Review: Mad Max Fury Road

Directed by George Miller

Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris

Starring Tom Hardy (Max Rockatansky), Charlize Theron (Imperator Furiosa), and Nicholas Hoult (Nux)

Cinematography by John Seale

Edited by Margaret Sixel

Music by Junkie XL

In a pleasant surprise, George Miller's heavy-metal extravaganza, Mad Max: Fury Road, was nominated for ten Oscars. I say surprising because the Academy Awards rarely recognizes artistry and brilliance when they are contained in genre works (action, horror, thriller). Six of these nods were part of the technical categories, which sometime serve as the space to honor more off-beat choices, but four were in the major groupings. These included Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. Fury Road ended up winning five, and Margaret Sixel took home the most notable, receiving a gold statuette for her editing work. In a truly just world the movie would have won everything it had been put up for, and decorated Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron for their duo of committed, over-the-edge performances. Alas, gearheads aren't in control in of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (at least not yet), so we'll have to make do with what is hopefully an initial salvo directed against the stuffiness of the Oscars.

Onto the meat of thing, the third sequel featuring our titular car cowboy, this one opens with a should-be-by-now iconic opening shot of Max, newly enveloped by an unruly mass of hair, standing over a bleach-out desert,V8 interceptor by his side. Shaking off encroaching madness, he is soon chased down and captured by a gang of vehicular bandits. From there, the creative team quickly establishes the vast chasm that separates the world of this entry to the others in the series. If the original Mad Max depicted an Australia that was just starting to fray due to over-dependence on fossil fuels, and The Road Warrior showed the immediate aftermath of societal collapse, then Fury Road leaps forward to a time where normality, security, cooperation, and abundance are hazy, near-forgotten memories or legends. There's little that's recognizable to us, and whatever detritus can be traced back to the current era is totally re-contextualized.

However, unlike 99% of blockbusters, the full details of this frightening new world are revealed in an organic way, mainly through character interactions, small-talk, and the robust, fully-realized production design. The audience is trusted to use their imagination to stitch the hints and suggestions together into a coherent whole. The first act feels like being suddenly (and violently) dumped into an ice bath as we watch Max get "processed" by his captors and are treated to a grand tour of the guts and bolts of Immortan Joe's medieval wasteland kingdom. His army of war boys, the hybrid norse-metalhead-biker religion he's built around himself, and the half-understandable slang that's arisen from the ashes of the English language are all introduced in short order. Again, all of these components are introduced through methods that make sense within the universe of the film. I never got the impression that the actors were speaking for the benefit of the audience. The way we are allowed to just sit back and absorb the novel aspects of Miller's vision is supremely refreshing in an age where most other movies of this kind are choked by garbled, expository dialogue.

After the overview of Joe's rule, the real action starts up as one of his high-ranking warriors, Imperator Furiosa, sets off in the War Rig on an errand run to pick up more "guzzoline". Secretly however, she has absconded with Immortan's four wives and is attempting to escape his grasp once-and-for-all. Upon uncovering Furiosa's back-stab, Joe summons the war-boys and a fleet of pursuit vehicles. Max is in tow as the "blood bag" for Nux. From there on, the ground work is laid for the expertly-choreographed chase that will take up the rest of the runtime and the basic ideas that will be explored. Using that scenario the crew behind and in front of the cameras masterfully shames all other filmmaking currently being done in this mold. All the problems associated with modern big-budget pictures (incomprehensible action, regressive gender roles, muddled or right-leaning politics) are avoided, and in their place is exhilarating combat, eye-popping backgrounds, and one of the finest female performances of the decade.