
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[SB] - https://synystrongames.itch.io/slartboz
I wouldn't consider the first Mad Max as a scifi film though I love its awful acting and general cheesiness. It's far more of an action film than anything else as it doesn't really examine why society is breaking down from what I can remember.
I think this is more of a listicle for those not familiar with how utterly bizarre 70's scifi movies could be. Underrated by non-genre movie fans specifically. One curiosity not listed was "Capricorn One", one of OJ Simpsons movies. Another is the first Mad Max which squeaks in at 1979.
Another genre that could use similar treatment is the 70's disaster movies like Towering Inferno, Airport and their ilk.
Who's invading who if the federal government collapses? Has Arlington, VA been amassing guns and ammo this whole time, just waiting for the federal government to fall so they can invade Washington DC? I'm sure it's a failure of my imagination too, or a faith in humanity, but I don't see roving hordes forming and raiding the countryside like something out of mad max or a zombie movie the instant the federal government falls. At which point my county, and its sheriff is the closest government, holding down order.
There are some good films about ecosystem damage, the documentary Mad Max for example.
As MTV some 20 years ago said: "Once it's not enough, recycle."
Sarcastic, of course.
Just look at Hollywood. Every now and then they reboot some movies or they make a follow up: Cinderella, Pinnocchio, Mad Max, Avatar, Star Wars etc.
It's almost completely gone in the US on Netflix also. I've had better luck watching older movies on Youtube 'Free with Ads' service, especially 80s and 90s movies, than I've had on Netflix. And there's no ads if you get Youtube's premium service (I currently don't, but don't mind the ads).
Currently on there is Wrongfully Accused (funny Leslie Nielsen movie), Glengarry Glen Ross, Robocop (1987), Ghost in the Shell, The Mask, License to Drive, The Neverending Story, Tombstone, Leon The Professonal, The Amityville Horror, Over the Top (some Stallone movie), Miracle on 34th Street, Con Air, Edward Scissorhands, Gone Fishin', Look Who's Talking, While You Were Sleeping, The Craft, Red Dawn, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Secret of Nimh, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Mad Max, Das Boot, Little Shop of Horrors, Hackers, .... okay, I'm just going to stop now, but t keeps going, I'm only a third of the way though the list.
I watched “1899” last week and it was excellent. The characters seems real despite the very slow revealing of their backstories. I can’t stand most blockbuster movies. There’s always so much action going on that characters and plot suffer. No real dialogue between people. Just exposition and one-liners. And everything seems to be rushing. Compare Black Addams to Dune. Mad Max was also fast-paced, but the director knows that and focuses on the action to describe the characters instead of adding useless one-liners and forced jokes.
Don't be hysterical. Of course there's going to be a future. The future will probably resemble a Mad Max movie, but it's still a future...
I think they tried post-Capitalism in October 1917 and it was a disappointment.
I see the post modern situation as depressing because a general theory of progress (e.g. Marxism) or even justice in the abstract (e.g. Rawls or Christianity) doesn't seem possible.
There is a "post human" philosophical movement, interested in things like Schwarzenegger's character from The Terminator, but I think the philosopher and I shared an additional meaning equivalent to "extinction".
I would point to Reason magazine as an example of people using the word "Reason" to create a frame in which people who believe that people have the right to form unions or that the state should regulate pollution or provision health insurance or public schools.
If you withdraw to pure mathematics you'll find Godel, Tarski, Turing proved that there is no salvation in logic.
The collapse of master narratives leave us scrambling for meaning, finding some, but with the feeling the apocalypse happened some time ago (1945?) and we are now living in some movie like Mad Max.
If there is moral rot in postmodern philosophy it is the moral rot of the age which is documented here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism
(big in Japan because Japanese people think it describes the Tokugawa culture)
https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Contradictions-Capitalism-20th-Anniversary/dp/0465014992#customerReviews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
Mad Max is a fictional movie and has nothing to do with reality.
The greatest risk from climate change is not from natural disasters directly like in Pakistan, but the downstream effects of frequent severe weather events and warming of local climates. The loss of life and levels of migration will be much greater when critical infrastructure such as energy production, food production, and clean water supply, are impacted.
Either way, humans going extinct or being reduced by several orders of magnitude is a dire outcome, and we should be doing all we can to prevent it.
2000 people dead is bad of course, but there's 7.5 billion people on the planet right now, so it's not much really.
I really feel like you're looking at a worst-case scenario, comparing it to living in modern civilization, and concluding that modern civilization can't possibly survive such an extreme climactic change, and then concluding that humans will go extinct. I'm sorry, but that simply does not logically follow. Civilization can be destroyed, but this is quite different from all humans going extinct. The Mad Max movies may be fictional, but they do show how humans are able to survive in very extreme conditions, which has been proven countless times in history by humans who really did survive in extreme conditions (go talk to the Innuit for instance). Will 7.5B humans survive in such conditions? Obviously not. Will a few thousand? Quite possibly. It was only a very small number of humans that crossed the land bridge from Africa to the Middle East to populate the rest of the world.
