What are some happy endings that really wasn't all that happy?

Hal-5700X@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 121 points –

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.

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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

I feel like that's the official answer that they came up with to explain the differences in the settings between the films. It works, but only because there was a problem for it to fix.

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.

I love how the video game does it. It makes more sense Max is a doomed soul forever wandering the wasteland never able to rest. And how all the time has passed but he still remembers earth before

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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.

Then he goes out into the deserts and it’s like 100 years passes.

It's like Arizona, only in reverse!

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.

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