Tag: Mel Gibson

Why You Should See ‘Flight Risk’: Setting up ‘The Resurrection’ in all its Book of Revelation glory

As of this writing, you can still see the new Mel Gibson movie, Flight Risk, in the movie theater, which you should do.  It’s such a good movie that you should not finish reading this before you do, you should rush to see it while you still can.  I’m sure the movie will be on streaming services soon, but this is one of those movies that is a point in history and is a bridge to other great things.  And we should all support a movie like this by going to the theater to see it because there is a bigger picture coming together here.  I personally love Mel Gibson.  I understand Mel Gibson.  And I think, as a filmmaker, he is one of the best there will ever be.  Ironically, back in my high school days when Mel Gibson was on his way to being considered by women to be the sexiest man alive, I had several teachers who wanted to date me as an underage opportunity because I reminded them of Mel Gibson, with that crazy kind of energy that was about to blow apart in a moment’s notice.  Those similarities might have been actual from a visual appearance and aspects of personality, but unlike Mel Gibson, I didn’t drink, smoke or even curse.  But I was always a fan of him in serious movies like The Bounty, The River, the Lethal Weapon movies, and Bird on a Wire with Goldie Hawn.  Mel Gibson was at the top of Hollywood society until he directed The Passion, which took the world by storm.  And Hollywood went into a shock.  Their wild playboy and king of the box office had turned against them with a dramatically Christian movie that cut to the core of all human corruption, and it made them angry.  And they cut Mel Gibson from the business from that day on.  Gibson is a great actor in front of the camera, but he’s even better as a director.  After The Passion, he directed Apocalypto, one of my favorite movies ever.  But by then, Hollywood essentially ran Gibson out of Hollywood until very recently.

But Mel Gibson didn’t just go away; he has been silently plotting to take on evil as he sees it in the background for the last twenty years.  He has appeared in a few movies here and there and directed a few as well, but he has only done enough to stay relevant in the business so that he could direct his long-thought-of masterpiece, a sequel to The Passion, called The Resurrection of Christ.  I think it will be the Braveheart of Christian films and that when it comes out, probably for Easter of 2027, the world will change because of it, and we want some of these movie theaters to still be open for that theatrical experience.  With Trump back in the White House and appointing Mel Gibson to be an ambassador of the Administration in Hollywood, fate has changed in Mel Gibson’s favor, and he will take his shot to make his long-dreamed-up masterpiece.  And this movie, Flight Risk, was done to open the door for the business side of making that movie, which will start shooting with many of the original actors in 2025.  The way the movie business works is you have to make studios money along with some investors, and Mel Gibson had to put some money in some people’s pockets to advance The Resurrection forward.  Hollywood will completely melt down over this movie, but some people are happy to go against the grain and invest in a project like The Resurrection, so long as they know that Mel Gibson still has the goods and can pull it off.  That is what Flight Risk is, and it’s a movie that is unusually brilliant and bold. 

What’s impressive about Flight Risk is that it’s a movie about high crimes and corruption at the top of our social structure, and yes, all the bad guys get it in the end.  However, the movie has only three actors, and the drama takes place on a little prop plane flying across Alaska over endless mountains. Most of what drives the narrative are people talking on a cell phone or airplane radio.  There are a few other people at the beginning and end of the movie, but it’s a very Hitchcock-like experiment in minimalism.  Mel Gibson is showing off his narrative ability with a camera by doing what few other people would ever dare to do in professional entertainment.  The special effects aren’t excellent.  There is no booming soundtrack.  There are no technical awards for outstanding achievements in film.  It’s just three people in an airplane flying over mountains for most of an hour and a half, and it is very compelling.  Mark Walberg stars in the movie, but otherwise, these people do not inspire people to go to the movies.  Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace are the real stars of the film.  Otherwise, it’s just those three actors for the entire film.  During a weak part of the year, the film has been number one for Lionsgate and has made a profit as the budget was set extremely low, made for about as little money as you can make a movie like this these days.  It hit around 40 million worldwide and has been a slow burner.  But it sets up Mel Gibson to knock the ball out of the park with The Resurrection because, in an economy of scale consideration, the margin on the film shows Mel knows how to hit it, so Flight Risk is successful on many frontiers. 

