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Mad Max Fury Road is one of my favorite movies, and personally I regard it as the best action film since The Matrix. Nothing has dethroned it yet (Though M:I-Fallout got close).
So needless to say, I was very excited to hear that George Miller was returning to the world for a prequel about Furiosa. What an excellent cast! The trailer looks great! It was my most anticipated film last year.
I was severely disappointed. Though the cast was great and the additional world building was interesting, I found myself checking my watch through it’s extended run-time, never really engaging with the film and feeling like it never got off the ground. I wasn’t just disappointed, I was kind of heart broken.
I’ve spent the time since seeing the movie trying to figure out what exactly didn’t work for me, and it comes down to my favorite word: pacing. That lean and mean momentum and energy of Fury Road had been replaced with a bloated run-time, needless scenes, stops and starts, and the movie never fully gets in motion. An incredible mid-film action sequence on the war rig comes too late and doesn’t do enough to keep the movie moving forward. It’s just too long, too slow, and lacks oomph.
futon88 made a great edit of the film already that I encourage you to check out, but my intentions are a bit more aggressive.
So I’m giving a fanedit a go, with the intention of getting the movie down to 2 hours or less and replicating as much as possible that momentum that Fury Road carried with it. That means I’ve got to cut roughly 30 minutes, so a lot is being ejected, but I’m hopeful that the movie may feel more satisfying for those that felt it didn’t quite work like I did.
Some overall notes:
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Cut the narration, chapter title cards, subtitles for locations, and anything else that needlessly stops the film.
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Cut quite a lot of the over-explaining of the wasteland, part of it’s charm is that George Miller is the only person that really understands it.
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Speed up the first half of the movie significantly to get to adult Furiosa sooner. The majority of the cuts to the film will happen before the war-rig sequence.
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Significantly increase the pacing of Furiosa’s kidnapping and the desert chase that follows.
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Cut Dementus finding the wayward War Boy in the desert. We don’t really need to know why he’s decided to attack the Citadel.
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Cut Dementus coming up with the “disguised war boys” plan after capturing the war-rig from Gas Town. We get all the information we need when we see them enacting the plan.
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After Furiosa escapes from Rictus, jump forward to her already being embedded with the the black thumbs as they start work on the war rig.
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Remove references to how long the war with Dementus is, and speed up the section where she makes her robotic arm and cuts her hair.
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Cut from “I need a vehicle” to Furiosa already pursuing Dementus.
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Cut the “multiple deaths” of Dementus, going straight from the desert to him under the tree.
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Various micro-cuts for pacing throughout.
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Slight adjustments to saturation and film grain, and the addition of some slight camera shake to certain shots to give the film a less “digital” look.
I’ve already got the movie down to exactly 2 hours, but I need to go through and make sure I haven’t “over cut” it and that the emotional beats still resonate. This one isn’t far off from release.