One of the year’s best action movies — and best movies of any genre — is George Miller‘s "Mad Max: Fury Road," a white knuckle action flick, presented with a tremendous sense of setpiece geography, paired with bold, visual audacity. In plain language, it rules. However, the filmmaker had another idea for the presentation of his movie.
"One thing I’ve noticed is that the default position for everyone is to de-saturate post-apocalyptic movies. There’s only two ways to go, make them black and white — the best version of this movie is black and white, but people reserve that for art movies now. The other version is to really go all-out on the color," Miller told Slashfilm in May. "The usual teal and orange thing? That’s all the colors we had to work with. The desert’s orange and the sky is teal, and we either could de-saturate it, or crank it up, to differentiate the movie. Plus, it can get really tiring watching this dull, de-saturated color, unless you go all the way out and make it black and white."
Going monochrome is something Miller had wanted to do for the Blu-ray release, but alas, that didn’t happen. So the internet took over, with the folks at Black And Chrome recutting "Mad Max: Fury Road" in full, in grayscale, and accompanied only by the score, which the director had intended as an experimental alternate cut. The result? Frankly, it’s a neat trick but the movie feels somewhat lifeless without the swirling sandstorm color scheme and scorched Earth backdrop. But let us know what you think in the comments section. Watch below. [Boing Boing]