I think years from now, when people look at the miracle of something like The Resurrection being made, people will wonder how it came to be, and this little film Flight Risk will have to be the door that was opened for Hollywood to become Great Again, as a direct representation of the Trump White House.  To tell a compelling story with no money and just three actors on an airplane running out of gas is a great filmmaker showing off to set up much bigger things, and ultimately, that’s where all this is going.  My wife and I had an excellent date going to see it.  We were out shopping for some ties for some of my suits, and we had an extra couple of hours free, which was unusual, so we went to the movie next to the stores we were shopping at and saw Fight Risk.  I wanted to support Mel Gibson’s new film.  But I was also curious about what he could do with a movie like that.  And I was thrilled to see that he did quite a lot.  I have been cheering Mel Gibson on for twenty years to make the sequel to The Passion finally.  I don’t think anybody in the world could do what Mel Gibson can do with a project like that, to essentially bring the Ephesians and Book of Revelation alive from the Bible and put it on screen very dramatically.  Mel Gibson is a very flawed person; he was a womanizer, a heavy abuser of drugs and alcohol, and essentially a hard-wired lunatic.  But over time, he has grown into a man of God and is essentially the finger of justice as Heaven wishes to implement it on earth, and it has come out through the characters Mel Gibson has played and the movies he has directed.  And it all leads to one place, The Resurrection.  To put on film for the first time the wrath and chaos of the Book of Revelation in all its artistic necessity is going to be spectacular and timely. And the movie Flight Risk shows how it is possible. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Bible Says Earth is Roughly 6000 Years Old: Understanding water displacment

I really like people like Mel Gibson and Ken Ham, one the famous actor, the other the creator of The Ark Encounter just south of Cincinnati.  However, both believe in the scriptural understanding of the earth’s history, that it is roughly 6000 years old.  I would argue that they aren’t wrong if you measure years differently than we do on Earth, but that is an entirely different discussion.  Regarding earth sciences, it says that life on Earth is billions of years old and is at apparent odds with scriptural timelines.  Within these kinds of debates, the truth gets concealed from people, which is partly on purpose and other parts unfortunate.  It’s challenging to put science into a belief system, just as it’s hard for people who build a belief system in science to alter a previous assumption because of their emotional investment.  I don’t hold it over Mel Gibson in any way; I can’t wait for his new movie on the Resurrection of Christ.  That will be a life-changing movement for all human history and change the world.  I believe God’s hand has pointed his life in the direction of making this movie the whole time.  So I can’t wait for it in 2026 or 2027 when they finally finish the movie which is a sequel to The Passion.  Because I love the Bible and have had a relationship with it all my life, it comes up a lot more now. How can you love the Bible and love science? The two are incompatible.  I hear all the time that Earth is only 6000 years old and that Charles Darwin was an absolute idiot.  I also hear a lot that we never landed on the moon.  But I think there is compelling evidence in both categories that will erase any doubt very soon, so people believe what they believe, and if it holds them together as people, that is the important thing.  But that doesn’t make everything a fact.  

Mel Gibson is a very smart person who is very passionate about many things, making him a great actor and creative director.  But he has lived a very rocky life, living hard and going through many women.  For a period in the 80s and 90s, he was the sexiest man alive by many considerations, and it was hard for him to maintain his sanity, I think, being a hand of God and having every woman in the world throwing themselves at his feet already undressed.  So, I don’t blame him at all for holding onto scripture like a disabled person holds on to the handrail while going down the steps.  But he recently said something on the Joe Rogan Podcast that was very interesting and part of the movement of trying to fit science into scripture, which is popular these days.  However, I argue differently because I see science trying to force understanding into the same problem, where new evidence is ignored to maintain a scientific narrative.  I’m just going to say it; everyone is going to be screwed up in a few years once we get out into space to discover that humans came from out there, not through Darwin’s evolution, and that many of the things we believe are going to be shattered with new evidence.  That doesn’t make scripture any less relevant or some scientific method.  It just means that discovery gives new evidence and that we must let that evidence tell the story.  Not to make the story fit our assumptions. 