I can't say which films were the most influential, but here's a list of ones which were at least as influential IMHO and also sort of stand on their own: Star Wars Trilogy (epic sci-fi), 2001: A Space Odyssey (hard sci-fi), The Thing (body horror sci-fi), Alien (body horror/dystopian sci-fi), Mad Max (post apocalyptic sci-fi), E.T. (family sci-fi? lol), The Terminator (post apocalyptic), Howard the Duck (still reading?), Predator (dunno?)
I could list a lot of others but I'll stop there.
I hope to see the next Mad Max movie as a visceral depiction of a wind, solar, geothermal, BEV, desalination tribe defeating the carbon tribe.
In replay of the recent election in Aus.
I'm not sure what the article is about, their bandwidth limit was hit. So, just responding to your comment:
I think one thing that "we are doomed" people miss is, no matter how badly we screw up, unless it is like Nuclear War, the world isn't going to switch into Mad Max/Walking Dead all over, overnight. If shit really does end up hitting the fan, it seems like these groups that are trying to prevent the problem are self-selected for people who are
1) aware of the problem, likely have some idea of what it will entail
2) are conscientious and proactively try to solve problems
In a post-apocalyptic movie these are the groups that end up turning into a cult or build a nice little village only to get wiped out right after the protagonist shows up, to show how grim and gritty the story is. But in the real world, seems like a pretty good post-realistic-crisis group to belong to, TBH.
Having seen that movie and a bunch of similar movies with well-done effects a lot of color work, the quality of the theater is extremely important. It, like Mad Max, shines on high-quality projectors with lots of illumination, and both fall flat if you can't have the contrast levels high enough. In theaters with modern digital projectors, it's a feast.
When I was a teenager, I probably would have dug violent vigilantism (like I enjoyed "Mad Max" when it came out at that time). My own art back then reflected a cynical, dark, post-apocalyptic future (likely inspired by films like "A Boy and His Dog" as an example).
Story time: in those days the "copy shops" were ma and pa (the way the original video rental stores were) and the nearest copy shop where I took some of my art to be "Xeroxed" was, apparently, run by a born-again Christian.
When I picked up my art he felt I needed a preachin' to. "Why spend your talents making the world a darker place?" Why not make positive art?" (Or something along those lines. I think "glory of God" was in there too and was in fact the tell.)
I thought at the time how boring that would be, how "non-cool", "non-art" that was. I laughed it off.
Three decades later I can begin to appreciate his disappointment in younger me. The world events since (and since I got older and started paying attention) have informed me that indeed there is already too many horrific (real) things in the world.
Older me now just can't enjoy, for example, a Quentin Tarantino film (no doubt teen me would have loved it though).
I have no interest in Frank Miller. I don't want to live in his world, don't care even to look at it.
I do on _very_ rare occasions.
Why? I'm fortunate enough to have gigabit symmetrical fiber, so streaming isn't an issue. That said, when viewing content on higher quality TVs and sound systems, there's a very perceptible improvement in both video and audio quality compared to streaming. For example, on my 65" LG C9 OLED with a Klipsch Atmos system, the difference is immediately noticeable.
Even with dedicated streaming hardware like new generation Apple TVs, which offer 4K streaming with Dolby Vision/Atmos, it still doesn't quite compare to physical media. Ditto for the native LG apps with identical options.
Of course, there are downsides. Good luck finding UHD content on physical media. Redbox doesn't offer 4K discs in my area, and local stores rarely have physical media in stock. Even with physical media, there's other annoyances--e.g. the Xbox One X produces a loud hum as the disc spins, not to mention the delay when seeking/skipping around.
That said, for rarified material such as Blue Planet (or anything by Attenborough)--or movies known for their sound quality like Mad Max--physical media can be sublime.
Dude get your facts right - the USSR and USA leaders were trying to bring global nuclear winter to thwart the global warming. They were willing to put humanity through suffering to save it. But their efforts were cut short by the deep state.
Which lead to the events in the documentary mad max.
This is a great question. The answer imho is that large creators can use crowd sourcing and leverage their reputation.
All they have to do is ask the public for money to make the next [say] Mad Max, Riddick, Startrek, Batman, etc etc
If the public doesn't want a new Startrek movie funding will be insufficient. It might have to happen on a smaller budget, not at all or simply have to wait until funds are sufficient.
New things (not sequels) can be done/advertised on the reputation of the studio, director, actors etc etc
I pay for production, I pay in advance for a cinema ticket, I get a digital download some months later.
Whatever copying happens after that is pure promotion.
Just rattling off the action movies I can immediately think of, I don’t believe any of which include a conspiracy in their plot/synopsis. The only action movie I can think of about a conspiracy is the movie Conspiracy with Mel Gibson, got any others?
