Title: Mad Max: Fury Road
Director: George Miller
Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne
Over 35 years ago, visionary director George Miller unleashed Mad Max, a low-budget, dystopian western-on-wheels. The movie, an international commercial success, spawned two sequels: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). Now, three decades later, Miller has returned to the series that made him famous. The result is Mad Max: Fury Road, a high-octane, half-insane, deliriously enjoyable action flick that renews faith in the summer movie season and in blockbuster entertainment in general. It's the best Mad Max movie yet, and it's one of the best action movies ever made.
Something of a sequel-reboot, Fury Road finds "Mad" Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, replacing Mel Gibson) alone in the wilderness, focused only on the basest of human instincts: survival. Chased down and abducted by the servants of a tyrannical warlord named Immortan Joe, Max is made a slave. When one of the warlord's lieutenants, Furiosa -- played powerfully by Charlize Theron -- steals his vehicle and property, Joe sends his "war boys" in hot pursuit. Max, now a "blood bag" for an injured war boy, goes along for the ride. Soon enough, Max and Furiosa join forces and struggle against overwhelming odds to survive a long trek across the desert.
Mad Max movies have never been about deep, meditative stories or powerful character arcs. They're about the smell of burning rubber, the crunch of metal and flesh, and archetypal characters driven mad by the post-apocalypse. Fury Road is no different. However, the movie is not all car chases and gravity-defying stunt work. Fury Road features a surprising amount of depth and character development for the genre, and, unlike many modern blockbusters, it has something important to say.
Back to the chases and stunt work: all of it is magnificent. Miller, armed with a huge budget and total creative freedom, has created in Fury Road an action movie for the ages, filled with a dozen show-stopping set pieces. Souped-up, fetishized muscle cars routinely careen across the sandy wilderness, colliding and exploding, while their human occupants leap, crawl, and shoot around them. What's impressive is that Miller and his stunt team achieved this spectacle with very few digital effects; Miller claims that 90 percent of the effects are practical.
Even more impressive is the fact that all of the action makes visual sense. Often, action movies, burdened down with special effects, end up visually confusing or disorienting. Not with Fury Road. Together with Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seale, Miller manipulated the frame rate of the movie in order to achieve a visual coherence. Said Seale, "It'll be running below 24 frames because George, if he couldn't understand what was happening in the shot, he slowed it down until you could."
Adding to the brilliance of Fury Road is production designer Colin Gibson, who worked previously with Miller on Babe, and Tom Holkenborg, aka Junkie XL, who scored the movie. So much of Mad Max's visual identity relies on the design of its cars, costumes, and paraphernalia. In Fury Road, Gibson acts like a demented artist, mashing together icons, motifs, and vehicles into something bold and original. Take, for example, the "Gigahorse," which uses a monster truck body to support two long-finned Cadillac Coupe de Villes, one mounted on top of the other. Complementing that visual identity is an audio track as menacing and throaty as the roar of a supercharged engine, thanks to Junkie XL.
Three decades have passed since the last Mad Max movie, and yet it seems like things haven't changed at all. Miller, now 70, is still a master of analog action film-making. His character, Mad Max, is still the gruff, succinct hero who personifies humanity's survival instinct -- as Miller says, "he's all of us, amplified." What's changed, perhaps, is the summer movie landscape and the audience's lowered expectations of it. Maybe that's why Fury Road, with its dedication to practical effects, visionary direction, and metaphorical meaning, is so refreshing, revelatory, and, if enough young filmmakers follow suit, revolutionary.
Adding to the brilliance of Fury Road is production designer Colin Gibson, who worked previously with Miller on Babe, and Tom Holkenborg, aka Junkie XL, who scored the movie. So much of Mad Max's visual identity relies on the design of its cars, costumes, and paraphernalia. In Fury Road, Gibson acts like a demented artist, mashing together icons, motifs, and vehicles into something bold and original. Take, for example, the "Gigahorse," which uses a monster truck body to support two long-finned Cadillac Coupe de Villes, one mounted on top of the other. Complementing that visual identity is an audio track as menacing and throaty as the roar of a supercharged engine, thanks to Junkie XL.
Three decades have passed since the last Mad Max movie, and yet it seems like things haven't changed at all. Miller, now 70, is still a master of analog action film-making. His character, Mad Max, is still the gruff, succinct hero who personifies humanity's survival instinct -- as Miller says, "he's all of us, amplified." What's changed, perhaps, is the summer movie landscape and the audience's lowered expectations of it. Maybe that's why Fury Road, with its dedication to practical effects, visionary direction, and metaphorical meaning, is so refreshing, revelatory, and, if enough young filmmakers follow suit, revolutionary.
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