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.

Oh yeah, there's a guy with an electric guitar/flamethrower
who rides a truck covered in amps.
It's that kind of movie.

One of the things that makes Fury Road as crazy as it is has to do with how the film is shot. Director George Miller utilizes under-cranking, speedfreak editing, and even some fish-eye lens to simulate that kind of adrenaline-fueled hyperawareness that doing meth probably causes. Miller deliberately starts the film this way, and keeps it up for almost the first 20 minutes of the movie, to get the audience into that same kind of headspace as the characters. Completely and utterly crazed. But even when things settle down and the action becomes more conventional, the look of the piece doesn't suffer. This is partly due to the beautiful natural scenery Miller & co. shot the film in. Half of this film could be a BBC documentary of breathtaking deserts and it really helps give a sense of scale to the ruined Earth when the camera pulls out for great wide shots of tiny vehicles moving like beetles in the sand below.

But that's only half of the film, the quiet and sensible half where bits of character development happen. The other half is the where the insanity ramps back up and that half is the action sequences. Props to Miller and the filmmakers for going full-out with practical effects, building dozens of Frankencars driven by professional stuntpeople to smash into each other. And because of this, every jump off the roof of a truck or dip from a pole vault onto a moving vehicle looks spectacular. No film I've seen in the past few years has had this level of committed verisimilitude and just knowing that I'm seeing real cars crash, roll, and explode is enough to get the blood pumping. All this mayhem is just enhanced by Miller's camerawork, keeping it constantly moving around the trucks and zooming in on the drivers screaming their heads off in maniac glee. It's in these sequences that the simulated craziness of the opening roars back in.

Immortan Joe, a post-apocalyptic punk rock Darth Vader type.

That contrast is actually interesting to note because it's not just visual, it's character-based as well. The more placid & serene moments of Fury Road are associated with Theron's Furiosa whereas the crazy action is associated with Immortan Joe. That dichotomy is actually kind of odd when viewed within the larger context of the film because thematically Furiosa is the hero. And while she is no slouch in the ass-kicking department (heck, she outclasses Max more than once during the film), her entire motivation and the reason Joe's slaves escaped was to leave behind the sort of dangerous, unhinged warrior bullshit that Joe and his Warboys thematically represent and that implicitly caused the apocalypse to begin with. The reason I find this odd though is that all that crazy macho action stuff is the main draw of Fury Road and the thing that it excels the most at, but maybe that was what Miller was going for. Bringing the audience in with the promise of gonzo destruction only to deliver the message that while appealing, going crazy like that will only cause more destruction. It's certainly what informs the character arc of Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who starts the film as a loyal Warboy using Max as a bloodbag before Immortan Joe abandons him for a failure and one of the slaves takes a liking to him and brings Nux into their fold. 

Strangely enough if the film has one major fault it's Max himself.  Not through any fault of Tom Hardy's though, he's quite fine as the gruff man of few words and he's more than believable as someone thrown into an insane situation who's always just near the end of his rope. The problem is that the character himself is rather superfluous to the going-ons of the plot. It's Furiosa and her actions that drive everything and Max kind of just stumbles into the situation by accident, he doesn't have any particular reason to be in the movie other than it's named after him. Eventually he does get involved when his survival and Furiosa's band's survival intertwine but you still get the sense everything would have worked out had he not been there. There also a significant drop-off in intensity after that first twenty minutes when the film settles into a more conventional pacing. It's still engaging but you can't help but feel a little bored in comparison to that opening and the film's energy level doesn't come close to matching it until the climax. But again, that's just because the first 20 minutes are so fast and so crazy that the rest of the movie couldn't maintain that speed without the camera catching fire.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a hell of a movie. It has the most satisfying and intense action sequences of any film in years shot by a director who clearly knows how to get the most of his camera. But aside from just looking spectacular it has some sly commentary that it's lean structure belies, but Theron and Hoult's great performances illuminate. What a lovely day indeed.

Go see it and then throw himself onto a burning car from the adrenaline it will surge through your system.

Final Score: 5/5