I saw two movies two weeks ago.

The first was a moving portrayal of the ravages of war, set in Shanghai and the surrounding area following the invasion of the Japanese army in World War II. The other was a CGI steampunk-bondage fest with an Instagram burnt orange filter that suffered from a superb lack of any intellectual substance. One was Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Rising Sun, and the other was the 2015 Mad Max remake. Can you guess which is which?

Mad Max is set in a post-apocalyptic world, void of water and fuel. There’s an evil government, with an evil leader and a bunch of followers, with wives who don’t want to be his wives who have to carry the evil leader’s babies and don’t want to carry his babies. The wives and their woman leader run away to the “green place.” Turns out, there is no “green place.” They keep going, but eventually turn around. The leader gets killed. The group makes it home. They all live happily ever after. There’s also a guy named Max somewhere in there.

Done right, dystopian post-apocalyptic movies such as Mad Max can serve a key societal function of pushing their audiences to stark realizations about the nature of war and the wastefulness of human actions. Bare landscapes and evil future dictators can tug and provoke our thoughts, begging for interpretations that tie into the real world. Is this just an exaggerated version of what life is currently like in Ramadi under ISIS?  Are we barreling towards this water-less wasteland of mutated animals if we keep wasting resources and playing with the genes of our food supply?

These are the kinds of questions I want to ask myself as I walk out of a movie theatre, and that I want Hollywood film directors to force American audiences to be asking themselves. But when I walked out on Saturday night, I was just grateful for the release from the theatre.

“It’s good for what it was,” said my friend’s Dad on the car ride home. If “what it was” was boring and repetitive, then yes, I guess it was good for what it was.

The problem with this movie is what seems to be an epidemic of Hollywood directors and film producers who, surprise, are in it for the money. Dialogue-less action and successful, well-known plot lines seduce directors into remaking classic films or making part 2s or part 7s (Star Wars, Furious 7, Saw, must I go on?) that don’t really need to be made.

I want there to be innovation and creativity. I want to leave the theatre with my fellow theatre-goers and have been showed what it is like to be a different race, or live in a war torn country. I want to die laughing at some jokes that aren’t sexual for once. I want to be moved.

Giving this movie its due credit, the graphics and visuals were stunning. Largely filmed in the Namib dessert of Namibia in southwestern Africa, the stunning orange mountains and deep canyons provided the perfect backdrop to the massive vehicles covered in grimey sand and decorative spikes. In the brigade of the evil dictator there was an electric guitarist strumming violently to the tune of the speeding trucks. That touch was pretty epic.

Setting, though, can’t make a movie, and there is no substitute for dialogue.

I want the stunning graphics of Mad Max to be combined with some dialogue and intellectuality. But until then, I might just have to keep turning to movies and directors of the past.