Mad Max Fury Road. They defeat the tyrant, and get the control of the water valves. Then they open the valves and seemingly keep them open. One problem, how long is the water reservoir gonna last now?
Logan’s Run. The city dwellers are freed from the computer’s iron-fisted rule, and Carrousel. But their city is in ruins, and thinks to the computer providing everything. They don’t know how to live without it. The city dwellers are going to start dying off real fast.
“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”
Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.
I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.
Thinking back on that series, I’m still kind of amazed at what we witnessed with S8. Not the season itself, obviously, but the phenomenon of it.
GoT was a huge fandom. Everybody was talking about it, for years. People were fuckin’ naming their kids after those characters.
And then S8 happened and the whole thing was just gone. That entire enormous fandom erased more or less overnight. A moment of confused outage and then… silence.
I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it.
Well they went off piste! Until then they had been in or close to the track that George RR Martin had laid out.
If you watch, binge, all seasons se08 becomes more logical. There are small markers all over the series predicting it all. I didn’t pickup those at first (weekly) watch.
I say more logical, not logical.
Se01-se06 are still TV magic. Se07 (dany’s attack on the lannister convoy comes to mind) still is good and se08 just speed runs everything.
I still think that was their only true mistake: speed running the season. It gave us everything we wanted. But in such a way nobody could enjoy it all. Jaime finally becoming true good only to return to his true love? (some very powerful acting there) Check. The long night? Check. End of the night king? Check. Ice dragon? Check. Arya voyage finally given meaning? Check. Jorahs redemption? Check. Cleganebowl? Check. Cersei dies? Check. Return of the mad king queen? Check. Theon’s redemption? Check. Destruction of kings landing? Check. Etc etc etc. It ticks all the boxes and more you didn’t even know they existed. It’s just that it ticks them in such an insane speed which results in gaps in the storytelling. Gaps of which some are filled if you binge it all but most will not.
Se08 had to be 2 seasons. Season 8, ending with the long night, se09, the fall of the red keep.
Yes, the 2nd dragon had to die for the sake of the story. Missandei had to die to cement Cersei being the baddest cruel bitch and complete dany’s arc to insanity. But like this? That was stuff for an entire episode. Not the final three minutes of one.
It’s a beast to wrap up and hit all those notes and do it before the heat death of the universe. That’s why we haven’t gotten a book in a decade, and likely never will again.
The hubris to think you can do it in eight episodes of television? Unimaginable.
The Land Before Time. They’re still all going to get hit with a meteor
On a slight tangent, how come in the Mad Max movies (not the first one) the ‘societies’ he encounters seem to be the products of multi-generational effort, especially Fury Road.
In the first one, there’s a more or less functional world almost as we know it. Then he goes out into the deserts and it’s like 100 years passes.
Max is not just one guy. He is an amalgamation of road warriors remembered in legends by the post-apocalyptic societies they helped
That’s one way to interpret it, but I don’t think the movies ever actually tell us that. The game certainly suggests something else entirely.
That bothered me too. I binged them all before Fury Road and it was a real whiplash to go from “All the houses are smashed up, there’s bits of siding everywhere and everyone has guns” to “These people live their whole lives on stilts in a fetid swamp like some sort of crazy flamingo men, but that doesn’t matter right now, keep driving”. It seems like more time would have to pass.
Two things here explain this for me. One someone already mentioned I don’t believe Max is one person I think he is a legendary figure that gets merged into one person as people talk about their local heroes. The other is I always viewed the first movie as one of the holdouts of old civilization. For whatever reason that region had the resources to be in a more normal state for longer. When Max fucks off into the desert he’s going deeper into areas that are more desperate and have been hit harder by everything. We don’t know the full landscape of everything. The bat shit stuff we seen in later movies could be relatively isolated even but the society that does remain could be more like city states that dont have the power to go in and control the wild areas.
Max is a pseudo-mythological figure. It’s never clear in the movies how much time has passed. Word of writers says that he’s multiple people retold as one person in retrospective story, but the movies don’t show that so you can take or leave it. The game has him as an immortal doomed soul.
Whatever is the case, I think it’s pretty clear we’re not supposed to take the story we’re told about Max via the movies as told completely faithfully.
Title gore
Snowpiercer: Sure, there’s some evidence the world is warming, but at current there are two people, a bear, and no real shelter other than a rapidly cooling train. Just how long do they expect to survive?
The Graduate: Ends with the famous fading smile. Sure, you ran off together… now what?
Morbius: The central conflict of the movie is that the vampires who drink real blood go feral but are more powerful, and those who drink artificial blood are weaker but in control. Morbius is under time pressure because the artificial blood is becoming less and less effective, so he’ll eventually have to drink the red blood or die. He got a temporary victory killing Matt Smith, but due to the incompetence of the studio the actual real conflict of the movie is never actually resolved.
I always interpreted Snowpiercer (the movie) as being somewhat ambiguous about whether there were other people. We only have the word of people we already know are authoritarians that lie to keep order.
