Review of Future World (2018) by Thequietgamer — 12 Jul 2018

Legendary filmmaker George Miller's Mad Max series was so influential that it spawned a wave of knock-offs across the '80s, particularly from Italy. When he's not making stoner comedies with his pal Seth Rogen, James Franco who co-directed, produced, and stars in this has shown an appreciation for the more niche variety of cinema. So it stands to reason that Future World is a loving homage to the low-budget Road Warrior wannabes that often totally missed the point of the masterpieces they were trying so hard to be. Of course all of this could just be the result of Franco calling all of his friends to come over and play Mad Max in the desert and only the ones at the bottom of his contact list actually showing up. Either way I had a lot of fun with it.

The plot revolves around a young man looking for a mythical cure for his mother's illness and coming across an android in the process that every whacked-out wasteland gangster wants to get their hands on. There's some stuff about the robot finding a soul and learning to feel, but there's no real message here. It's all action sequences, shots of desert scenery, and whatever other weirdness they could come up with to keep viewers attention. What's surprising is how well it's all put together given that it was apparently only moderately better funded than by whatever pocket change the cast had on them at the time. The somewhat barebones story is cohesively presented and has a nice flow to it. I got a kick out of the drug-fueled dance party, the slave strip club, and the fight to the death inside an abandoned motel swimming pool. It was all very post-apocalyptic and deranged. Franco, Snoop Dogg, and Milla Jovovich all seem to be having a lot of fun playing their insane characters.

Your enjoyment of this is really going to stem from just how much appreciation you have for low-grade movies. It's a throwback to the C-grade films that are just hard to find these days. The kind of flicks that you would pick up from VHS bargain bins or catch on a late night one weekend when you were a kid. No, they weren't great, but they managed to stick out in your memory as good time back when the world was simpler. Future World takes inspiration from the rather popular "Maxsploitation" rip-offs to remind us just how much fun trash cinema can be.