I think these tunnels under the Temple Mount are older than when Abraham went there to sacrifice Isaac to God. And is why the politics of religions are designed to make real excavation impossible.

Anyway, Mel Gibson was telling Joe Rogan that he doesn’t believe the idea that the ocean levels weren’t lower during the Ice Age, as I have been saying, 400 feet lower.  Mel Gibson said that if you put ice in a glass of water when the ice melts, the water doesn’t displace itself over the rim of the glass.  The level of the water doesn’t change.  And from the point of view of mass and how we measure it, he’s got a point.  But he was missing that during the Ice Age, massive amounts of Earth’s water were tied up in glaciers, and those giant blocks of ice were coming down over both poles and were mostly over land.  The weight of the ice itself is what caused the Great Lakes in North America.  The weight was so great that it flattened the earth’s crust in that location, which is still rising back up to a circumference, pushing the water out and into the St. Lawrence Seaway and, ultimately, the Atlantic Ocean.  Another several thousand years, and the Great Lakes won’t even be there.  So because of this massive effect of glaciers displacing large amounts of water over the land masses, the world’s sea levels were 400 feet lower.  At that time, you could have walked from England to France without getting your feet wet, except for a few ancient rivers.  And the Persian Gulf was above water all the way down to Dubai.  Most of Florida extended well into the Bahamas, Cuba, and the Yucatan Peninsula.  If you have read the Book of Morman, there were old civilizations in North and South America that the Nephites and Lamanites interacted with when they migrated from Jerusalem around 600 B.C.  Even then, it looks like land mass was lost to the sea. 

I would further offer that if you look at the previous shorelines of water levels that were oceanfront during the Ice Age, we will discover a lot of ancient civilizations and that the assumption science has of linear technical development is ridiculous.  Rather, we are dealing with the Vico Cycle here, where human civilization has started and stopped throughout history.  And that history goes back millions of years.  Not just 10 thousand years.  And likely goes out into space.  I think there is compelling evidence that Jerusalem goes back to settlement with a cave system under Mt. Moriah and that the Temple Platform that King Solomon built his temple on, and the current Dome of the Rock was significant, perhaps even millions of years ago.  And many of the world’s religions have purposely been put at each other’s throats to conceal the truth, which we’ll likely figure out once we start colonizing Mars.  Much of what we know now about everything will change with new evidence, and we have to be willing to look at that evidence without losing the importance of our belief systems.  It can be tricky business, but it’s not impossible.  Everyone must understand that the bad guys out there purposely seek to pit people’s beliefs against each other to conceal or use the truth to their advantage.  So, because Mel Gibson doesn’t quite understand water displacement concepts and how they relate to ocean levels, that doesn’t mean that what he says in his movies, especially the upcoming Resurrection, is false.  It’s just perspective.  The art says what it says.  And that is the same whether we are talking about the Bible, the Book of Morman, or the Quran.  I find them all very fascinating, and there are certain truths there.  But there is a lot else that science is unpacking, and our scope will increase with new information.  We must have the guts to look at that information and not hide from it, which is the case with science and what we look at regarding previous ocean levels.  And what we will discover under the water, especially off the coast of Cuba, India, Japan, and the Persian Gulf.  It’s going to be a mind-bending few years of upcoming adventure.  And we will all be better off for it.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Terror Act of Burning Down Los Angeles: Hiding an evil ahead of the Trump DOJ

