Playing Catch-Up

[netgirl_y2k]

Having been excessively charmed by the trailer, I caved and watched the leaked Supergirl pilot and it was exactly as lovely as I'd wanted it to be, even if it is little more than an expanded version of the trailer (all the trailer footage, I'm almost sure, came from the pilot).

I adored how they went out of their way to give every iconic Superman shot they could think of to Kara; saving a plane, striding through burning rubble, and ripping open her shirt to reveal the S... although in addition to wondering how no-one has noticed that Supergirl is Kara with her glasses off and hair down, we can all also wonder how she manages to fit the skirt from her uniform under her regular clothes?

It's exactly as bright and cheerful and slightly cheesy as you want something in the Superman-verse to be; fuck off, Man of Steel, and take whoever it was who wanted to make a grim take on Superman with you.

The scene where Kara's boss has to explain to Kara why the name Supergirl isn't insulting felt kind of forced, but I understand why it was included; yes, the name Supergirl could be seen as infantilizing and patronising, but that's what the character's called, so might as well lampshade it and move on.

Kara and Alex; man, I have such a weak spot for fictional siblings, and the way that Alex being in danger is what spurs Kara to embrace her powers, the way Alex is realistically jealous of Kara but still adores her... I was never not going to love them.

I saw some criticism that the Supergirl trailer was very like the SNL parody trailer for Black Widow, and that's actually true, but the problem isn't with Supergirl, it's with treating female characters like they're interchangeable, and putting limits on the sorts of stories they can be in. Putting Black Widow in a rom-com setting isn't funny because rom-coms are necessarily bad, although of course they can be, it's funny because she's Black Widow. That sort of setting actually works for a character like Kara.

And, I'm sure this will change as the series progresses, but there wasn't actually any overt romance in the pilot. There's Kara's crush on James Olsen, and the dude who designed Kara's costume whose name I didn't catch, his crush on her. But Kara's most meaningful relationship seems to be with her adopted sister, which is awesome, and I hope continues.

Anyway, I very much enjoyed it and am looking forward to more.

And I have belatedly seen Mad Max and I think whatever marketing exec came up with the strategy not to talk about the plot in the promotional stuff knowing that all the dudes who were going to see a Mad Max movie come hell or high water were going to come opening weekend anyway, and that when a subset of them started screaming about feminist propaganda on the internet they'd get a whole different audience of people going feminist propaganda, you say? that guy is probably going to marketing exec heaven because that's genius of super-villain proportions.

Although, dudes, if We Are Not Things is your idea of feminist propaganda then I both pity and fear you.

I loved the basic We Are Not Things theme, obviously. I loved Tom Hardy's confused puppy face. I loved the Five Wives, especially The Splendid Angharad. I loved the relationship between Furiosa and Max, which basically boiled down to: I have decided to trust you angry, muzzled dude, so better be trustworthy. I loved Furiosa's everything - I read an interview with, maybe George Miller? where he said that Furiosa was necessary because if it's Max that steals Joe's wives, then that's a man stealing women from another man, which is a different and kind of distasteful story, which is the sort of thoughtfulness I'm not used to from Hollywood blockbusters.

The ending was awesome, so were the Many Mothers. I with there were more stories of post apocalyptic matriarchies.

That said, I'm not a fan of action movies, car chases, explosions, or protracted fight scenes, and found myself bored a lot of the time.

The world building falls down if you think about it for more that 0.3 of a second. This is soon enough after the apocalypse that all the cars run and Max remembers once being a cop, but long enough that society has completely collapsed and rebuilt itself along such different lines that people can genuinely be called Imperator Furiosa.

I shall file this under things I wanted to like more than I did.

