Mad Max: Fury Road - Review Thread

The plethora of remakes, reboots, and sequels to long dead-franchises in the last ten or so years has been the fuel for many angry film fans who flock to the internet to complain. Of course, such outrage hasn’t stopped many of these same fanboys (and girls) paying for movie tickets and turning these films into hits, but a tangible resentment toward many of these films does clearly exist. And yet, there never seemed to be any grievances with Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth in a series which hasn’t seen an instalment since 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Perhaps it was because Fury Road was not a cheap grab by the studio, but an effort from series creator George Miller, who had been trying to get the project off the ground for years. My theory though is that while the Mad Max trilogy does have a following, only one of the films really lived up to series potential (The Road Warrior of course), and the notion of a film striving to capture that yet again seemed more promising than an already accomplished franchise seeing a forced sequel. Sure enough, Fury Road has proved to be an inspired and creative film which breathes new life to the Mad Max franchise.

The film opens on archive footage, along with narration from the titular Max (Tom Hardy), revealing what has become of the world in this desolate future. Essentially, society has collapsed, with water and oil becoming primary resources for warring gangs. Max is a former cop who lost everything in the fall, now just trying to survive through the wasteland. Early on, he is captured by a gang who use Max as a “donor” for blood and organs. This gang/make-shift society is led by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who controls a fleet of vehicles and possess a group of “wives” he uses to continually reproduce. These wives plan an escape with one of Joe’s key soldiers, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Driving Joe’s “War Rig”, Furiosa escapes, inviting a large scale chase with Joe leading an army of eccentric followers. One such follower, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), needs a “blood pact” to keep him going, and this brings Max into the chase.

Previous Mad Max films have been about what products have become vital resources in the future, with water and energy sources like oil being the most precious. In a twist, the most precious resource in Fury Road is not a product at all, but fertile women. Immortan Joe is using a group of young women in an effort to create “perfect” children and there is also an undercurrent that men specifically brought about the downfall of the old world. The feminist readings of the film are there. The film is essentially about women reclaiming their agency, both sexual and otherwise. I also think Miller did a good job focusing on new thematic content while remaining true to the core of the franchise. That said, I don’t want to oversell the intellectual readings of Fury Road. At it’s core, this is a balls to the wall action movie, and essentially one large chase scene broken up by a few beats. After a few skirmishes in the opening fifteen minutes, the plot of Furiosa and the wives’ escape kicks in and the film becomes about Joe’s pursuit of the women, along with how Max enters the fray. Making such a singularly focused film is not easy, but Miller pulls it off, in large part due to pacing. The film is simple, Miller breaks up the action with more lowkey moments which deliver basic character and plot development. None of this is overly complex, but it works okay and is integrated organically. The action scenes themselves are all kinds of awesome. There is a tremendous sense of size to these chases, with tons of cars smashing into each other in all sorts of over the top ways. Miller never allows these scenes to become too big either. The man maintains control throughout, bringing focus to the insanity. In addition to the scope and skillful execution, there’s all sorts of creative things going on. As an added bonus, it looks like a lot of the action was filmed practically. There’s definitely CGI in spots, but only when necessary.

Despite the simplicity of the story, I did find a lot of creativity in the film’s world building. The previous films were also set in an apocalyptic future, but those worlds were fairly restrained. While there was some exaggeration for the sake of style, it never seemed like much of a stretch for what a real-life post-apocalyptic society might look like. This is not the case in Fury Road, which fully embraces the kitsch, Heavy Metal inspired vision of the future. The villains in particular have very stylized look with the frequent pale faces, and Joe’s mechanical enhancements. However the highlight in the “cool looking characters” file is the guitar guy; a henchmen of Joe who rocks an awesome electric guitar which doubles as a flamethrower. You’d have to be a real jaded bastard to not get a kick out of that. Additionally, Miller uses his visuals to tell the story and the world very well. We see an image early on of a bunch of women attached to machines extracting their breast milk for Joe’s own purposes. The shot doesn’t last long, but it does reveal things about this world and there are moments like this throughout. The film also spots some really beautiful cinematography and great use of warm (orange) and cold (blue) colours. All of these great visuals are matched well by an energetic score from Junkie XL.