- The Last Action Hero
- Robocop
- Karate Kid
- Baby Driver
- Rocky
- The Revenant
- Mad Max
- ConAir
- Terminator
Yeah, Mad Max movies show people fighting in the sunny desert over drops of oil to run their cars when solar panels and an EV would have been royal. 8^D
It is a trippy experience because many objects don't make sense, it's like solving a puzzle without having the reference image. I haven't watched about half of those movies, but of those I could instantly recognize Mad Max, Bill & Ted, Black Swan and Star Wars. The rest were enigmas. Maybe bigger images would make things easier.
Right. Moreover, it’s visibly memorizing specific images from the movies themselves. It’s very evident for Midsommar and Mad Max, where the renderings contain very idiosyncratic images from these movies which I can’t imagine emerging from mere descriptions of them. So I can only assume that the synopses for these movies contained the actual movie names.
Well. I guessed just one of them - Mad Max. However I've seen probably not more than 10 of those movies, so it's 10% success rate. Not so bad ))
That was fun! I got 16 right, if I’m allowed to count the wrong Willy Wonka and Mad Max. Many of the movies I didn’t get I’ve not seen and only barely heard of, so I certainly relied on guessing on famous movies where the themes in the picture are prominent.
My personal opinion... We've basically stopped watching Hollywood-fodder: it's largely formulaic, largely caters to the Politically Correct/Woke and seems intent on destroying the Good Stuff that came before. I'll give Mad Max, Alien and Jurassic Park as examples. Prequels? Sequels? How many sequels do you need? There's plenty of Good Stuff left though, and it needs a little research: look at what used to be called World Cinema and there are some real gems. You may need to get used to subtitles, but the works are inspiring and unlike the Hollywood Fast Food Burger movies will actually give you something to discuss afterwards.
They really are. I’m reminded of George Miller, who created and directed the Mad Max movies. Those movies are about how cars are terrifying death machines that shred human bodies. Miller said he was “inspired” after working several years as an ER doctor, seeing the damage firsthand.
why are bicycles nonexistant on post-apocalyptic stories?
Bikes are present (and maybe even integral to) some post-apocalyptic films like, Testament, Turbo Kid, The Stand. There are some media with no gas powered cars, like Adventure Time, and probably more.
However, for better or worse, Mad Max set the trope that the fight for fuel is often an interesting conflict. It's easy for a gas hungry viewing public to understand, at least!
Think this is bad? Does it raise a concern in you? Well, let me remind you of leaded gasoline and how it used to convert people in post apocalyptic savages taken right from a Mad Max movie - scientifically proven.
Electric vehicles can't come fast enough. We desperately need a battery tech revolution!
On the topic of ice cream trucks and monopolies, has anybody else seen the South Pico Armored Ice Cream Truck?
My best guess is that Los Angeles hands out its popsicle man contract to a single vendor with the caveat that they are required to serve the entire city, not just the profitable bits. That way every kid can get a fudgecicle on a sunny day.
That's the only way I can explain what I saw in the neighborhood south of Pico, near Little Ethiopia, where Mo' Betta Meaty Meat Burgers used to be.
Now if you don't know the area, there are a whole bunch of really cool houses dating back to around the time the movie Snow White came out, many with whimsical little turrets and minarets like little fairy tale castles. It's a pleasant neighborhood to walk around for an afternoon.
North of Pico, that is.
Immediately South, the lawns grow knee high, bars appear on windows, and the walkability declines... significantly. Mortally, perhaps. But there are houses there that could conceivably house children. So the Ice Cream must flow.
And one day in July, I saw what was clearly an Ice Cream truck, but with steel grill plates welded over all the windows with a little slot cut out with a torch that could theoretically be used to pass an ice cream sandwich through. That is, were it not weaving along at 45 miles an hour (playing its jolly tune as stipulated in the contract), then careening around a corner on two wheels to high tail it out of there.
It was the missing scene from Mad Max. The ice cream man of the apocolypse.
10 years later, I'm starting to doubt whether I really saw it.
But I did.
It is an interesting open question if, should the deal go through, Microsoft would maintain a strong content licensing deal with AT&T for WB, DC, and other brands to go with the sale.
I have a pretty bad impression that AT&T, and WB especially, doesn't have a good enough handle on its IP licenses to make a strong IP deal with Microsoft. (Such as the number of IPs that its own videogame companies once created but WB has no ideas if it owns the rights to them is fascinating. For instance, it's likely WB's fault that there will never be a re-release of No One Lives Forever. They have no idea if they have the rights to it, despite owning what's left of Monolith that developed it.)
> For example, the Mad Max game was their best open world entry, but it failed to reach sales expectations due to the lack of appeal of the media property.
Mad Max is pretty well regarded brand. My impression was that WB didn't know how to market the game, badly timed its release, and accidentally gave the first impression it was a direct "movie tie-in game" which has decades of game history of bad "movie tie-in games" against it. By the time reviews came it it was tough to overcome that first bad impression.
So far Microsoft doesn't seem to have similar marketing blunders in their games division.
