Just back from seeing it too, really good… How do you make a movie that captures the different tone and style and legacy of two such different characters? You just don’t. Take turns, why not.
<mild spoilers…>
Honestly I reckon the thing that separates a really good modern genre film or show and a lacklustre one is just the confidence- partly the confidence to do their own thing, partly the confidence that the audience can and will follow you, and this has that in buckets. Like, lots of stuff is hamfistedly meta and so is this but reassembling the actors for unpopular or discarded or just never happened characters from an in- and out-of-universe dumping ground and giving them “the ending we never got”, in a movie that’s constantly openly meta, that’s just pretty sublime. Kinda wasted Dafne Keen though, there was room for a lot more of her in there, and I’d have binned every second of Nicepool.
There’ll be tons to catch on a second or third viewing too. Like, the big mad max pastiche is obvious but the little nod to George Miller with the sped up explosion is subtle