We know enough at this point to say with confidence that the LA fires that have destroyed the Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills, and Brentwood and are still raging is an act of terrorism just as much as the killings in New Orleans were, and the attempted Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas was.  Arsonists started the fires, some of them were caught, and the policies of California made it ripe for the terror act to commence, destroying the lives of many people in the process.  The only thing we don’t yet know is why.  Some speculate that LA wants to build a “smart city,” as was the speculation behind the wildfire burning in Lahaina, Hawaii, on the island of Maui.  This looks to be a modern strategy from the radical left, especially in areas that typically have a lot of Democrat support with soft social policies toward fiscal management; they are more vulnerable to policy terrorism than other places.  And when we say policy terrorism, we are talking about the purposeful weakening of infrastructure so that it can be exploited for a more significant cause by radical terrorists.  Such as hiring too many DEI employees who are not competent enough to do the job.  Or giving away the budgets for their fire departments to Ukraine.  Or deliberately not having water reservoirs filled for use to chase some ridiculous environmental concern.  Nothing kills all the turtles and fish more than a raging fire.  So, there was a lot wrong with Lahaina, which is still a mystery.  And the same lessons appear to have been exploited in Los Angeles just a week away from President Trump re-entering the White House.  Logic would say that there is an attempt here by financial types to torpedo the Trump economy with the same zest that they unleashed COVID-19, a known bioweapon during the first Trump term, to halt the economy and force everyone into globalism.  But what we know about the LA wildfires was that they were purposefully caused by stupidity and terrorism because they caught the arsonists running around burning tossed-out Christmas Trees after the holiday season.  The fires weren’t started naturally.

So this is where things get fuzzy, and you have to fill in the gaps based on what you know, and that is why the policies of LA were so mismanaged, deliberately not to be prepared for a fire that would so quickly destroy entire cities. Indeed, nobody is as stupid as the people running LA proposed to be.  The mismanagement of fire resources and water management is astonishingly dumb.  Dumber than dumb people would perform under any conditions.  Which only contributes to the terrorist plot.  Who gets paid for these kinds of things? Who profits from the enterprise?  We have to view this through the lens of war, not through accidental environmental degradation.  The Pacific Palisades looked like a bomb was dropped on it during wartime activity; it had the same effect.  And I would offer that was the point all along.  Bomb an American city ahead of Trump’s return to the White House to derail his incoming administration with a crisis.  But I think personally it goes further than that.  And Mel Gibson, who I think a lot of personally, lost his house during these fires and wasn’t very happy about it, is digging into the truth of the matter regarding terrorism being hidden behind purposeful leftist mismanagement of resources.  So incompetence could take the blame for the property ownership change; when one party wants to acquire property but doesn’t want to fight things in court over eminent domain issues, they destroy the property, making it useless so that others can take over the financial rescue and change how the land is used. 

But I think it’s even worse than all that, and this goes back to the Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons partnership with L. Ron Hubbard. Occult worship in that town has always been a problem.  Many people, even to this day, get wrapped up in the adrenochrome cults and child pedophilia parties that are being revealed by the Puff Daddy arrest.  And what we know about Jeffery Epstein and the way they harvested undocumented children for use as sex slaves and blood sacrifice.  Mel Gibson got it and was talking about that topic on the Joe Rogan podcast as his house was burning down in the Pacific Palisades.  While these kinds of topics have been kept in conspiracy theory circles and away from the topics of polite society, nothing splashes it into common knowledge like a devastating court case with lots of evidence from people’s homes who are doing these kinds of things in much higher concentrations per population density than the people outside of these burnt out communities.  The question is, would evil people be that cruel to destroy entire neighborhoods to keep the sex trafficking and adrenochrome cults out of the news and the answer is an emphatic yes.  Of course, they would. P. Diddy is being prosecuted for racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution, and many of his party friends live in just the area that was burnt down by a raging fire, ahead of a Trump DOJ that is not going to sit on the story and let Combs off the hook and toss him back into the world.  People like LeBron James and Leonardo DiCaprio are attached to Combs, and that could bring down the entire Hollywood industry that has been corrupted with this kind of occult activity, fully embracing evil since Crowley’s days.  I know much more about all this than I should; I used to be a frequent contributor to L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future efforts.  So I know the characters very well and understand why they do what they do. The occult actions in the Hollywood Hills and house parties in the Pacific Palisades are not conspiracy theories.  There are many people in the entertainment business who are far more terrified of aging than they are of the law.

