Mad Max: Fury Road

Studio: Warner Bros.
Directed by George Miller

May 15, 2015 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

In the furthest reaches of the wasteland, Mad Max Rockatansky is captured by the acolytes of Immortan Joe, an irradiated warlord who uses the bodies of the healthy to fuel his army of War Boys. This leads to an unlikely alliance with Furiosa, a renegade driver who has stolen Joe’s greatest treasures: his five fertile wives. Their only means of escape is a straight shot through the wasteland, by way of Fury Road.

Given its troubled production history and the thirty year gap since the previous film, it’s not hard to imagine an alternate reality where Mad Max: Fury Road is a disaster of epic proportions. Instead, we live in a far less probable world, in which a major production company handed $150 million (that’s almost ten times the budget of the previous three films combined), a prime, early-summer release date, and two of Hollywood’s most compelling actors to George Miller and gave him carte blanche to create a deranged, two-hour action sequence with a proud feminist agenda and a commitment to the practical stunt work that made the series legendary. Truly, we are blessed.

Fans of the original trilogy will recognize Miller’s fingerprints on every frame of Fury Road. From the quick zooms into the eyes of those about to die to a seemingly insatiable desire to give every character some kind of impairment or deformity, the seventy-year-old director remains as vital and dynamic as ever. The film lacks the granular realism of the earlier installments, but Miller renders that unnecessary by magnifying the weirdness and insanity that always lurked beneath the series’ surface via crisp cinematography and a vibrant color palette. Techniques like undercranking, which would seem quaint to modern audiences, have been replaced by contemporary hyper-fast editing, but Miller keeps the action coherent and fluid, even when it seems to defy all logic.

The absence of original star Mel Gibson has necessitated a new Max and Tom Hardy’s laser-focused intensity combined with his soft facial features make him an excellent analogue to his predecessor. But where Gibson played Max as a bitter, lonesome samurai, Hardy plays him as a cornered animal driven by little more than the desire to survive the next five minutes. Combined with some horrific hallucinations and voices in his head, this is certainly the maddest Max we’ve ever seen. As with The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, however, Max is less a protagonist and more a catalyst for plot movement, fast driving and frequent violence. The true hero of the story is Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, the heir apparent to Ellen Ripley, both in her capacity as a slim, shaved living weapon and her motivations being an unmistakable desire for female empowerment. That Furiosa seems custom built to launch a trilogy of her own is a testament to the power of Miller’s myth making. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another thirty years for the sequel.

www.madmaxmovie.com

Author rating: 9.5/10

Rate this movie
Average reader rating: 8/10

Comments