#mortiflyers

[chocohybrid]

The many tribes of Dementus's Horde - From Metal Beasts and Holy Motors

[likopinina]

MORTIFLIERS in FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA (2024)

[melopni]

Halloween with the mortiflyers!

[bug-timez]

Hmmm what about Octoboss and his Octokite? His badass creepy balloon. Either a cool shot of him standing and the cephalopod waving in the sky above him, or some Mortifiers trying to wrangle it in strong winds lol

I was going to draw a badass pic of octo and the octokite butttt the urge to be silly took over SORRY!

[roopnavarro]

Anatole, a Mad Max Mortiflyer OC! Art by me, character and lore by @mygodcharles Anatole operates the flame-throwing glider we see in the Stowaway chase. You'll never catch him entering a road war without his homemade recreation of Greek Fire. Much like its historical ancestor, this incendiary chemical weapon is a horrific tarry, burning slime that sticks to its target. He's also the Octoboss' right-hand man when it's time for some, ahem, "enhanced interrogation." When it's time to string up the "interviewee," he's the one lighting the fire beneath them and holding one side of the rope to keep them suspended. Anatole's brutal actions are not the result of blind loyalty or simping for the Octoboss — he genuinely believes he's acting in the best interests of the Mortiflyers, and that no tactic is off the table when protecting his found family. Last but not least, Anatole is the Octoboss' longtime romantic partner. See Anatole and Octoboss when they were young here. Get to know his relationship with Octoboss here.

[themummersfolly]

Happy Octoboss Friday!

This is the last update on Highflyer for a while, I haven't had much time to write. I have more chapters in mind, but they'll have to wait.

[bubbadabad]

This is for the real Octoboss fans. Reblog if you're a real Mortiflyer who only takes orders from The Octoboss 🐙

"I only take my orders from The Octoboss!" - all of us

[kamakrazeeee]

nsfw //

i like to think that octoboss has a few mortifiers/mortiflyers that he likes enough to have flings with every now and then. he's tall and imposing and in charge but honestly that old man always be on his back for his sexy lackeys and has 0 shame about it 🥴

[likopinina]

Mortifier Villanelle

welcome behind the scenes!

tackling a villanelle once again. i felt it must be a villanelle, given the subject. the repeating chorus verses make me think of the subsequent attack waves during the sequence with the war rig siege, each one ending with death. and it must have 8 syllables per line. because octopus, you see.

anyway, props to the mortifliers for surviving a whopping 12 minutes against jack + furiosa combo. this is what the poem is about.

as for the visuals, well, it's the tentacle parachute. and the screaming skull with horns and the bommiknocker. it's not that deep and it was fun to draw.

thank you for tuning in, only take orders from the Octoboss, dementus is scum, etc etc, have a good day!

[poem transcript in alt and also here below]

sow torment onto those of skill skies look over his signifier when straight into hell they will reel

on future corpses filled with zeal dark flock eclipses sun and casts fire to sow torment on those of skill

unhinged vermin, they wish him ill him, the deceitful, vile liar and back into hell may he reel

with death angel along its keel mangled beneath the chrome beast's tyre sows torment onto those of skill

airborne demon in whirl of steel low rumble of descending choir when back into hell he will reel

the black-clad figure - the devil meets his end in manner most dire and back into hell she will reel the ones who sow torment with skill

[themummersfolly]

No mistake that the one of the Mortiflyers on the War Rig looks like the flag-raising on Iwo Jima.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga by Dane Hallett

[fuckyeahisawthat]

Furiosa thoughts

About 48 hours after watching, I think my take on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is coalescing into: I enjoyed it as a Mad Max movie but found it disappointing as a Fury Road prequel.

Any Mad Max movie made after Fury Road was always going to suffer the fate of being compared to Fury Road, which is the best action movie ever made. So like, compared to any other action movie you can think of, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (we'll call it FMMS going forward) is very very good! It just isn't Fury Road.

