''MAD MAX: Fury Road'': A Cli-Fi Movie for 2015 and nominated for the Cli Fi Movies Awards for best picture and best director: SEE korgw101.blogspot.com
Is there an environmental ''cli-fi'' message at the core of George Miller's new high-octane "Mad Max" film? YES!
CALL-OUTS from text: the director speaks:
''There is an environmental story, but it's in the subtext. The sad thing is that it doesn't really require much exposition for the audience to buy a degraded world, because we already see evidence of it happening all around us.''
''Yeah, [in the film] we call them toxic storms. But even that's not too far from the truth. In Australia, when the conditions are right, you get these great dust storms moving across the landscape and often into the cities. In the middle of the day, the sun will be eclipsed by this mass of red dust. I've been in a couple of them; most Australians have. We just take it further in the film. But the movie's not trying to chronicle the world's environmental collapse. It's saying, "Here is the world that remains." It's spare and elemental. And within that context, you play out a morality tale.''
Our characters don't just fetishize cars; they worship them as religious artifacts. There's a group of warriors that we call "half-life war boys" who are doomed to die young, and they worship cars because the machines endure when they know they themselves will not. Steering wheels become religious symbols. One character has scarified a whole engine block on his body. They want to become the machines.
''Well, we've taken the fetishizing of cars to a religious point, which is definitely a commentary on car culture. The thing is, I love silent films, which were very much driven by chase and action. I see them as pure cinema. So that's my conflict: I really do like action movies, even though I worry enormously about the degradation of the planet.
''Compared to, say, passenger jets flying across the globe, the carbon footprint of this film isn't all that significant, because it's a relatively brief event. All those cars stacked up on freeways around the world—that's constant. When you film a big explosion, you don't do two takes; it's a one-off event that at most lasts 15 seconds. I remember with Happy Feet, there were people arguing the hypocrisy, because we were using electricity to run our computers to make the animation. I mean, OK, if you wanted to be a purist about it, then you'd do nothing.
''There's an interplay between the two. When you give someone a purely logical argument, you're only involving the intellect. Which is fine in itself, but it's not a story. A story touches the entire human being. It works with the viscera, with the intellect, and with the spirit. If a story is any good, it will follow you out of the theater. It will come back to you, and you will reflect on it. That's my greatest hope as a storyteller, really. In the end, there's no ideological agenda here. I'm just telling a story in response to the way that I perceive the world.''
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