schwarmerei1:

OK, I’ve watched MMFR a *few* times and I am wondering if the “count” is wrong.

After escaping the canyon, the War Rig breaks down and needs repairs. That’s when Cheedo breaks away and attempts to run back to Immortan Joe. As she’s doing this Furiosa takes the SKS rifle and and shoots the two War Boys approaching on a motorbike and Cheedo is persuaded to return.

After this is the scene when Furiosa says they need “inventory” and Toast does the count of guns and ammo, then declares that Big Boy is “all but useless” due to only having 4 rounds left.

We don’t see the SKS rifle fired again until Max tries to take out the Bullet Farmer later that night in the bog. Toast says after the first shot “You’ve got two left.” He then takes another shot and misses, then hands it over to Furiosa for the last shot.

So what happened to bullet no. 4?

Was there a change of scene order and Cheedo’s flight/Furiosa shooting the bikers was supposed to be after the “inventory” scene? (It doesn’t look like it since inventory is clearly at sunset, and the bikers are earlier in the day – but who knows what Eric Whipp could magic up in terms of lighting?)

Is there a deleted scene? Is a straight up continuity error? Or did I completely miss something? (Entirely possible – I live in a state of permanent sleep-deprivation.)

I don’t think you missed anything. I’d noticed it when Toast made her “two left” comment, but I always thought for a second and said to myself, oh, right; when Furiosa shot the bikers was the other one. But I didn’t remember that that came before, rather than after, the inventory.

George Miller said there’s a deleted scene of Miss Giddy being killed that was removed for pacing. Since Miss Giddy is alive with Angharad when she dies, the deleted scene would have been after that, possibly putting it somewhere around the events discussed here. So maybe the removal of that scene had a cascade effect, and now it worked better to swap the order of the shooting-the-bikers and taking-inventory scenes, so shooting-the-bikers became more of a coda to the action of the escape through the canyon and the death of Angharad, and taking-inventory became a relatively quiet breathing space after that. Whereas before, taking-inventory might have been a breather after the escape, with a separate rising action through the torture and death of Miss Giddy and the sniping of the bikers. It would raise the stakes of the sniping if we knew that there were only four shots left at that point, making Furiosa’s killing two people with one shot more meaningful.

Since the deletion of Miss Giddy’s death happened late in editing it would make sense that it was too late to reshoot Toast’s comment about “only got four for Big Boy here”, and unfortunately you see her mouth when she says it, making it hard to dub “three” for “four”.

On whether or not it counts as a continuity error, one could make an argument that just because we don’t see another shot being fired doesn’t mean one wasn’t fired in-world, or that Toast didn’t give an off-by-one count either on purpose or accidentally. Those explanations would be awkward in terms of story but at least would be logically possible.

It’s kind of shocking to me that this far into the process of obsessively analyzing the movie people haven’t found more glaring continuity errors. I just checked the “goofs” page at IMDB, and it is really sparse (and some of the listed errors are questionable, I think).

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1H7bXu9.

Tags: world-building, fury road, meta, text post, continuity errors.

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