The rest is under the cut for spoilers:

The action sequences were compelling. (I was aware I was hunched forward in my seat in tension/anticipation almost the entire time.) Some of them were even brilliant. That long sequence where the Octoboss and the Mortiflyers (yes those are their names) are attacking the War Rig with all kinds of airborne contraptions? Phenomenal. I was like yes okay now we are in a Mad Max movie! Other than that one sequence, though, in which we see Furiosa and Praetorian Jack begin to trust each other, I thought they rarely achieved the kind of wordless advancement of character relationships through action beats that is the lifeblood of Fury Road. So the action was good, but it was just normal-good, not Fury Road transcendent.

I did miss John Seale's cinematography. While I thought the action choreography was great, the shot selection was just not as dynamic and interesting as in Fury Road. I also really did not vibe with so much of the musical themes being recycled from Fury Road. The Fury Road score is SO memorable and the music is such an integral part of the momentum and feeling of every scene in the movie; I can play that score and see every beat of the action unfolding in my brain now. I wanted new score that felt like it was a part of this new action that we were seeing.

I loved all the new worldbuilding details and finally getting to see inside Gastown and the Bullet Farm. Those locations and their unique features were utilized really well for the action that took place in them. Loved the new details we got about the Citadel. The grappling hooks just dipping down to yoink people's vehicles during battle? Fantastic. The hidden Citadel ledge with the little pool of water?? That was such a fanfic-ready location. Pretty sure I already wrote at least one fic set there back in like 2016.

The Green Place! Very different from what I imagined but so much worldbuilding in just a few shots.

In general I thought the new cast rose to the challenge. Alyla Browne who played little kid Furiosa I thought was phenomenal actually. That's a tough role, both emotionally and physically, for a child actor and she slayed it. Casting Indigenous model and actress Charlee Fraser to play Furiosa's mother certainly made the Stolen Generation parallels more obvious. I'll have a lot more to say about Dementus down below, but Chris Hemsworth brought a great combo of bonkers and menacing.

I never doubted that Anya Taylor-Joy could bring the emotional intensity needed to the role--she can do crazy eyes like nobody's business, and with the growl she put in her voice she really did sound like Charlize Theron a bit. I found her physicality convincing for a young Furiosa. But she is not Charlize, through no fault of her own. Charlize is tall and she has broad shoulders and she just takes up so much space when moving and fighting as Furiosa and I think it was always going to be hard to replicate that. As long as they didn't try too hard to bridge the gap between the characters I was fine with it. But that one scene at the end where she's bringing the Wives to the Rig I was very viscerally like that is NOT our Furiosa. (I almost wish they would've used Charlize's stunt double for that scene the way they popped Jacob Tomuri into Max's place.) They could have simply left a time gap--based on the "15 years" she says to Dementus and the 7,000+ days we hear about in Fury Road there should be at least a 4-year gap between the film timelines, although in terms of bridging the look of the two actors it feels like it should be more like 10 years.

If FMMS had been a self-contained movie about a character named Furiosa in the Mad Max universe, I think I would have found it very satisfying. But as a prequel to Fury Road there were a bunch of ways I thought it was lacking on a story level.

I think it's pretty clear that this is not the backstory, or at least not the complete backstory, that Charlize Theron was imagining while playing Furiosa. Which...there's nothing objectively wrong with that; word of God and what actors think about their characters doesn't supersede what's on film for determining what is canon. However, Fury Road positions Joe as Furiosa's main antagonist, and while we don't get the full story behind the incandescent rage she directs at him, we know that rage is there and is a big part of her motivation. In interviews at the time, Charlize talked about the idea that Furiosa had been stolen to be a Wife but then was discovered to be infertile and discarded, how she survived by hiding in the Citadel and eventually rose to a position of power, how she saw her actions not as saving the Wives but as stealing them, and that her motivation at least starts out as more about hurting Joe than helping these women.

