Entry 52: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Dir: George Miller

"The future belongs to the mad."
 
  
Tonight is a big milestone, as I venture out of the dank of the basement and into the cool darkness of the multiplex to return to a world in which the most valuable commodities are a fast vehicle and a tank of high-octane gasoline...

SPOILER ALERT: this is the first time I've written an entry on a film while it's still in it's initial theatrical release.  As such, I'm going to go as light as possible on the plot spoilers, but if you want to experience Mad Max: Fury Road fully unspoiled, stop reading this, get your ass to the theatre and get back here.  Hell, I'll get two page views out of you that way!

As the film opens, perpetual drifter Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, Bronson, The Dark Knight Rises, taking over from original series star Mel Gibson) is captured by marauders from the citadel of despotic Immortan Joe (Hugh Keyes-Byrne, who also played the villain Toecutter in the original Mad Max).  Max's arrival happens to coincide with the treasonous departure of Joe's top enforcer, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron, Monster, Prometheus), who has absconded with the dictator's five enslaved young brides in an attempt to spirit them away to freedom.  As Joe and his army of thugs set out in a convoy to intercept Furiosa and retrieve the fertile young women, Max finds himself dragged along due to a delightfully bizarre circumstance I won't spoil here.  Eventually breaking free, Max decides to throw his lot in with Furiosa and the brides, while also being alternately helped and hindered by confused, near-death "Warboy," Nux (Nicholas Hoult, X-Men First Class, TV's The Walking Dead).

I've seen this movie twice now, and I'm still struggling to find the proper words to describe it.  After decades in self-imposed exile in kiddie movie land (the Babe and Happy Feet films), Miller has returned to the genre he defined to orchestrate a ballet of post-apocalyptic vehicular mayhem unlike anything put on the screen before.  My first time through, I couldn't take my eyes off the screen and had to pick my jaw up off of the filthy floor at the end of the film.  This is a relentless, riveting, non-stop piece of entertainment, a wholly-singular work by a mad fucking genius and, to date, the absolute defining achievement of it's genre.  HOLY SHIT!  I'm not kidding; go now!  Much has already been made of the mostly practical effects and stunt work (only an over-the top sequence involving a huge sand storm and portions of Joe's enormous citadel show obvious signs of CGI work), but it bears repeating here: you've NEVER seen so many REAL vehicles on-screen at one time orchestrating such dazzling (and really fucking dangerous-looking) stunt work and slamming into each other in such beautifully explosive collisions.  Credit also needs to be given to Miller's astonishing camera work.  I didn't notice until my second time through there's deceptively little editing going on in the action scenes; instead, Miller keeps his camera prowling over the action, dipping, weaving and turning sharply when necessary to follow the action.  As to the actors, Hardy does fine work as Max, though he doesn't quite have the same charisma and presence as the young Mel Gibson.  Hoult is excellent as the confused, side-switching Nux, who gets perhaps the films strongest character arc.  This is, however, Theron's show; it's her Furiosa who drives the action of the film and her performance is impeccable, perhaps the most memorable female sci-fi asskicker since Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley.  There's been a lot of talk about where this film fits into continuity with the other three films in the franchise (Miller himself has said that he sees it as both a sequel and a reboot)...Take my advice-don't fucking worry about.  It's not as if there was a whole lot of connective tissue between the first three films, anyway.  Bottom line, if you've never seen any of the previous films, you can go into this one without worrying about being lost.  If you're a long-time fan, this could work just fine as a sequel to Thunderdome (only the re-appearance of Max's destroyed V-8 Interceptor and the gender switch of his dead child from male to female cause problems, and those can be pretty easily justified).  Oh, and if you're worried that a mega-million dollar budget and A-list stars might cause Miller to tone-down the weirdness that permeated the original three, don't!  This is a hard-R picture chock full of striking, grotesque imagery.  

If you're interested enough in this type of film to be reading this blog, for fuck's sake, see this one.  See it now, see it today, see it in a goddamn theatre.