Stepping into the role which originally helped make Mel Gibson a star is Tom Hardy. He does a fairly serviceable job here. Max isn’t a complex character, but Hardy brings the right masculinity and oddness to the role. He isn’t as mythic and badass as Gibson ways, but in some ways that might be a doomed undertaking, like someone other than Clint Eastwood trying to play The Man with No Name. It’s a simple characterization, but in some ways that makes recasting all the more difficult. The real star here is Charlize Theron, who is awesome as Imperator Furiosa. Theron is totally believable as a tough-as-nails action hero and brings the right emotional conviction to the part. I really hope to see this character again. Nicolaus Hoult also has a pretty fun turn here. On the downside, I was a little disappointed in the film’s villain. Immortan Joe may have a great look, and Hugh Keays-Byrne is pretty imposing, but the character ultimately doesn’t do much.

Fury Road does have its faults. There really isn’t much story here, and the plot is largely a hodge podge of previous films in the series. I also think that, much as I enjoy the extreme style, the more reserved style of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior resonates with me a lot more. Having said that, I must say I was highly impressed with Mad Max: Fury Road. As a work of spectacle alone, the action scenes here are staggering and worthy of the price of admission, however this isn’t a “leave your brain at the door” movie in the vein of Furious 7. This is a work of total visual artistry in terms of design and style which serves not only to look cool, but also to tell a story. Miller has returned to the series with a vengeance, and injected some much needed creativity into the summer movie season.

A-

Mad Max: Fury Road(5/17/2015)

Anyone remember Super 8? I do, in part because I actually like that movie, but the rest of the world seems to have forgotten it pretty quickly. It was certainly on the film community’s mind before it came out though, in part because it looked like it would be an oasis in the middle of a summer that was going to be filled with the likes of Green Lantern, The Hangover Part II, and Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tide. The idea of an original IP from an exciting filmmaker with a fun retro style was like catnip to everyone sick of CGI packed franchise nonsense and everyone assumed that this movie would be our savior. But when it came out it turned out that it wasn’t a savior so much as it was a well-made summer movie, and there’s nothing that people hate more than a false prophet. The summer movie that most people did end up sucking off that year ended up being one with all the elements that people hate, it was a CGI-packed prequel/remake/reboot called Rise of the Planet of the Apes. To my eyes that movie wasn’t any better or worse than Super 8 but it did have the element of surprise and didn’t have the weight of six months of hype leading to its release.


The same thing happened the next year to even a greater degree the next year when the movie Prometheus came out and was also probably harmed by a runaway hype-train that had people thinking it would be the savior of summer fun. It’s that experience that had me bracing for disappointment when people started to hotly anticipate Mad Max: Fury Road. The two movies were put on a pedestal for a lot of the same reasons. Both movies featured veteran directors returning to the 1970s sci-fi franchises that made them famous, both movies promised to use CGI in ways that were necessary rather than excessive, both opted for the more hard core R rating rather than neutering their source material in order to reach a wider audience, and both films had really cool trailers that promised a really distinct visual style being brought to the proceedings. Somehow I just knew people were going to be burned again and that I’d once again be the one sitting on the sidelines trying to remind people about the film’s merits while everyone else gets dismissive over minor plotholes. So, I’ve decided to jump off the hypetrain and walk into the movie nearly blind, not quite knowing what to expect.


Like the rest of the movies in the franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia that is dominated by roving gangs with crazy cars fighting over the last remaining gasoline. This one starts at a city called The Citidel which is ruled by a demagogue Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) who keeps people in his service by slowly doling out water. In Joe’s service is a violent gang of thugs called The War Boys who roam the wastes scavenging for items and stealing gas. As the film begins Max (Tom Hardy) has been captured by these War Boys and is being used as a human bloodbag by a War Boy named Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who’s recovering from an injury. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, for Max this particular day a trusted person in Joe’s army named Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has just broken Joe’s prized “breeder” women (or sex slaves as they’re more commonly called) out of their confinement and is attempting to drive them away from the Citidel. Enraged, Joe brings almost his entire army in pursuit and since Nux has no intention of missing out on the battle he decides to strap Max to his car in order to keep his blood transfusion going as he joins the convoy going after Furiosa.


Let’s take a step back and consider the earlier films in this franchise. The Mad Max movies hold a rather strange position among commercial films in that they seem to be widely known but are perhaps not actually all that widely watched. The original Mad Max in particular is rough viewing for anyone not accustomed to the beats and pacing of 70s exploitation movies and few people seem to like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, so the series legacy rests almost entirely on the second film which was released as The Road Warrior stateside and even it is mostly just known for its final twenty minute actions sequence. Still, there’s a reason why these movies are so famous and that’s the wild vision of the post-apocalyptic future that George Miller seems to have. The world of Mad Max can be seen in everything from Cormac Mcarthy’s “The Road” to 2pac’s “California Love” video to the “Fallout” video game series, but there’s hardly a single famous line of dialogue from any of the films and individual scenes that don’t involve car chases are rarely cited.