> but I can judge their games output, and outside of Halo and Forza, there is nothing for me there
You might be surprised, They've bought a lot of development companies in the last two years and have been expanding back out from just Halo/Forza/Gears/Minecraft (and don't forget Rare!), after the late Xbox 360 sale/collapse/divestment of studios when they decided to focus more on publishing than first party development (Lionhead RIP, Bungie, Ensemble RIP, etc). Among others, Microsoft has lately picked up Double Fine, Obsidian, inXile, and created three or four development houses that haven't made major announcements yet other than logos and game developers leading them.
It'll be a few years before all the M&A/Development work bears fruit, changes their image beyond their "safe" mega-franchises.
Much of WB Interactive's studios have rich and interesting pedigrees and on paper it seems like the kind of risky opportunities they have been taking in their M&A strategy to beef up their first party development assuming they manage to untangle access to as much of the IP rights as they could from AT&T/WB. Especially if they got the Lego videogame license with the sale of WB's TT Games, that would create a huge force at Microsoft given they already own Mojang (Minecraft).
A bactery that eat oil and you have the movie mad max
Given the agricultural issues in that movie, perhaps the purification device was intended more to collect and concentrate the urea than to purify the water.
But that assumes the scriptwriter would have thought of that, which may be a stretch, given that Earth has insufficient water to cover all landmasses to a depth of 7 km. That would require about 3.6 billion cubic kilometers more water than already exists in the oceans, and there are only about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water on Earth to begin with, . Certainly there isn't that much locked up in glacial ice. That is only 26.5 million km^3, which is enough to raise sea level by a maximum of 52 m, far short of the 8 km it would take to cover everything but Mt. Everest.
Anyone who would skip that bar-napkin math was probably only putting that scene in specifically for the gross-out factor. It's just like Mad Max eating the can of dog food. Which is an apples-to-apples comparison, because Waterworld was written specifically to be an ersatz Mad Max.
> A small detail many forget is that Netflix pays very different prices for different shows.
Yeah, it's extremely annoying. Netflix essentially mocks its customers by keeping the best works just out of their reach. Almost every time I search for a classic film, I find its sequels instead. The film I actually wanted to watch was apparently too good for Netflix's pay grade.
Netflix has Terminator 1 and 3 but not 2; the first Mad Max but none of the others; Spider-Man 1 and 3 but not 2; several Hannibal movies and a TV series but not Silence of the Lambs; some Star Wars movies but not others; the list goes on...
Haven’t been through the Nullabor myself, but I can’t imagine it’s so treacherous that you can’t drag a few five inch HVDC conductors through it (which only need to be buried, no concrete channel or conduit required, to support ~2500MW of transmission capacity).
If I recall, that’s where the latest Mad Max film was filmed.
In the next episode of Mad Max.
It depends on how you define "collapse". If you mean they turn into a dystopian image of burned-out buildings, and a population looking like the Mad Max movies, then no, there has been no collapse. (At least not on a national level.) But if you define it via metrics related to the economy, employment, healthcare, quality of life, etc... then you get a different story.
I too enjoy the Mad Max movies.
Possibly a reference to the Mad Max movie...
Also what about more modest movies? If I'm not mistaken, Mad Max, Predator or Terminator were made with budgets that were ridiculous compared to their sequels.
Arguably Syria was/is Mad Max. It's a lot uglier than the movie, but the movie had standards of decency to fulfill...
I'm from Australia, the only thing that a grid without nuclear or coal has proven is that it can't deal with sustained demand. This year we came perilously close to having to choose which hospitals to cut power to when the there were two 40C days in a row.
If we have a week of that weather Mad Max will be a become a documentary.
> Were films a lot more divisive before 2010?
Honestly? Yeah, I think so. I'm not saying RT's rankings necessarily reflects this, but I think modern movies in general are a lot less daring than what hollywood used to produce. Probably after 2008 or so, but near enough to 2010, it seems they stopped taking risks on movies and really started to search out the lowest common denominator to have the greatest shot at mass market appeal, even when that meant gutting the plot, degrading the sophistication of dialogue. SFX budgets have gone through the roof, movies are filled with explosions and vivid colors, but little that stimulates the mind. Even the exceptions that most would hold up as poignant movies are generally quite mundane, almost always appealing to the most popular public sentiments.
Consider Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) at number 7 on that list, and Mad Max (1979). 2015 has no shortage of explosions and vivid colors to keep anybody glued to their seat and eating popcorn; the movie watcher doesn't have to put forth any amount of effort to enjoy it, they could walk in half way through the movie, look at their smartphone 90% of the movie, and still enjoy the small slivers of the movie they did see because the movie was made to be as widely accessible as possible, even to philistines who don't pay attention to movies they pay to watch.
