A New Road Warrior

According to this article on aintitcool, we're again hearing rumors about FURY ROAD.

I've been keeping my ear to the ground on this project since I first came out to LA. THE ROAD WARRIOR is in the very short list of my all-time favorite movies, right up there with CONAN THE BARBARIAN, ROBOCOP and THE BIG LEBOWSKI.

I've seen ROAD WARRIOR dozens of times, and I can pretty much guarantee I'll watch it at least a hundred times in the course of my life. If such a thing exists, it is as close to a perfect movie as I can imagine.

THUNDERDOME, though... I put that right up there with ROBOCOP 2 and CONAN THE DESTROYER. The first time I saw it, I thought the Thunderdome fight was pretty cool, and the rest of the movie sucked. I saw it again a couple of years ago, and it's a really mediocre action sequence... The inspiration begins and ends with the idea.

It's indicative of the kind of pseudo "out of the box" thinking that seemed to plague the town in the '90s, the same type of development that ruined the ALIEN franchise. "Ha-ha! What if Mad Max shows up and he doesn't even have a car? Crazy, huh? Am I right?!" I'm all about applying fresh ideas to projects, but sometimes if it ain't broke, don't fix it. "Ha-ha! What if the Terminator wasn't even a cyborg! Crazy, huh? Am I right?!" Shut the fuck up.

Everything about THUNDERDOME drives me insane. The train, the kids, the song, the long stretches without action, the lame-ass delivery of what little action we get, a guy who gets conked on the head with a frying pan... ugh, it's like MAD MAX BEYOND THE GOONIES.

My point isn't to bitch about a movie I don't like... It didn't magically erase the first two movies from existence, so it's like, fuck it, I'll just move on with my life and not watch that one.

My point is: I'm praying to the Hollywood Gods, "Please-please-PLEASE don't fuck this up." I'd be sweating bullets if we hadn't seen such awesome movies come along in the past couple of years. In the '90s we had BATMAN & ROBIN, now we have THE DARK KNIGHT. In the '90s we had THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, now we have CASINO ROYALE. Does this mean in the '90s we had THUNDERDOME, so now we'll have... FURY ROAD, and that same uptick in badassery?

Fingers crossed. You can never make another MAD MAX or ROAD WARRIOR... Shit man, that was lightning caught in a bottle twice. But they're both fantastic movies in similar-yet-different ways, which means if you adhere to the core concepts of the franchise (Like, for instance, Max drives a fucking car... Crazy, huh? Am I right?!) while still taking a new spin on things, there's a chance we can pop the cork on a third bottle.