The new Mad Max film is a betrayal of everything that made Fury Road so good

Action films are boring. This isn’t really an opinion, it’s just demonstrably true. Try it for yourself: put on any high-octane, orange-and-teal action movie from the last 15 years and see how long it takes before you start automatically fiddling around with your phone. I can usually make it about five minutes. This is weird. I can deal with all the incredibly sedate cinematic vegetables just fine, but as soon as there are gunfights or chases involved I get distracted. I think I know why.

Action directors know that they’re competing with the sensory equivalent of a crackpipe in every pocket, so they do whatever they can to make their films as attention-grabbing as possible. Everything comes out slick, shiny, computerised; a lot of the time, each individual shot only lasts for a few seconds, in case you get tired of looking at one thing for too long. They’re desperate not to bore us. But the overall effect is of loud, manic, basically unconnected digital images swimming in front of your eyes – which happens to be the exact same effect you get from scrolling mindlessly on your phone. So you may as well just look at your phone.

In a way, CGI has ruined the dumb action film. When anything is possible, nothing is ever really impressive. When an essentially fictional camera can swoop through a simulated environment at will, the image loses any relation to the actual process of looking and it’s hard to maintain any visual interest. You can throw in as many explosions as you like; it still feels like watching a screensaver.

But it wasn’t always like this. You can go back and watch the magnificently dumb original Matrix from 1999: there’s some computer-generated stuff happening around the edges, but most of what you’re seeing onscreen is a human body being dangled on wires by a Hong Kong choreographer, and it looks visceral and real.