It’s been thirty years since the last Mad Max movie came out but for better or worse the same strengths and weaknesses seem to exist in the newest film in the series. The title character has never been the best part of any of these movies; he’s always been a drifter in the Yojimbo tradition who’s pretty much devoid of any real personality beyond the fact that he’s apparently tortured over the death of his wife and daughter. Mel Gibson had enough screen presence to make it work and so does Tom Hardy to some extent but the character is still a real nothingburger in this new movie. He is less of a lone warrior this time around as Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is practically a co-lead but isn’t much more talkative than Max is. Both character do have a somewhat tantalizing mystery to them and do function quite well in action scenes but they’re odd characters to rest an entire film on. The performance that really stole the show for me was Nicholas Hoult’s work as a hyper War Boy who slowly starts to realize that the leader he’s been loyal to has not had his best interests in mind.


The film’s real star is almost certainly its visual design, which is absolutely vivid. You can tell that in the thirty-some years it took to finally return to this franchise George Miller has spent every day coming up with new and inventive ways to let his freak flag fly in this post-apocalyptic setting and he’s put every one of them into this movie. Take a look at the villainous Immortan Joe for example, who looks like a sort of steampunk Darth Vader with a respirator over his mouth that has skull-like teeth on the front of it, or his gang of War Boys who are these sort of gangly hyper junkies with bald heads and white makeup. I could go on and on listing cool elements like that, the highlight is probably a car in Joe’s war party seemingly meant to pump up his troops by playing rock music played by drummers in the back seat and a guitar player in bondage gear standing at the front strumming out licks and shooting flames out of the neck of his instrument. The odds of such a rig being at all workable in a resource starved future, but practical realism is not the point, this is expressionistic filmmaking that’s been tailored to look really cool on screen and it can be rather intoxicating.


Those visuals alone do more or less make the film worth seeing and so do the film’s many action scenes, which are highly kinetic and appear to feature some rather dangerous stunt work. CGI is obviously used to some extent (this is an action movie made in 2015 after all) but it doesn’t seem to dominate the entire film like it so often does in blockbusters these days. A couple of the fight scenes did seem a bit over-edited to me, but for the most part they are pretty thrilling. They have to be by the way because this film is to a certain extent one elongated chase scene for the entirety of the film with a couple of lulls here and there for the audience to catch their breath. The dialogue is… I don’t know if minimalist is the right word but it certainly isn’t front and center and the story is at the end of the day quite simple. Some commenters have highlighted that Max’s mission is to rescue the “breeders” that Joe has held captive and that he’s being aided by a tough woman and have tried to make the film into some kind of grand feminist statement, but I’m not really sure that amounts to much. Sure, if feminism is a binary I suppose this film would qualify but whatever statement it’s making is minor. A character reluctantly deciding to help a group of white slaves from a common enemy is not exactly revolutionary and while it’s nice to see that women are allowed to have murky pasts and fight people alongside men these days I feel like I’ve been there and done before too.


I started this review by talking about my prediction that this movie would disappoint people and I’d be left to defend it from the nitpickers… well that hasn’t happened. Turns out people absolutely love this movie and I’m actually the one sitting on the outside saying “hold on a second, it isn’t that great.” Make no mistake, I think this is a badass that I greatly enjoyed and look forward to seeing again many times but I must say I also find it to be a fairly superficial accomplishment. As much as I enjoyed looking at it I found its themes shallow, its characters boring, and its story simplistic. If it had a less engaging presentation it would be bordering on poor, and it probably says something about just how amazing its visual design is that it carries the movie as much as it does. The again this is the summer movie season and “mindless” is the order of the day, so if a movie is going to be shallow it might as well be shallow in ways that are this exciting and awesome.

***1/2 out of Four

Ah, OK. I hadn't heard that term.

Dracula PG Cooper SnoBorderZero

www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mad-max-beyond-thunderdome-1985

It's not. 

Indeed.

Great movie loved it. But I do have one question, why didn't they just give the gas to the bikers like the deal was supposed to be? She had the extra fuel, the path was blocked, they could have easily stopped unloaded the fuel and when Joe got there took care of him. The bikers might have even helped.

After weeks of pestering my girlfriend, she agreed to see this with me. And despite her protests going in, all she could say when it was over was, "That was fucking awesome". A highlight of our relationship.

Doomsday Dracula PG Cooper SnoBorderZero