Lima

For me, the best episode of the franchise. It's not as unbearably loud as the first one, nor as visually aggressive as second one, or as shallow in plot as in the third one, which bordered almost on a Mexican soap opera. It has proper with, unexpectedly funny scenes, good visual ideas, and during action scenes the camera circles the space in an interesting way and chooses unconventional angles. And the biggest surprise is the one I least expected it from. Martin Lawrence may still be a pain in the ass, but holy wonder, he's funny here too. Starting with the unwanted "visit to the beyond" the goofiness and his sort of messiah complex make sense and I just enjoy the dude as an actor, unlike, say, the king of awkwardness Kevin Hart. The only one who spoils it a bit is the character of Will Smith's son, the youngster just can't act and in all the scenes he looks equally impassive, as if he's not even enjoying it.

Mad Max is an Australian cultural treasure that should have only stayed at three or four episodes. For the first hour, it felt like a sequence of mini-stories, with the disgustingly overacting Chris Hemsworth twitching like a pigeon eating grain and his performance actually making it into a kind of interlocking semi-comedy sketches that I really don't want to see in the Mad Max saga. He was the weakest link in the film. The other one was the overuse of obvious green-screen and over-stylized colors. Back then, years ago, with the first two episodes, I admired the punk spirit that came out of them. A punkness that was related to the low budget, when everything was handmade, so to speak, when the wastelanders were played by real bikers, the cops by real cops, the props were invented in the breaks during filming, and it exuded a wildness and realness that George Miller partially revived in the equally wild Fury Road. This is rather closer Thunderdome, which was also over-stylized and implausible in its depiction of the post-apocalyptic world. I didn't believe it. Mad Max doesn't benefit from a swollen budget because then Miller can't keep it up and in trying to cram in as much as possible, it's like that dog and cat fairy tale where they cooked a cake with so many ingredients that it made them puke (the quarry scene is too over the top). As time goes on, you find that you don't really care much about Furiosa's fate because, unlike Mel Gibson, she's not a pivotal defining character for you, you don't experience it with her, and you pray all the while that there's as little Hemsworth as possible. In fact, the only thing worth singling out is the ten-minute attack on the tanker, because you can feel the punk genuineness of it, where the stuntmen have honestly worked their magic along with those who came up with the choreography. And that's not enough for me, George. Too little.

In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, Hollywood made about 270 low- and high-budget sci-fi films, and this piece is one of the last representatives of the 'Golden Age of vintage sci-fi', when the demand for this type of films gradually began to wane. Very nicely produced, with nice visual effects and a cinemascope format that was not standard in sci-fi films. It's basically the granddaddy of Ridley Scott's The Martian, 50 years older. Here too, a stranded lone astronaut struggles to survive on inhospitable Mars, and in fact the entire first half is a bit of a solo for him, his ape companion and one inhabitable cave. It's all commensurate with the scientific knowledge of the time, of course, so our hero parches around Mars without an oxygen mask, indulges in a refreshing bath, in short, things Matt Damon could only dream of. Towards the end, it turns into total nonsense, with a native "Friday", aliens whipping deadly rays from a flying saucer in orbit, and changing ecosystems that include fresh snow. The whole thing looks pretty nice, but I can't shake the impression that the long running time is rather untenable given the sparse filler.