No doubt many of you are aware of the "Black and Chrome" version of
Mad Max: Fury Road that was recently released. Director George Miller originally wanted to release
Fury Road in black and white to give it an art movie feel, as the studio wouldn't go for that his other options was desaturation or over-saturation. He chose latter, and while Fury Road certainly works in this way it just doesn't work in black-and-white. It could be because of the editing or the additional action sequences, or most likely simply because
Fury Road is an awesome brain-melting spectacle that is doing so much you need the saturated colour to convey a full range of information for maximum impact, in which it completely succeeds. (
Book of Eli certainly worked well enough in B&W but again even then there was a washed-out look to the film.)
However, Miller got the idea for a b&w movie back when he was working on
Road Warrior (aka
Mad Max 2). When the composer was scoring that movie (sadly, original movie scores are becoming rarer and rarer nowadays) Miller dropped by and saw he had a black-and-white print playing so he could get the beats. Seeing this was what gave him the idea for doing this to
Fury Road, but I don't think it really works.
To be clear,
Mad Max and
Road Warrior (not to mention
Thunderdome and
Fury Road) are absolutely primo material and make me wish Crossbow and Chassis got it's own revamped rule set, if not a unique parallel game history. However, what some friends and I did after playing some Car Wars was to check out the first few minutes of
Road Warrior (not
Fury Road) in black and white, simply by turning off the colour on the TV. Goddamn it, it was worth it! We ended up watching the entire movie. It was like an entire new film. I think why it works so well is that
Road Warrior is slower paced than
Fury Road, and having no colour simply brings out the underlying composition of terrain, light, dark, shadow, characters and motion to be in sharp relief.
TLDR: Watch all the Mad Max movies, this goes without saying. But I highly recommend watching
Road Warrior/MM2 in black-and-white.
Bonus: as a soundtrack, play the one from Heavy Metal (1981) available in its entirety (playlist and original score) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQQdCrGp_8o
Tony