They think you are too stupid to notice

One of the areas destroyed by the fires was Mulholland Drive, the subject of the great David Lynch film.  And I say great because it was a good, honest look at the kind of people who live and work in Hollywood and the kind of activity they get themselves wrapped up in.  To say they openly embrace evil is an understatement.  If you know that movie, it’s a good look behind the veil of the Hollywood glitter that many people who work in the industry understand all too well. Once you know that, you can understand why embracing the occult, even for a young 22-year-old actress who has run away to Hollywood to make it big and doesn’t care what she has to do to gain wealth and power while her looks hold up.  Never underestimate what a person in their 30s will do once they feel that youth and opportunity are leaving them.  What kind of deals with the devil will they make?  And once you understand that, you’ll understand why people were running around starting fires in key places upstream of the raging winds, creating arson conditions to destroy evidence of many massive crimes.  And to hide the destruction of evidence behind the tragedy of so many people impacted by the devastation.  Look at the effects of the destroyed city, not the crimes it was intended to hide.  And suddenly, it all makes a lot more sense under such understanding.  The Trump DOJ should look at the people who created the policies that made the act of terrorism possible.  For example, why was the water reservoir empty?  Who made that decision? From there, things will become a lot clearer.  Don’t let all this be a conspiracy theory.  Instead, make it factual testimony of a massive crime that needs evidence, which starts with the behavior of those who created the circumstances for which this vast evil occurred.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

A Review of ‘The Sound of Freedom’: God’s Children are not for sale

Boy, that was a good movie, the Sound of Freedom. I intended to see it on the 4th of July when Angel Studios released it, a bold move considering they were putting a critical box office movie in the middle of summer between the new Indiana Jones film and the latest Mission Impossible project. I like these Angel Studios guys; I’ve worked with independent studios in the past, namely the Atlas group for the Atlas Shrugged films, so I have an appreciation for how difficult it is to make a movie in the first place, especially one with a big message like the Sound of Freedom has. But that’s only half the battle. Getting a movie distributed through the theaters is the biggest hurdle, and it’s been in that way that finance has been able to take over the movie industry. Putting this movie out on the 4th of July was hard because it competed with other big studio films with big marketing budgets. I think we should see this kind of thing more often because people hunger for good movies. And it’s usually not an either-or kind of decision. There’s room for Indiana Jones. And there is room for Sound of Freedom. I honestly didn’t expect much from the Sound of Freedom. I thought the movie would have a good message and was important to support. So when I tried to buy tickets for the film on July 3rd and 4th when my wife and I had some free time to see it, I wasn’t too disappointed that I couldn’t find any theaters that weren’t sold out in my area, or if they did have open seats, that we couldn’t find two together. We weren’t going to go to the movies and not sit together; that was ridiculous. So I waited until the following weekend, and we had the same problem. But we did manage to find two open seats for a Saturday afternoon in the third row, which I usually wouldn’t do because it’s too close to the screen. But we bought the tickets, went to see the movie, and were both blown away by what we saw.

The Sound of Freedom was actually, technically, a great film. It reminded me of Schindler’s List, one of my all-time favorite films. But pacing-wise, it reminded me of the Clint Eastwood-directed American Sniper. The Sound of Freedom was of excellent quality, on the level of those kinds of movies, and at a different time, this would undoubtedly be the Best Picture of the Year for the Academy Awards. The director, Alejandro Monteverde, put a lot of love into this film, and it sure showed. It was more of an action-adventure picture, more like Taken, rather than a documentary on child sex trafficking. To be honest, after seeing lots of clips from Jim Caviezel, I thought this film would be more of an activist movie. It certainly was; this film was made by really good people for good reasons, from top to bottom. But it was a far better movie than what usually comes out of those intentions. The director Alejandro Monteverde made a great movie with Jim Caviezel and the cast based on the real-life exploits of the Homeland Security agent Tim Ballard without knowing how the movie would get to the public. The movie has been done for five years; it was first going to be distributed by Fox, then Disney owned the rights, and they sat on it for a long time. Eventually, this new studio, Angel Studios, came along and picked up the rights. They are the studio behind the very well-done television show, The Chosen. So they picked it up and brought it to movie theaters.

