Over Several Evenings: Mad Max: Fury Road - Black & Chrome Edition

I hate watching movies in parts.  By design, movies are to be seen from start to finish. It’s long-form story telling.  Short-story short: I watched this movie in two parts.  I made it about halfway through then had to go to sleep, cause I’m an old 20-something.

Also, I just remembered the hotkey to italicize, so expect to see a lot of italics.

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Mad Max: Fury Road - Black & Chrome Edition. Here's What I Thought About It.

From the Fandango Website

"Have I mentioned how cool the action in this movie is?  It’s cool.  It’s super cool.  Well choreographed and everything.  Just watch it."

It’s hard to recommend this movie – I guess, I just assume everyone’s already seen the vanilla Mad Max: Fury Road.  It’s an extraordinary action flick.  It’s so good - and that’s a shame, if only because I haven’t seen a movie like this in some time (this came out two years ago… But - you know what I mean).  I think you should only watch Black & Chrome if you LOVED the original Fury Road.  For all intensive/intents and purposes: it’s a slightly worse version of the movie.  Let me explain.

I was lead to believe this would be a straight-up silent re-cut of the film; with title-cards and everything.  No one told me this; I just told myself this enough times I took it as Mad Gospel.  This is the same Fury Road you’ve seen, but in black and white – sorry, black & chrome.  This movie is ostensibly a recoloring of an existing movie with only cosmetic changes; because of this, this writing will pretty much just talk about color – A lens with which I don’t normally see the world.  That was a joke.

The re-coloring – sorry, de-coloring - definitely changed the film into a different piece of art completely.  This version had texture; in a way the original did not.  This movie takes place 100% in a dessert.  There is a lot of sand.  Sand is gritty and gets everywhere, to Anakin’s chagrin.  When seen in color, said colors are vibrant and distracting, and the implied grit is distracted by the color.  It didn’t take me long to realize I liked the color version better.  I’ve seen this film a lot, and I am accustomed to the bright yellows, oranges, reds, etc.  Black & Chrome still looks great - but I kind of feel I was spoiled seeing it in color first.  I will say there were several moments where the use of a high-contrast black-to-white gradient was astounding.  Are italics best here?... astounding.  Bold is better.

A few moments:

• When Immortan Joe breaks back into his breeding thunderdome, the words scrawled on the walls and floor look cool.
• The Guzzoline altar the Valhalla boys go to looks like an old-school alta: light reflecting off chrome rims and steering wheels.
• When the Valhalla boys drive into the Sandstorm after Furiosa’s caravan it looks awesome.  The storm cloud has a gradient from pitch-black to grey, placed against the white sand.  Looks super-doops cool.
• When Max wakes up with his head in the sand.

As much as I would love to tell you more about MM:FR-B&CE; it’s important to note this is when I had to go to sleep.

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Just like how I waited several days to finish watching the film; I had to wait several days to finish my writing.  I know; conceptual.

Once you recognize Day-Into-Night, it’s hard to ignore.  Day-Into-Night is when they shoot a night scene during the day, desaturate it, then blue the screen to Tobias’ preference to get the “night-time” look.  Night in the regular Fury Road functions well; it feels like night.  In Black & Chrome there is no blue to rely on, and in turn the night scenes look and feel like day-time, but with cloud cover.   I mean, I get what that could mean:  Increased fossil fuel consumption messed with the clouds and the layers of atmosphere dot dot dot would essentially make everything daytime all the time – “Night” is still sunny, just slightly dimmer.  But it doesn’t really work for me here.

Fury Road was the first Mad Max I saw.  I’ve since seen them all, and one thing I’ve noticed is that he isn’t ever really the main character.  Max is a drifter who stumbles into situations and stories.  The only exception is - Max 1, where he’s seeking revenge after the death of his family.  In Max 2: Drive Angry, he drives a big truck for a crew of folks seeking revenge on some dudes, but it’s clear they were going to do this anyway – he just helped.  In Max 3: Tina’s Short Turn to Acting, Max just gets thrown into the Thunderdome to deal with Tina’s minions, whilst also helping in a coup against Tina – But this time it’s the Lost Boys seeking revenge.  And in Max 4: Drive Angrier, he just jumps into Furiosa’s story in progress.  It’s really her movie, honestly.  The beauty of this character is that he feels like a real person in the post-apocalypse; Max is not the savior movies like these tend to have.  It’s pretty cool.

Have I mentioned how cool the action in this movie is?  It’s cool.  It’s super cool.  Well choreographed and everything.  Just watch it.

Some more black and white visual treasures:

• When the dude with bullet-teeth says he is the “scales of justice.”
• The dirt bike caravan jumping around.
• Everything in the green place.  The sand is powdered-sugar white, which contrasts great against the lone power tower out there.
• Furiosa screaming into the sun looks pretty cool.

Also it's worth noting that George Miller originally wanted to make this movie in black & white.  I wish we could have seen that black & white movie, rather than this colorful movie de-colorized.

Final Thoughts:  If you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road in its original color version, I recommend you watch that first.  Then if you really like that – then maybe pop in the B&C version.  If Fury Road had an arbitrary grade: it would be an A, and the Black & Chrome Edition would be an A- .


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-Jacob