We get only the tiniest suggestion of Furiosa's backstory in Fury Road ("I was taken as a child, stolen") and the rest we piece together by implication. She is a healthy full-life woman working for a man who keeps healthy full-life women as sex slaves, hoping one of them will produce a viable male heir for him. She is effectively a general in his army, projecting his power on the wasteland, a position no other woman seems to occupy. She tells Max she is seeking "redemption." Redemption for what? She doesn't say. But "whatever she has done to win a position of power within this misogynist death cult" seems like a pretty obvious answer.

And that's interesting! That's an interesting backstory that engages with some of the core themes and moral questions of the Mad Max universe. These movies deal a lot with the tension between self-preservation and human connection. Do you screw someone else over to protect yourself? Even if it means putting them in the terrible position that you yourself have clawed your way out of? Even if it means enforcing your own oppressor's power over them? Or do you take the risk of helping people and caring enough to connect with them, even though this carries an emotional and physical risk?

FMMS doesn't really engage with Furiosa's relationship to Joe like, at all. It's not like Joe comes off looking like a good guy. He's just hardly in the movie. I don't know if this would have been different if Hugh Keays-Byrne were still alive. I don't know if there was pressure from the studio to cast an A-list male lead actor alongside Anya Taylor-Joy (who's a hot commodity now but wasn't what I would call an A-lister when she was originally cast). I don't know if, once Chris Hemsworth was cast, that affected how central his character's role became, since he is certainly the biggest name attached to the film. I would have actually been fine with Chris Hemsworth or another actor of his ilk playing a younger Joe, and us getting to see some of the charisma that attracted followers to him.

But the end result is that we have Dementus, who is a perfectly fine Mad Max villain, and quite entertaining at times! But not the most compelling antagonist you could give Furiosa.

The four Mad Max movies that feature Max go through an interesting evolution. In the first two movies, the villains are people "outside" society--criminals and roving gangs--and the people Max is defending are "civilization." So we have Mad Max where Max is a very fucked-up cop, and Road Warrior where Max is the prototypical western gunslinger, riding in to town to protect the settlement from an outside threat, but ultimately unable to accept any of the comforts of civilization for himself.

Then in Thunderdome and Fury Road, the dynamic switches. Now the antagonists are warlords and dictators. They are civilization. And the people Max ends up helping are trying to escape them.

To me, Dementus feels much more like the earlier kind of Mad Max villain. If there's another Mad Max movie I can most compare FMMS to, it's the first one. Dementus is Furiosa's Toecutter. (Kills her family, gives her her signature disabling injury, movie ends with her seeking revenge on him but it doesn't feel heroic or triumphant.) The whole end of FMMS when Furiosa is implacably hunting down Dementus? Extremely Mad Max 1.

But violent revenge holds a different symbolic place in Furiosa's story than it does in Max's. The end of Mad Max is a tragedy because Max tells us it is. He explicitly states, early in the movie, that he needs to stop being a cop or he'll become no different than the violent criminals he's pursuing. So he leaves his job and goes on an extended weird vacation with his wife and child, trying to get away from the violence of a collapsing society. But that violence finds him anyway, and by the end of the movie, Max has become the exact thing he said he didn't want to be. It's a tragedy not because the people Max kills in revenge for killing his family don't deserve it, but because seeking violent sadistic revenge is damaging to Max. That is not what he needs in order to heal from the loss of his wife and child. What he needs is to take the risk of human connection again. This is what he starts groping toward in the following two movies and fully realizes in Fury Road.

But Furiosa doesn't have the same arc. Her story in Fury Road is about how a few people struggling against their oppressor can be the catalyst that brings down a whole regime. Furiosa getting to rip Joe's face off is fucking satisfying, and it's supposed to be! So it's a bit weird, then, to spend an entire movie giving her a backstory that not only is not about Joe at all, but implies that seeking and getting revenge against Dementus for killing her mother and Jack is what made her into the person we see in Fury Road.