Mad Max (1979) on the other hand doesn't make it onto this Top 100 list. RT gives it 90% from critics and 70% from audiences, which hints at why. 1979 is not as easy for the casual modern tech-induced attention deficit disorder afflicted movie consumer to enjoy. It's very far from non-stop action; it asks the viewer to pay attention even when things aren't exploding on screen. It's excellent, but the industry won't make another Mad Max like that again in the foreseeable future. They don't take risks like that anymore; not when littering the movie with 500% more explosions is so cheap and is so effective at shoring up the profit potential of a movie.
A lot of the removed U.S. content, is usually accessible in other countries (and vice-versa in some cases). I find more blockbuster movies when I am in Europe can be accessed via Netflix than in the U.S. (e.g. Black Hawk Down, House, Brooklyn 99, Lethal Weapon, Mad Max, Star Wars VII etc). There are a couple of search engines specific to find the right region.
Netflix from my understanding can pay less upfront for rights to well known movies outside the U.S. (https://flixed.io/newest-best-netflix-movies/).
The problem with Netflix from a non-U.S. region viewer is its lackluster offering of native language movies.
>Because of environmental issues (better to live close to work, less carbon pollution) and globalisation agenda, the rural areas of the world are lost forever. The rural areas will become as in the movie Mad Max, totally without and control from government.
Not necessarily -- at the first sign of disruption, e.g. a large economy crash, a peak oil related problems, climate change related catastrophes, it's the cities that will become like in Zombie movies.
Rural areas can be much more self-sustainable when it comes to the essentials.
(Someone feels invested enough in city life to downvote a pretty standard argument. And yet this is how people survived major wars and famines in the city in my country -- by having an outlet to grow vegetables etc. in the countryside).
Because of environmental issues (better to live close to work, less carbon pollution) and globalisation agenda, the rural areas of the world are lost forever. The rural areas will become as in the movie Mad Max, totally without and control from government.
Politicians will never address the rural areas in a positive way, because they know they will loose city votes. That’s why you always here generic promises, like “more police” and such, then they also get the city votes.
> may seem like something out of the Mad Max movie, truckers say they are often more akin to Robin Hood
> Imagine people doing gas-punk cosplay in a couple of decades.
Like some of those "Mad Max" movies?
How does that demonstrate what I said wasn't true? My point wasn't that all movies are bad or that good movies don't score well on RT. My point was that RT doesn't incentivize good movies. It incentives average and risk-averse movies.
It is also worth noting that none of the movies you listed are targeted at wide audiences. The most successful of the list was a surprise hit in Mad Max and even that was just outside the 20 biggest movies of its respective year. The others probably didn't even end up in the top 50 of the year. If you look at the top box office draws you will find the kind of movies I am talking about.
> Lower the taxes and don't let government get their hands on it at any stage of the process. This smacks again of redistribution of wealth and I'm totally against this.
Brilliant! I'm sure that startups will flourish in an environment where there is no functioning government. What I don't understand is why the movie Mad Max didn't show a vibrant startup community with flowing rivers of lattes and soylent, rather than the human misery that comes from the absence of rule of law, retirement, and health care.
Serious question, do you really want to live in a world devoid of "redistribution of wealth", where life is cheap, the working class is treated like disposable trash, and treatable illnesses are a death sentence?
What would it take to convince you that the wealthy contributing some of their riches back to society is the foundation for a functioning civilization?
What's with the comic book movie hate? Most of the Marvel ones are pretty good.
I'd say the one exception is the soundtracks. Movies used to have memorable soundtracks. Nowadays the soundtracks are pretty boring. They use a process of filming using another movies soundtrack nowadays and then going back and recording a soundtrack afterwards. It makes movies sound the same. It's cheaper to make but it makes the movie going experience cheaper too. It reduces one of the best parts of going to the theater, the sound system.
I'm pretty sure that Marvel used the soundtrack to Mad Max for the filming Winter Soldier and then went out and recorded for the winter soldier.
At least they'll have a post apocalyptic industrial set for the next Mad Max movie. Just need some pigs to make the gas.
Realistically, society can make a comeback from pretty much any conceivable catastrophy. Similarly to the situation in communist countries, where important things were scarce and money was worthless, surviving would depend on cooperation and mutual trust, not on defending your bunker and playing out a Mad Max movie.
While self-defense has its place I wonder which attitude would prevail.
Isn't Mad Max the film where paper is the most highly prized commodity, but everyone smokes cigarettes?
It's easy to forget that the vast majority of popular speculative fiction is utter bollocks and could never happen. I wish we had more "plausible" sci-fi.
>They're the only technology anyone understands
I wouldn't describe personal vehicles in such base terms, it's more that cars, trucks, off-road vehicles, etc are the only form of manufactured goods that are both suitable to the world portrayed in the films and widespread enough to be accessible to everyone.
All complex manufactured goods in such a world would be irreplacable, at least within the lifetime of anyone living in that time period. Radios and other electronics are also widespread and suitable enough to be considered a necessity but they'd be destroyed by the EMP effects of nuclear warfare (hence why every vehicle in Mad Max appears to be from the carburetor/pre-electronics era).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistuingishable from magic and although the mechanicals of a car are well understood by laymen, their existence carries an air of magic/reverence as they cannot be replicated by the society which possesses them. IMO, the closest comparison is that of a Cargo Cult rather than an extreme extrapolation of existing car culture.
