Mad Max, Tomorrowland

As I walked through the Alamo's doors Sunday night and onto the streets of downtown Kansas City, my ears were smacked by the deafening thud of cannon fire. Then three more rounds erupted. They echoed off the skyscrapers and into the streets. My friend and I tried to locate the explosions' source when a quieter, more ominous din reared and roared. “Shut up!,” I barked. “Do you hear those people?” The chanting grew. So did my pulse.

It was already dangerously high: we'd just been discharged from the trenches of "Mad Max: Fury Road" and I wasn't sure if what I was hearing was real or PTSD-induced paranoia. I unlocked the car and started the engine, doing my best not to rev the thing. Driving through the Crossroads and Midtown, the scene remained eerie: pockets of overcrowded corners and entirely empty blocks. When traffic stopped entirely—the streets resembled the opening salvos of disaster movies like "World War Z" or The Day After Tomorrow"—one of us may have wondered aloud whether it was a riot: I remember that word bouncing through my head, struggling against high-pitched ringing in my ears.

And then the sky exploded in Technicolor. The air boomed in Dolby. I pulled over before my friend could even summon the order: we'd stumbled onto Ground Zero—front-row seats—for the city's Memorial Day fireworks show.

Blocked by gawking crowds with their necks arched, their eyes trained away from whatever's directly in front of them, my standard response is rage. This kind of thing usually has my blood boiling with anger. But today was different. I'd just spent the day at the multiplex. The first feature was "Tomorrowland," a movie I'd been following since its inception because I'm a sucker for theme parks and space-age retro futurism. It was a drag—an overlong, preachy slog. The movie urges, insists we “have fun,” but the brand of fun it's shilling is of the safety-first variety. But it's hard to fault the thing: in retrospect, the warnings to keep my hands and feet in the car at all times, no flash photography, no gum, etc. are plastered all over its packaging. And if, like me, you've held off on riding the Brad Bird Bandwagon of Exceptionalism, I exhort you to remain one of the chosen few.

All snark aside, the best part of "Tomorrowland" is the end credits—a truly fantastic bit of animation that finally delivers on the movie's promise of Jetsons-style zip. But in order to get there, you're forced to sit through a bafflingly misguided climax where the movie's villain scolds its audience about getting kicks from (of all things) watching movies about the end of the world. (There's even a running joke where we see posters and billboards advertising a movie called "ToxiCosmos 3." That's the punchline too.) Sure, optimism is fantastic. But where "Tomorrowland" scolds us into feeling optimistic, "Mad Max: Fury Road" instills it. In so many ways, it's "Tomorrowland's" inverse: fleet, where the former is bloated; subtle, where the former is obvious; inviting, where the former is exclusionary. And if it's bloated, obvious, and exclusionary too, just go with it. "Fury Road" is everything "Tomorrowland" despises—it's a loud, obnoxious, thrilling shred. It's also revolutionary, anarchic, and the most fun I've had at the movies in years.

A septuagenarian's rebuke to the last 15 years of Hollywood corporate synergy, it throws continuity to the wind. So fed up with contemporary trends in big budget moviemaking, it even has the balls to make its subtext text—it has no time for pussyfooting. Both a scathing indictment of patriarchy and a testosterone-fueled gearhead anthem, this is the kind of movie that restores one's faith in the power of shared experience.

Maybe that's why afterwards, gazing up with everyone else at the magnificent display overhead, feeling my blood pumping and hearing frequencies I knew I was sacrificing forever, I may have—probably did—shed a tear. It was awesome.