Aside from questions of revenge, what I thought Furiosa's goal was going to be is set up in the beginning of the movie. "No matter what happens, find your way home." Very clear objective there. And then we see her try to get home like, 1.5 times. I thought we were well set up to follow the tried and true film story format of "simple goal, big obstacles, high stakes." I wanted to see her trying over and over again to get home, and being thwarted in different ways every time. I wanted to see grief and guilt over her mother's death turn her mother's last command into a mission for which she would sacrifice anything (and anyone) else. I wanted to see her justify working for Joe and accumulating power in the violent world of the Citadel as what she has to do in order to get home. I wanted to see "Have you done this before?" "Many times." But we didn't really get that either.

Ultimately, I think the least frustrating way to think about the film--which the film itself encourages--is as one of many possible Wasteland legends about a character called Furiosa. Maybe it happened this way. Maybe it didn't. Maybe this is the Furiosa we see in Fury Road. Maybe it isn't. It all depends on how much you believe of the History Man's tales.

[faeryaesther]

Inspired by this post by @mortiflyer

[themummersfolly]

Next chapter of Highflyer has gone up! And so has the rating.

[roopnavarro]

I am SO GLAD I'm not the only one who heard "you're not my real dad" when he said that HAHAHAAA

He takes orders from the Octoboss!!

[aquitainequeen]

Further bits and pieces of worldbuilding that I really liked in Furiosa (the previous post have gotten rather long)

One of the first shots of the film is trees being detroyed by a shock wave, and later as the raiders escape with Furiosa we see the edges of the Green Place eroding into the desert; a sign of what's to come. And zooming in from space, this paradise is so terribly small...

Furiosa knows how to disable a motorcycle, but still marvels at the petrol pouring over her hand.

There's a brief moment where someone is using a satellite dish as a cooking pot!

Toe Jam and his companion automatically assume that it's Furiosa's father tracking them, not her parents; certainly not her mother.

The first thing the Organic Mechanic does whenever he meets someone new is to check their fingers and teeth to see what kind of health they're in; he does this later with the Lone War Boy, without even being told to do so by Dementus.

When his followers get too rowdy, Dementus calls them off with a whistle - they are his hounds too.

Dementus orders for their best drinking water to be used to wash Furiosa; an immediate sign of how valuable he considers her to be.

I have a theory about the Organic Mechanic serving human blood sausage (the jury is out on whether he was actually drawing Furiosa's blood or whether he was bluffing in front of Immortan Joe). He doesn't yet have the resources to safely do blood transfusions, so this is a simplified way of trying to keep Dementus healthy and strong!

There are wind turbines on the top of the Citadel, but we don't see them move; a shallow echo of the turbines in the Green Place.

The power dynamics in Dementus' horde; the Mortiflyers answer to the Octoboss, who calmly tells them to comply; compare this with Dementus' posturing...

Immortan Joe is the only one during negotiations to speak directly to Furiosa, asking her questions and getting answers from her - yet we never see him speak to any of the women in his harem. When one of them gives birth to a mutated baby he turns and departs without a word, leaving Scrotus to pass sentence on her.

I've commented before on how unsettling it is that Furiosa's given a little cubby of her own with a lamp and books and a bed, and how it all looks so normal. The whole setup of the harem is unnerving. Down in the depths of the Citadel everything is scavenged and mismatched; @cinemaocd noticed that the 'bunks' that Furiosa and Jack are sleeping on later in the film are actually repurposed lounge chairs. Even later on, when the People Eater is plotting battles, he uses salvaged objects to represent the armies. But up in the harem everything is preserved, clean and kept for its original purpose, from the chairs and chalkboard to the stacks of books and the ordinary (if not necessarily comfy) beds. Like the Green Place, the harem is recognisable and normal, a series of rooms you could well imagine in our universe...but it's a manufactured paradise rather than a natural one, a false 'haven' and a real prison for so many women.

[rolandkaros]

JIŘÍ LEHEČKA [CZE] d. JACK DRAPER [GBR] || ADELAIDE OPEN FINAL || 01 13 2024

[@mortiflyer]