Calling Mad Max movies a critique of car culture is like calling Blaxploitation movies a critique of racism.
Trying to make all of the Mad Max timelines fit into a single-generation timeline is hard at best.
Think about the kind of timescale needed for those War Boys to exist as an entire subculture, or for the Green Place to be populated and well-known before withering up and disappearing. The only way it makes sense to me is to consider it happening over generations - and yet in the first movie, the collapse of society is still only in progress.
I must watch Threads given all the talk about it in this thread, but I guess I'll be the lone dissenter that will come out and say that The Road was an absolutely horrible movie. I found it so drawn-out, boring, interminably long. I realize it was presenting life in a post-apocalyptic future, but that's no excuse to have no plot to truly speak of in its 111 minutes of runtime.
Then again, I hated Mad Max and only sat down to watch it at the theater because of the ridiculously-good critical reviews it had amassed. I found it a pointless exercise in hedonism and a testosterone-fueled car chase filled with gore and nudity for their own sake.
wait, Mad Max is not a documentary ;)
With a full scale nuclear exchange we would have a nuclear winter for a the first few years (when the radiation would be the highest). This is an interesting read that looks at actual US government procedures following and exchange. It's a bit dated, but was written during the height of the cold war. https://www.amazon.com/Day-After-World-War-III/dp/0670258806
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
I was pretty surprised, when I found out that Tom Holkenborg (Junkie XL, Composer of the film music for the new Mad Max movie) was using a Windows PC in his studio. Maybe more and more are moving from Apple hardware back to Windows hardware. Altough you still see most of the people using MacBooks for their live acts.
Yeah I think it is going to get really big in a sleeper hit kind of way, much of the material is just superb, like nothing you've ever heard on the traditional radio, which is almost all overly hyped boring rubbish.
Our Fair City I actually sponsor and I give money to the independent efforts that impress me.
Horror in particular is exceptional with audio drama. We're Alive is better than any recent horror or action movie I've seen for the last three-five years with maybe the exception of the recent Mad Max. In the non-fiction realm History is also going to become intense I think, Dan Carlin is going to get plenty of competition.
One of the things I loved about the original Mad Max film was that they nicknamed their own toddler 'Sprog'...
Well actually, "Gas Town" was mentioned in the latest movie. It and oil refining in general are also a significant part of the Mad Max video game. http://madmax.wikia.com/wiki/Gas_Town
> each film is a story about Mad Max that happened
That is what i think of it.
I think it is also important to notice that Max is barely aprotagonist of the movie. He is more like a walking plot device. He help the drama start and move along while not being the real focus of it. Max is more of an entity than a character.
Mad Max is a bad example. Max never spoke much after his family died in the first film.
There's been some movies about the future of US infrastructure. They usually have the name "Mad Max" in them.
I like looking at stuff like this, but it's a completely unrealistic view of humanity's future.
If we're really lucky, the cities of the future will look something like those in Blade Runner (minus the part about people living offworld) or Dredd, or even the Mad Max movies. But more likely, things are going to look more like 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, or the scene of the future in The Terminator.
> Global thermonuclear war (Alas Babylon, Mad Max, Fallout),
Pretty poor choice of references here. In terms of movies, "The Day After" is the most viewed movie of all time, and certainly one of the best references for the impact of Global Thermonuclear war and what happens next on an individual level if you even make it. Mad Max is a fiction as best that has about nothing to do with thermonuclear war (it just serves as a background to start the story, but you can't see any of its consequences).
A little shocked the author did not mention it at all.
If anything I'd say a movie license in the world of gamers is a chain around your neck, because there haven't been a lot of films that made the jump well. Mad Max did well because it was a legitimately good game, and while Metal Gear was a big deal, its not as big on the PC as in Sonyland.
Mad Max seems higher on that list than I would have expected especially launching alongside Metal Gear. The power of a movie license I guess.
Got to say, I haven't seen it, mostly because I know I would hate it. But one of my friends told me that they are destroying a death star. Again. For the 3rd time. Seriously? How many times are they gonna try?
"One can envision Hollywood eventually turning out only two products: "Star Wars" movies and James Bond movies, each periodically "rebooted" for a new generation of customers."
Absolutely love the conclusion. This is exactly what is happening right now. It's like every single new movie is a reboot. Mad Max, Ghostbusters, Robocop, Point Break, The neverending story...
The privacy aspects are not that important to me, I just want to get out of Google's increasingly irrelevant search results. I tried switching to DDG a couple years ago and it was a pretty meh experience, so I went back to Google.
But, I tried again just a couple months ago (I went whole hog and changed the search engine in chrome to ddg) and have been very impressed with it. It's been continuously worked on enough that it now serves about 90-95% of my daily search needs without any fuss and I actually prefer the way it presents images, semantic search and videos in search results over google's. It does a much better job at returning results for what I'm actually searching for and that's awesome.