Since most of the film production was Mexican, it brought the life of the cartels into sharp focus in ways that I hadn’t seen before. It was a very gritty movie that put viewers into the world of sex trafficking without being oppressively difficult to deal with. The Sound of Freedom walked that very fine line between being tasteful and hopeful, with Jim Caviezel playing the real-life Tim Ballard with such optimism that it wasn’t hard to fall in love with these people. I say all the time about movies, one of the biggest problems is that the writers of these things often don’t have much life experience. You can see that in big studio pictures where the writers clearly hang out in Santa Monica, and their perspective is from that world. The Sound of Freedom was written and directed by people who know the world’s dark underbelly but have not become hopelessly lost in it. What ended up on the screen is really something stunningly special. A movie everyone can enjoy that is much more optimistic than I thought it would have been. And not to give away spoilers, but I think it’s important to note because I honestly wasn’t fighting too hard to see this movie because they are usually depressing. While you want to know about these problematic subject matters, who wants to experience a depressing story? But I can say this movie has a very happy ending. I will likely see it many more times because it really was inspirational, hopeful, and bold. 

At the end of the movie, Jim Caviezal came on and gave a little speech, which was very appropriate, during the credits. They also put up a QR code which I took a picture of for this blog site. They encouraged people in the audience to buy tickets for people who couldn’t afford to go to the movie with a Pay it Forward campaign, which I thought was pretty clever and smart marketing on behalf of Angel Studios. There is a lot to like about this entire enterprise that will undoubtedly give hope to anybody who goes and sees it. For those who feel pretty hopeless about the world’s condition, I would strongly recommend The Sound of Freedom as soon as you can get to a theater and see it. I would recommend buying tickets and sending them to someone who might be on the fence. Not only for the box office need for a film like this, because this is how these kinds of movies get made. If they do well at the box office, it impacts the rest of the industry, which is precisely what is needed now with the amount of genuinely sinister aspects of culture that are on our nightly news. This movie is a ray of hope and deserves all the credit that can be given to it. I would personally like to see a lot more out of Angel Studios because this project is a real treasure. And the world could use a lot more from them. But it takes money to tell these kinds of stories, and this is a movie that was done on a high level as a kind of leap of faith. And we are lucky to have it. The world is better because of it. And maybe people will become educated enough from this movie to do something about sex trafficking and the amount of it that is destroying the lives of the innocent before they ever have a chance to live life for themselves. 

Rich Hoffman

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‘Fury Road’: Rebelling against Giambattista Vico

I have a general assumption about mankind that is quite opposite of typical academia. Civilizations rise on the backs of innovative individuals and flourishing capitalism. They decline with more centralized control and absorption of individual achievement into the fabric of a collective society. When an unworthy king or bureaucratic democracy takes over the direction of economic enterprise and invention, a society is in decline. It is due to the hard wiring of human beings trained from their infancy to follow the Giambattista Vico cycle always witnessing societies fall only to be born again in a much regimented pattern. This holds true no matter what the society, whether it be the Mayan people, the Inca, the Mongol, the Roman Empire—all societies so far have followed the Giambattista cycle. This is why anybody with any honesty looks at George Miller’s Mad Max films and declares him a genius. It’s also why it was more than symbolic that Mel Gibson showed up at the premier of Fury Road, the latest Mad Max film now staring Tom Hardy. Studios didn’t want Gibson in the film as the Vico cycle declares that what’s old must be recycled to make way for the young and new. But Gibson showed up to give the young Hardy a bit of support because any Mad Max fan knows that Mel Gibson will always be the iconic Road Warrior. It all started with this movie.

Our current world is not very far from the world of the first Mad Max movie. Police are now being openly murdered and Vico’s final phase of anarchy is fully at hand. What happens next is the rise of a theocratic society followed again by aristocratic, then democratic rule, followed by chaos once again. In the film Fury Road we find that in the period between the first Mad Max film society has devolved into the rise of theocratic civilization. No longer is society concerned with missions to Mars or inventing a new iWatch—now the primary concern as it has been in the past is to establish a new deity figure for the society at large.

