Mad Max: Fury Road

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.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Title: Avengers: Age of Ultron
Director: Joss Whedon
Written by: Joss Whedon
Starring: Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner


Avengers: Age of Ultron is the ultimate comic book movie. It's not the best -- far from it. But it is the ultimate, the quintessential comic book movie. Concerned not only with its own story, but with the stories of several other movies -- past, present, and future -- Ultron brings to the big screen the serialized nature and looping character arcs of comic books. In no way is it a self-contained narrative; instead it's the prism through which the Marvel Cinematic Universe is reflected. It's not really a story; it's connective tissue. And yet, despite this reality, despite the fact that Ultron is over-stuffed and bound by the narrative logic of the larger Marvel cinematic project, the movie is enjoyable. It's inferior to director Joss Whedon's first attempt at the Avengers series, but it's still an efficient and capable entertainment.

Age of Ultron starts kinetically with an Avengers raid on a Hydra base in the eastern European country of Sokovia. The Avengers, led by Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) manage to pummel the bad guys and retrieve Loki's scepter. Back at base, Stark and fellow genius Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) decide to use the artificial intelligence inside the scepter to power "Ultron," Stark's global defense program. Unfortunately for the Avengers, Ultron achieves sentience and decides that the only real way to protect Earth is to eliminate its human population.

Age of Ultron is an entertaining movie, but it would benefit from an extra 30 minutes, or, perhaps, half as many characters. Writer/director Joss Whedon has a penchant for writing groups, but even he, skilled as he is, cannot devote enough time to develop each primary and secondary character. Ultron, voiced mellifluously by James Spader, is unfortunately underdeveloped. Newcomers Pietro and Wanda Maximoff are egregiously underdeveloped. Others are more lucky. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who spent most of The Avengers possessed, gets his fifteen minutes of fame in Age of Ultron. Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) and Banner also get a healthy amount of screen time; it's their story arc, along with Hawkeye's, that help provide a human touch to a movie that's concerned mostly with elaborate fight scenes.

Speaking of the fight scenes: they're interesting enough, although not as visually inventive or daring as those in recent Marvel movies. There's nothing in Age of Ultron that compares with the Heat-esque street shoot-outs from The Winter Soldier or the brawl through dimensional portals in Thor: The Dark World. Still, Ultron's set pieces are serviceable, and Whedon manages to elevate them with a few shots of humor and his trademark group shots. A panoramic slow-motion shot of the heroes fighting in tandem during the movie's climactic battle is especially thrilling.

The movie is at its best, unsurprisingly given Whedon's credentials, when the superheroes are "off the clock." The finest scene in Age of Ultron isn't a knock-down fight between The Hulk and Iron Man, or a clash of superheroes and supervillains. It's a party at Stark's high rise, where the movie (and the audience) can take a breath and learn about its characters. The pacing, sense of humor, and composition on display in this short, intimate scene outpaces everything else in the movie.

It begs the question: what would Ultron be like if Whedon wasn't attached as writer and director? The movie is successful in spite of itself, thanks to Whedon's mastery of the subject matter and his understanding that human emotion is far more compelling than exploding robots. It's just a shame that Ultron had so little room to maneuver. With a dozen heroes, plenty of bad guys, and a platoon of supporting friends, family, and well-wishers -- each with his or her own back story and movie tie-in -- it's nearly impossible to push into new cinematic territory. Age of Ultron is lesser than The Avengers in large part because of The Avengers, and, for that matter, every other Marvel movie that came before it and will come along after it. As the Marvel Cinematic Universe continues to expand, its individual projects will continue to shrink.