For example in Google, if I search for "Mad Max" I get showtimes for "Mad Max: Fury Road" at the top and and imdb-like bit of information for "Mad Max: Fury Road" on the right (neither of which I searched for) and then a list of search results which these days are increasingly just links to Wikipedia's take on whatever I'm searching for (this time for "Mad Max" and "Mad Max (franchise)") followed by news on "Fury Road" the "Fury Road" video game, IMDB links to "Mad Max (1979)" and "Mad Max:Fury Road (2015)", etc. then trailers on youtube for both movies and links to the movie sites etc.
It's okay, I suppose, but Google first assumes I'm looking for "Mad Max:Fury Road" and fills the results for that, then I get links to WP and IMDB on the same topic (I could have just gone to those), except for WP it's not for Fury Road. And why no love for Thunderdome?
Guess what happens when I search ddg? I get a list of possible meanings, the first of which is "Mad Max" not Fury Road (that's #2), then a list of other possible meaning (which include Fury Road, the videogame, the Franchise, etc.). This is awesome, it's not assuming which meaning I want, and thereby getting it wrong like Google and the list of possible meanings is better ordered. Then the search results are better too, of course the prerequisite IMDB and WP links are there, but the top 4 results are for "Mad Max" (or the franchise) and not for "Fury Road"...I'm actually getting results for what I searched for, not for what it thinks I searched for. The mix of results after that is also "better" to my eyes, it includes a large fan site, which Google doesn't ever seem to get around to, Amazon, ebay, games, non-WP fan wikis, reviews, and so on.
Google seems intent on shoving the latest thing that the film studio marketing departments are currently pushing, while DDG provide links to information on what I actually searched for.
I've found this to be true for most of my searches. DDG is actually finding what I want instead of what Google wants.
About the only times I'm finding I'm using Google any more is in two cases:
* I've exhausted DDG's results and want to see if Google's bigger index has something else.
* Google's more sophisticated time constraints on searches. DDG just lets me order results, but Google let's me slice out results between time ranges, which I often find more useful for research purposes.
Bonus: Privacy, again not my main interest, but it's nice that it's there. !Bang syntax. I don't use many of them, but I find them useful (it's also how I execute google searches, just put a !g before my search in ddg).
Wishes: time-slice for search, someway to make it my default in mobile chrome on my android devices
> disregarding the pattern
To agree that it's a pattern, I'd have to agree that any single instance that you've listed is in fact "spying." Since I don't agree that any single instance is "spying," it is inaccurate to state that I'm "disregarding a pattern."
Would a personal secretary, paid to be going through my mail and email for me, sorting it, prioritizing it, making suggestions, be a "spy"? OF COURSE NOT.
Imagine I showed my secretary a text from my wife, reading, "Can we eat at Fogo de Chao, and then go see Mad Max?" I ask my secretary where the closest Fogo is, to help me book a reservation, and then to find showtimes and ratings for the movie. You'd call that "spying"?
> Anyway, I have better things to do than argue with trolls and/or fawning fans of spyware.
Someone who disagrees with you is automatically a troll or "fawning." They can't possibly have a reasonable position that disagrees with yours. Got it.
If you wanted to watch something in more detail, some minor celebrities in the Australian modified car scene did a marketing job for the movie and made their own "Mad Max" style car.
It's an S15 Silvia with an LS1 v8 on knobbly mud tyres.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp0KnUFYB--g_NcNczfkXW_T7izPjMHcI
> "This movie has so many cliches in it," a boy said (...) My son told him, "This movie was made in 1986. It invented all the cliches."
The first boy was right. It felt full of cliches even then. I watched it in eighties as soon as it was distributed to my place and I all the time I had that feeling of "boring 'we're the marines' movie." And I still can't understand why would anybody consider Aliens an interesting movie. The first Alien is however something else. And I was always amazed to later watch "The Dark Star" made before the Alien and find it (among the other things) an Alien parody made before the Alien(!) It's really so thanks to Dan O Bannon. Now that's something. Aliens... not even worth mentioning.
Watch Alien, watch The Dark Star. Forget the boring Aliens.
Disclaimer: I'm old enough that I've watched the Star Wars in seventies in my movie theatre. And Mad Max. And and and.. Of course Aliens were already cliches and cliches.
I have seen a lot of paintings and listened to plenty of music, but none had a significant impact. So IMO they if games fail to qualify as art so does painting, architecture, sculpture, music, and just about everything but books, movies, as possibly TV.
However, if simply having a strong emotional response is enough then something as simple as Unreal World can be really intense. Fear, Joy, despair, angst, longing, it covers just about every base except love. http://www.unrealworld.fi/
In the end what separates video games from all other art is the experience can vary greatly. Go and see Mad Max and sure you might respond differently but you see the same movie, play in a sandbox game and our experiences can be wildly different.
plus, if in the middle of the Australian outback, the datacenters can serve as the plot device for a 5th Mad Max film.