I have always loved the Mad Max character because he maintains himself throughout the entire cycle as a constant reminder into the phase of the Gambattista cycle from which everything was taken from him, his wife, child, friend, career—everything he cherished from that time. Unlike the rest of the world he finds himself standing up against the tide of regression. He is a representation in these Mad Max films as Nietzsche’s ubermensch-otherwise translated as the overman. Nietzsche’s ubermensch is one who has graduated from mankind and stepped away from the Gambattista cycle all together—and has decided to advance their life based on individual creativity.   But this is a dangerous road, Hitler tried to take Nietzsche’s ubermensch and advance Germany, but failed in his interpretation and instead moved his country into a Karl Marx inspired socialist democracy—followed by war defined anarchy, then back to a theocratic/democratic existence where it currently finds itself in a European Union—otherwise a democracy that is once again plunging into anarchy now inspired by the failing economies of Greece.   Mad Max is the figure who refuses to submit to these tides of the world.

I have no doubt that George Miller would agree with this assessment. He knows all too well what he’s doing. He’s not just making a popcorn action thriller with great car stunts and bizarre characters. He’s making a rejection statement against Gambattista’s famed cycle. He may not have set out to be conscious about that statement but rather let his intellect drive those elements of the story along as evolution of the various aspects of the story evolved, but based on the presentation of Fury Road, it is clear he understands what he’s doing all too well. It’s also clear why so many people are excited to see such an apocalyptic story and why after all these years it’s so close to the hearts of so many people. This is not a typical summer blockbuster film.

So, how excited am I for the upcoming Fury Road? Well, let me tell you, I have dedicated this upcoming Friday to seeing it. I will certainly be one of the first, and I will likely see it several times. I love the action, I love Mad Max and all that he stands for, but more than anything I love seeing the Gambattista cycle challenged. The world may have went crazy in relation to the advanced days of invention when oil was being produced to propel cars from city to city, to instigate the growth of economies of various trade. All that can and will fall apart within just a few decades of human development—just like the Maya abandoned their cities apparently very fast—as if they just evaporated. It’s not that such people abandoned their cities because they left earth for alien destinations, the people of Ur did not suddenly become equivalent to the Neanderthal after building hanging gardens and massive temples—they regressed because they emerged into war then reinvented theocracy starting the Vico cycle fresh again losing all that they had gained before. Mad Max is that personality in these George Miller movies who in spite of everything that he has lost and continues to lose, refuses to give up on his heroic past and be the last representation of a time when mankind was truly great.

How many people do you know who would at the drop of a hat become one of the mindless followers of some future attempt at theocratic rule? The current Muslim obsession is but the latest. How many maniacs would kill the masses for a chance at everlasting life in the hereafter because some slug of a wanna’ be king dictated that such a thing would bring redemption to the soul? The answer is probably everyone that you know. Most of the people shopping at the grocery and working in a corner cubical would gladly trade in their suits and ties for a thong and Mohawk if some skull inspired death cult instructed them that through worship of his heavenly presence that someday they too might rise up to greatness if only they adhere to the tenets of collectivism.   Miller’s brilliance is that he was able to see such a clear vision from our present age. It’s not easy to see that overweight school levy supporter buying meat at the grocery as a future sex slave to a blood thirsty cult fighting over the worship of water—but Miller does, and with a grand design. It’s not easy to see that corrupt politician kissing babies and whatever else as the skull wearing Immortan Joe hunting down the wives who are desperate to leave him. But in Miller’s films, it is quickly recognizable that most people we know under similar conditions would find themselves as some character in that wasteland. It doesn’t take much to forgo everything we have ever been and throw it away in exchange for basic human necessities, like food, water, and sex.

I am excited for Fury Road, but for reasons that go well beyond the visual spectacle. I love it for the rebellion against Vico. On one hand the Vico cycle is shown in all its brutal honesty, but through the character of Max—using almost no dialogue—Miller beholds the ubermensch—a character that launched the career of Mel Gibson who in almost every movie refused to buckle under the pressure of Vico to decline—but always to advance. Whether it was Riggs from Lethal Weapon or William Wallace from Braveheart, Mel Gibson started as Mad Max, that hero from the past who punched through the Vico cycle with the throttle down and the skill of a Road Warrior as the rest of the world attempted to drag him back into the Stone Age. That’s why Fury Road is more important than a four-year degree in college studying history and the Vico cycle. Because Fury Road shows through art the results of that path—and how treacherously close we always are to falling off the edge of reality into an abyss controlled by maniacs like Immortan Joe—or the Toe Cutter.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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