(EDITED 20 May 2015. A second viewing has me even more enthralled with this movie. But some a huge correction to the below: It is without doubt the same Max Rockatansky in this film as Mel Gibson played. That's clear up front, and elsewhere. Which makes the lead of Charlize Theron's road Warrior Trucker all the more amazing. And the first appearance of The Wives is one of the great rug pulls of modern cinema. The first shot seems contrived and sexist, wet ladies in the desert, wearing gauze, maybe. College guys next to me whistled. Within moments they cringed and winced at the rage these ladies held. That's powerful film-making. I never touched on the wild religious implications of the film, the sick promise of Immortan Joe to his followers that if they die for him, Valhalla (heaven) awaits. Massive part of the story. It hits current wars of this day. Just epic. I don't know George Miller, only a few months younger my father, pulled this off. He has just crushed every young filmmaker working today. Epic. That certain Jedi film coming out later this year has a huge mountain to climb. A sequel.reboot has just set a new standard for action films, and how woman are to be seen on screen. Forever. And the energy on screen -- the feeling that anything can happen -- i just have to applaud.)
Days on, I’m still pumped with awe. I don’t know where to begin or if I’ll ever get everything I feel right now. “Mad Max: Fury Road” is the most daring, subversive summer action film to hit cinemas in years. God love George Miller.
Days on, I’m still pumped with awe. I don’t know where to begin or if I’ll ever get everything I feel right now. “Mad Max: Fury Road” is the most daring, subversive summer action film to hit cinemas in years. God love George Miller.
This is THE
film we need now. In its jaw-dropping spectacle. Its energy. Its anger.
From
trailers and posters galore, we expect rising Hollywood star Tom Hardy (“The DarkKnight Rises”) to take on the iconic Australian role of ex-cop Max Rockatansky played
frighteningly wild-eyed, fierece by Mel Gibson 40 odd years ago and run with it.
Hero.
Savior. Bad ass driver and gunslinger. Nothing could be further from the truth.
During a frenzied pre-credits opening salvo, hero Max is taken hostage, bound
and masked, and in drops the true lead of this film -- the new Road Warrior for
our time -- Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa. One-armed, armed, and driving
a steam-punk tractor trailer straight out of hell and into freedom. Or hope. Or
any place, but from where she came.
This is an action film with women at the
core. Not since “Alien” have we seen such a display. Theron makes Sigourney
Weaver’s Ripley seem tame. Here, strong, blood, divisive, kick-ass women in a near-future
world take back control of their lives and their world -- killed by men -- with
ferocious force. Max has to keep up. This could have been called “Mad Women.” (Unlike “Alien,” Miller uses scant clothing to again burn genre.)
And the action -– the entire film is one
chase with so little dialogue, you begin to forget to question if anyone can
talk – has no peer. In an age where whole hours of something like “Avengers:
Age of Ultron” is wall-to-wall CGI and impersonal robots and immortal heroes,
Miller drops in real vehicles and teams of stuntmen and women and smashes
everything together decadent glee. He smashes trucks through cars. Drops bikes
off mountains. Throws tanks into a tornado, and lets them fall. He kills
characters we have instantly fallen in love with minutes ago.
Every frame of
“Fury” is madness, glorious madness that feels as alive and pulsing as the
first “Mad Max” in 1979, a film that plays like it had to be made or its
director –- Miller –- might lose his f’n mind.
(This also recalls the gonzo mad
independent Australian films of the 1970s, such as “The Cars that Ate Paris,”
where narrative coherence is slain by glorious visual chaos. And, yes, John
Seale’s digital, handheld cinematography is Oscar worthy, inches from bloodied
cheeks and oil-spewing motors. Also Oscar worthy: Nicholas Holt, breaking out from boring X-Men and childish movie star roles to play a crazed man riddled with tumors and a desire to die horrifically, so he can be reborn whole.)
Before I get ahead of myself: We are back in
the post-nuclear apocalypse desert of the “Road Warrior” and “Thunderdome,”
although I don’t think “Fury” is exactly a sequel or a reboot from the previous
films. It’s never specifically said that this Max is the same Max of the
previous trilogy. His flashbacks -– violent, haunted acid trips of a man long
past sanity -– match nothing told before. Miller has us work for info. He drops
us in the middle of the action and makes us chase down the back stories, the
detailed horrors of this world.
One viewing is not enough. Furiosa’s task at
the start of the film is to steal gasoline for her master, Immortan Joe (Hugh
Keays-Byrne, who played the villain in “Mad Max,” but a fully different
character). Joe is an obese tumor-stricken old man wearing a plastic muscle
suit that bulks him to Hulk-size, with a horrifying oxygen mask of plastic,
rubber, and animal teeth for a face. He is the leader of a desert cult that
worships him as a god, and as he controls all water, food, fuel, and the blood
supply, he will not be questioned.
He also keeps five young women as sex slaves
to breed his children. It is they who are Furiosa’s cargo as the film opens,
she defying the order to steal petro as she carries these women to the “green
place” of her lost youth. Within Joe’s tower cave, his “wives” have scrawled
defiant phrases: “We are not your property!”
The chase is set when Joe decides
otherwise and sets out to get his “women” back, no matter who he has to kill to
do so. (Even his underlings question his sanity.) That the “wives” are introduced
as one-note barely-dressed supermodels is a tantalizing FU from Miller and his
writers. In the sands, away from men, finding more women warriors and mentors,
these young “hotties” explode in murderous revolt. Max can barely keep up.
Oscar winner Theron rules the film with quiet intensity. Our action star for
2015. Hardy is her acting equal as a man lost and in desperate need of saving
by these women before he loses his last thread of humanity. Epic does not do “Fury”
justice. It is vital viewing as action spectacle and comment on our sexist age.
I can’t think of another Hollywood summer film that has so upended my
expectations to glorious effect. Miller has just writ the end of our male-dominated
Marvel and D.C. summer era. Those films are made by business. This was made by burning need. A+
