finally watched Mad Max: The Road Warrior
and there's a thrill to an action movie made in the era when "they did that for real" isn't an IMDB trivia fact but a thing you can absolutely definitely tell by looking at it
(okay, and they also really broke a stunt performer's leg. that is a downside)
in scale it's kind of miniscule compared to e.g. Furiosa, you can tell that the entire town where everything happens is maybe one acre, but that town is also indisputably real and packed with real details and real people and lit by the real sun
and I think what I get out of this is partly visual enjoyment--look how dirty everything is! delightful!--but also a certain satisfaction of knowing that I am watching a record of things that really happened. the movie is fiction but the story of these sets being built, these stunts being performed, that's not. that is always a more interesting story to me than "once upon a time, some non-union animators sat in an open-plan office staring at wireframes..."
I know being anti-CGI is the boringest film opinion a person can have but this is my real reasoning for it. (I'm also not, like, 100% anti-CGI. The sandstorm in Fury Road is amazing and how the hell would you do that full-scale in real life.) I like when the production of a movie is in itself an interesting story, and the production of CGI is never interesting.
also there's a great sense of place to movies that were shot in a real location and not color-graded to death. (Fury Road gets... half credit on that.) you ever watch the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre? it looks like Texas! maybe it's the color and angle of the light, maybe it's including background detail that is neither plot-necessary nor famous landmarks, but you can watch one second of any exterior shot from that movie and know it's not LA or Toronto.
in conclusion, I really like how everyone in The Road Warrior looks like they cut their own hair, because yeah, having been through a little apocalypse lately, that checks out