There are many people on this planet who are brilliant, but flawed. If you disregard all the brilliance because you dislike the flaws, you miss out.
Tom Cruise has made some fantastic films. But Scientology...
The Scopes Monkey trial eventually lead to evolution being taught in (most) schools... but Scopes was apparently pretty okay with Eugenics.
Mel Gibson was Mad Max... But he's a racist.
Fred Phelps won some important Civil Rights cases in the 60s... but Westboro Baptist Church, wtf man?
Card is a tool in his personal life, and I'll fight him tooth and nail on those issues. I still loved Ender's Game, and I still found this article cute and fun to read.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Much of this is true, but I think it's important not to look at the differences just through a lens of production values. Even worse to equation production values with merit or quality of the end product.
There have been several low budget films and tv shows that have become highly successful and well regarded, the same is and will be true in the online realm. Look at Mad Max, which was made for around a third of a million dollars, Primer, or Napoleon Dynamite.
But also it's not just production value or even quality but fundamental differences in character. TV was a different sort of beast than film, and even over the last decade commercial TV has changed a lot. Look at all of the independent content that sprang up on non-network TV channels, especially from HBO. A show like The Wire, or even more so The Corner, was very unlikely to ever be made within the confines of traditional network TV. TV has a different sort of character than film in terms of the sorts of productions that are suited for TV, and online video is different as well, but we haven't seen all of the ways that's so.
One example I'd highlight is the Lizzie Bennet diaries, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in vlog form of over 100 "episodes" of typical youtube length (~3-5 minutes).
Another example would be Periodic Videos (and related projects). These are educational videos about chemistry but because they don't have the length limits or requirements of traditional TV they can be focused on a single subject without being forced to add in unrelated filler.
Or, there's Lindybeige, who's likes to talk about medieval, classical, and bronze age technology and weapons. It's just a guy expressing his opinions and trying to back them up with experience or logic but it's frequently just as informative and interesting as watching a typical historical tv show.
I vividly recall walking west on Haight to The Alembic in the summer of '07...it felt like something out of Mad Max or a post-apocalyptic zombie movie.
FYI, if you have the IMDB ID for a movie, then you can link to Rotten Tomatoes using that IMDB ID.
Using the IMDB ID number, "0079501", you may access the Rotten Tomatoes Mad Max page using the following URL: Mad Max: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/alias?type=imdbid&s=0079501
I know you probably can't display the rotten tomatoes score, but it would be interesting to have that data internally.
I challenge anyone to find a movie with an RT score below 40% or IMDB score below 4/10 that was worth watching.
They probably could but the users don't want to pay the premium for that. PC users that always bring up the cost argument remind me of the guys from the mad max movies who build those insane looking frankencars. Why buy a BMW when you can get the parts to do the same thing from miscellaneous cars. Most PC users do care about design but not to the levels of detail that Apple puts into their computers. They want to spend the money where it counts for them and that's on the guts.
I voted no, because I don't really like zombie movies on balance. But I am a lover of film and cinema in general.
My beef with zombie movies is that they're usually cliche, and are going for "cheap scares" first and foremost. Often they're punctuated by gore for the sake of gore, and it's done tastelessly. Frequently there's a large cast that you feel no real attachment to and don't bond with, because they need lots of people to kill in a variety of ways.
But the upside: Apocalyptic scenarios in general give lots of options for plot and character development and interaction. I'd say take a look at something like Mad Max - it's a bit campy at times, but I remember some very interesting scenes. There was a relatively small cast that you developed some attachment to, and the sometimes slow pacing made the heavy action scenes really stand out.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a zombie movie with really exceptional acting and minimal cliches. (If someone who is a fan of this genre can recommend one, I'll check it out). What I'd want out of a zombie movie is focus on character development of just a few people who interact with a broken world. And the filmmaker resisting the temptation to have the "dumb, defiant, big-boobed blond girl who doesn't listen to the leader and thus gets impaled on a fence and eaten" - the zombie scenario itself isn't unsuitable for a good movie, but the execution in these films leaves a lot to be desired.
For inspiration into some unique elements, you might check out the first two Fallout games. It's been a few years and I've not checked out the third, but the first two had some interesting scenarios and plots. In particular, humans interacting with other humans during the apocalypse/zombies could lead to interesting dilemmas and development. In Fallout, the world had fallen apart, and yet there were still people being really petty and villainous instead of uniting. This jives with my understanding of human nature, and makes the games more interesting. Human/human conflicts amidst a zombie background could be a fascinating way to break from the cliches.
What happens when the "economy collapses tomorrow"?
It's horrible. The world becomes a combination of the movies "28 days later" and "Mad Max," almost instantaneously. The only glimmer of hope is roving bands of freedom fighters grown out of the ranks of former bloggers who had the prescience to comment frequently about gold-backed currency.
Um ... I think they covered that already in "Mad Max" ... didn't work out too well if I recall the movie correctly.