“Oh, what a day. What a lovely day!”, one of the characters excitedly proclaims early in Fury Road upon assessing the spectacular damage wrought during a chase through a blistering sand storm. His idea of what constitutes a lovely day almost certainly differs from yours or mine. This is a parched, colorless place with nothing to strive for other than delaying extinction. The most precious commodities-and constantly fought over-are water and gasoline. Food is something to not be picky about, and sex doesn’t seem to register as anything like a priority either. In the relentless opening sequence Max, the self-described “road warrior looking for a righteous cause”, notices a two-headed lizard. Instead of alarm his reaction is to promptly devour the reptile like it was a potato chip (in a later scene a crawling insect is quickly munched, rather than squashed).
Mad Max is surely one of the odder franchises the movies have ever given us. And yet it’s also a strangely plausible and unsettling one. Our world after war destroyed the pillars of society and plunged us into a chaos could very well come out looking like the one director George Miller came up with: humans reduced to a primitive, primate state of unceasing tribal warfare. The original installment in 1979 saw society receding and heroes fading (and Max’s family robben from him), but it still took place more or less in the world we live in. It was with the Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome (most memorable for the dopey presence of kid actors and Tina Turner’s performance and music) that the visionary Miller fleshed out his ideas of a world gone seriously cuckoo. After a thirty year gap in the series (in which time he made the marvelous Babe movies along with Happy Feet), the Aussie director has finally returned to the dark and demented. Fury Road is the franchise’s certifiably insane masterpiece.
The movie essentially amounts to two epic chase sequences and Miller gets right to it. Max, this time played by Tom Hardy (taking over the iconic role from Mel Gibson), introduces himself as a man who “runs from the living and the dead.” He’s haunted by loss and failure to protect the people he loved (in the only thing that feels like a misstep is the psychological trauma of those flashbacks which feel cluttered and overdone). Fury Road starts as he fails to outrun the foot soldiers of Immortan Joe, a war lord leader who uses his monopoly on the water and gas supply to control the nearby population (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who previously played a villain in the original Mad Max but is horrifyingly unrecognizable here as a long haired, albino demon dependent on a respirator). They shave, chain, and muzzle Max, using him as a blood donor. When Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) drives off to replenish the stock of fuel, she is seen by Immortant intentionally going off route. He charges after her with his cavalry, including Max tied-at least briefly-to the front of a car driven by Nux (played by Nicholas Hoult).
Furiousa has taken something else from the desert warlord: his youthful, fertile wives from forced marriages. Max first encounters them after that first spectacular chase has ended and they appear before him like a mirage. The moment Max lays eyes on these young attractive women would have been played crudely for a laugh (perhaps an insinuated girl on girl action joke or just a lascivious gaze at them pouring water on themselves). He refreshingly doesn’t go for anything of the sort. Miller steadfastly refrains from sexualizing or objectifying them, along with every other woman in the movie.
Just before its release Mad Max: Fury Road got a last minute burst of additional attention because of one MRA blogger decrying the movie’s “feminist agenda”. Really, he was doing what too many arguably do in the internet age: politicize all art and render judgement on films before seeing them. But this unsavory writer wasn’t completely wrong either. And that’s a highly welcome development. The story isn’t of helpless girls being rescued by fearless gents (Max joins forces with Furiousa clearly as the indebted party). It’s very aware of the tyranny of men who prey on and exploit women (including in this case a pregnant woman who is seen by Immortan Joes solely as a vessel for another son and cruelly disregarded). The heroes turn out to be a pack of lethal women. Perhaps the most telling moment though is what should be a minor one when Max voluntarily hands over the gun he’s using to Furiousa to get a critically important shot right.
Max himself starts to feel like a secondary character to Furiosa. While Max has had all motivation other than fear and adrenaline stamped out of him, she has held on to the folly of hope even as she too has had so much stolen from her (her loss extends to being an amputee). Theron makes her a tough, yet guardedly vulnerable and sympathetic character. She’s a full fledged badass. It’s easily one of the finest performances she’s ever given.
Mad Max: Fury Road is as much an action movie as it as a breathless symphony of car crashes and bullets. This isn’t a case of the storytelling being flimsy or slight: it’s action itself as storytelling. The sand storm sequence in particular, with apocalyptic clouds that loom like a 400 story building and flashes of lightning that devours many in its path, is a descent into hell. As Miller stages it, its peculiar power-and thrill-is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a movie. The relatively sparing use of CGI makes the incredibly choreographed effects and stunts all the more searing. It’s not very surprising given that Miller made the groundbreaking Road Warrior, but the tone here seems less quirky and more brutal than ever before.
No matter how dazzlingly pulled off this wouldn’t amount to much if it wasn’t anchored to ideas and character development. Fortunately Miller creates here as singular and immersive a world as he did in the previous installments and later with the Babe pictures. Fury Road is not an eloquent movie and doesn’t strive or need to be, but the imagination and visual inventiveness is unrelenting, from the spiky porcupine cars to the guitar player who churns out distorted war riffs on an axe that spits out fire and the goons who use poles to propel themselves around while wielding spears. Miller’s a filmmaker with a vision and Mad Max: Fury Road puts the pallid offering of the new overblown Avengers to shame. This is an idiosyncratic and exhilarating action film elevated to the level of storyboarded art. It’s also an experience so visceral you may leave it wanting a painkiller or two. Maybe a shower. And hopefully demanding more from everyone else making big-budget movies right now.
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