Comments

[endeni]

Actually, I'm almost sure that for the Supergirl trailer they could only use pilot footage because by the time they put it together they had only shot the pilot, who IIRC was filmed months in advance... :D

And I think 'Imperator' is a crazy title Immortan Joe gives his lieutenants - we see other two Imperators with the same make-up as Furiosa standing by his side in the very first scene with him, when he is at that balcony overseeing the departure of Furiosa's convoy. But yes, what kind of name is Furiosa? She gets called that by the Vulvanini too so I guess it's her real name. Except the other Vulvanini have normal names LOL

[netgirl_y2k]

Oh, that would make sense about Supergirl, yes. I actually saw it suggested that unlike the Game of Thrones leak, the Supergirl one might have been deliberate to drum up some buzz, which if true has definitely worked on me.

Yeah, that's what threw me - like if Furiosa was just some crazy road rage name she'd given herself, fine, but somebody named a child that... hmmm. Like, I think it was that all of the other characters seemed to have been born into this post-apocalyptic wasteland, whereas Max's damage seemed to be trauma from having lived through the end of the world, which left me confused as to what sort of timeframe we were working with; also, the cars still run???

[endeni]

I didn't watch the previous Mad max movies but I've been assured by my boyfriend that while the first one is kind of an origin story (drawing out Max's original drama too), the last two have a very similar structure to Fury Road, in that Max just stumbles upon some kind of situation where he has to help other people. What makes me more lenient toward Fury Road crazy time-frame, as you said, is that my head-canon for Max is one in which he is some kind of solitary, more-than-human mythical figure, going around this post-apocaliptic world, always young and trapped in his trauma, someone who suddenly slips into other people's lives and problems only to vanish back just as fast once he has done his part.
Well, hopefully that made some kind of sense to you... :D
I just really liked the metaphorical tone of this movie and I think my head-canon explanation would fit right in.
(Also, the Mad Max fandom is turning out to be a source of so much delicious meta! Have you had the chance to read recessional's Wives and milked women and Max Mad and being non-verbal meta posts?)

/also, the cars still run???/ - Well, that's really weird. Possibly whoever is in charge of gastown (which I guess has some kind of oil well) is dealing with car repairs too? though where would they get spare parts is beyond me...

[fyrdrakken]

I am late to reading this post but I was also late to seeing the movie, and somewhat spoiled beforehand. A podcast I heard a few days before I saw it advanced the theory that the Max in the movie wasn't the original Mad Max, but rather a kid from the second movie who found Max's body after he was eventually killed and took on his car and jacket and name and legend. Doesn't quite work with his ghosts and flashbacks, unless you assume he's had fuckups of his very own to be guilt-ridden by, which also works -- but Furiosa was evidently kidnapped from the Vuvalini like 20 years before the start of the movie, and the Green Place with the Many Mothers setup does indeed sound like it was already post-apocalyptic when she was growing up there. (This was ursulav's podcast with her husband, where in and around sampling discussing and rating pre-packaged foods they talk about any damned thing. She's a gardener and was absolutely thrilled that agriculture played such a thematic role in the movie. And also contemplating Vuvalini cosplay at her next con.)

[netgirl_y2k]

I remember hearing that theory, which worked well enough for me as a person who's never seen the previous movies, but as you say doesn't quite gel with Max's flashbacks and guilt.

My personal theory is that the world didn't all collapse at once, and Max used to live in some isolated corner of civilisation (his line "I was a cop, a road warrior" would refer to his being more of sheriff type than a traffic cop in Melbourne) that was eventually overrun by War Boys or similar, and that's what Max's trauma dates from. It's the only way I can get the timeline to add up.

[fyrdrakken]

And then not long after the above comment I ran across Warren Ellis talking about seeing Fury Road with his daughter and then coming home and catching the very first Mad Max movie on TV and her being all, "Holy shit, this doesn't look postapocalyptic at all," which led him to point out that the first is just an action movie about a tightly-wound cop and that the whole set of movies in chronological order shows society collapsing into chaos and now Fury Road is the survivors gathering up the pieces and figuring out how to start rebuilding.