Mad Max: Fury Road: A Review

This movie is crazy.

I'm sorry, I know I usually start these reviews a bit more erudite, commenting on genre conventions and director's critical reputation, but I just keep coming back to this fact. Mad Max: Fury Road is crazy. It feels like being dropped into some bizarre alien environment after taking some drugs that both heighten your perception to the max and make you trip some serious balls. And even once the initial high wears off and some semblance of reality sets in, you notice everyone around is still completely out of their minds. But I think the guy behind the camera might be crazier than anyone in front of it.

But we'll get to that, first the story. It's after the apocalypse and the world is a wasteland of sand & ash. Here we meet "Mad" Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), a former police officer who's slowly gone insane after his family's death and the harsh reality of surviving in this new world. At the start of the film he's captured to be used as a human IV drip by the Warboys, members of a death-cult formed around the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keas-Byrne). But his day gets worse when Joe's general Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) betrays him by helping the warlord's harem of breeding slaves escape and Max finds himself strapped to the hood of a car in pursuit of them. After some shenanigans free him, Max reluctantly agrees to aid Furiosa in reaching a mythical promised land across the desert. So the chase is on down the fury road with Joe and his Warboys hot on their tail.

So what was that thing at the end of Age of Ultron?

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

Once more, I am here to elucidate the meaning of the post-credits scene of a Marvel Studios film and decipher its meaning for the non-comics literate. Though thankfully the studio's latest offering, which followed its most recent release Age of Ultron, was short and straight-forward. Hell, If you've seen Guardians of the Galaxy I probably don't even have to explain all that much. But nevertheless let's go through the teaser and see how Marvel is already putting us on the road to that big two-part Infinity War they're promising. Last chance to avoid spoilers and here we go!

Avengers: Age of Ultron: A Review

Escalation has been the name of the game at Marvel since The Avengers burst onto screens back in 2012. Each subsequent movie set in their inter-connected cinematic universe has gotten bigger with higher stakes and cosmic repercussions. And with a civil war between heroes and an enormous radical sci-fi conflagration on the horizon, Age of Ultron has some pretty huge obligations to set the deck for that along with just measuring up to its instantly iconic predecessor. A daunting task for any sequel, about superheroes or no. So does it succeed? Yes, and beautifully so.

Let's catch up on where things are. While we were off on a fun space adventure with Star-Lord and crew, The Avengers have been busting up the resurgent Hydra organization (revealed to have survived WW2 in Winter Soldier) who have been meddling with Loki's Spear from the first film to grant people superpowers. Age of Ultron opens at the tail-end of the Avengers' work as they storm Hydra's last stronghold and seize the dangerous Asgardian weapon, but not before encountering the superpowered Maximoff twins (Aaron-Taylor Johnson & Elizabeth Olsen). Wanda Maximoff (Olsen) has the power of mental manipulation and surreptitiously brings Tony Stark/Iron Man's paranoia to the forefront. This is what inspires him to use Loki's staff to revive Project Ultron, an Artificial Intelligence defense program designed to replace the Avengers. But as often happens, Ultron (James Spader) is more than Iron Man bargained for and rebels against his creator, creating a powerful robot body for himself and attacking the Avengers. He has other ideas about how to defend the human race and so recruits the Maximoff twins to bring about his idea of peace not just without the Avengers, but by destroying the Avengers.