Mad Max: Fury Road

I am not what you'd call a Mad Max fan. I never saw the original three growing up, at the early- or pre-teen age that seems to be when most of my generation developed a fondness for them; my awareness of Mad Max as a character or a movie phenomenon was largely through the zeitgeist - all I really knew was that it was a weird, car-obsessed post-apocalyptic action franchise.  Then, when the Fury Road hype started to build (and, let's face it, those visuals), I decided it was probably time I had a look.


Mad Max is not a great movie; it's a decent idea, but one that would be better served by boiling the first two-thirds into the opening twenty minutes, and spending a lot more of the movie with Max in "Mad" mode.  Mad Max 2 (or The Road Warrior, if you're American) was the closest that they came to coherence - it had a (simple, but decent) story, and it all (mostly) made a kind of sense.

Beyond Thunderdome is cobbled together from a third of two different stories, with no real rhyme or reason to any of it.  It does look pretty striking in places, but it's a pretty awful movie when you come down to it.

TL;DR - I wasn't impressed with Mad Max to date.

Those visuals, though...

And then on top of that, reactions started coming out. Tweets and blogs and forum posts (oh my!), talking about this being THE action movie; and the accusations of feminism.

Let's talk about that first, actually, because it's one of the bigger things to come out of the early discussion, and I find it kind of interesting that's the case.

There's a school of thought (one I'm a subscriber to) that if something seems apolitical, that just means it shares your politics.  Fury Road, then, must share a heck of a lot of my politics - for all that it's attracted screaming terror for the fall of masculinity from red-pill MRA types, I didn't think it did a whole lot in the way of patriarchy-smashing.

I mean, sure - the women in this movie kick ass. Almost certainly more so than the title character, who spends a great deal of time tied to the front of a car with a post-nuclear impression of The Dark Knight Rises' Bane mask locked to his face.

Queen Kick-ass is, as the trailer (and her top billing) suggest, Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa, a rebel lieutenant to chief villain Immortan Joe, who absconds with his five "Breeders", women held captive for his procreative purposes. Tired of being locked away (and with the words "We are not things" scrawled on the walls of their prison), they've convinced Furiosa to take them away to The Green Place, some kind of promised land.

These women - who have names like "The Splendid Angharad" and "Toast the Knowing" - could just have been relegated to the role of cargo, but they aren't - each of them has a character, a breaking point, and a part to play in the story, though they do vary in terms of overall impact. They all fight, too - when their fragile freedom is threatened, they don't just cower in the back seat and wait for rescue or recapture.

And they're not the only ones, either - there are some equally badass middle-aged and borderline-elderly women, too, who go toe-to-toe with the overwhelming forces that Joe and his cronies have managed to muster.

Hm... I guess maybe it is feminist, after all.

As is always the case in a movie with "Mad Max" in the title, Max is only involved because someone's making him. It's a slow burn, but Hardy's change from grunting reluctance to active participant is actually a nicely understated piece of work, for all the turned-to-eleven, end-of-the-world heavy metal bombast that surrounds it.

For a movie that's about 80% exploding car chase, it's actually not that exhausting, either - there's variety in the vehicular carnage, and it manages to find quiet moments here and there, too.  Around the chase, there are glimpses of a larger world: stilt-wearing marsh-walkers, a couple of rival wasteland gangs, flashes of the bigger picture. The production design is universally spectacular - there's hardly a single vehicle in the thing that's actually just a single vehicle, rather than a towering, jumbled Frankenstein's-monster of hot rod, lowrider and Mack truck.

If this had been a review of any other Mad Max, it would be a NO. But Fury Road is not any other Mad Max. It shares the DNA, but this feels like the first time that George Miller has been able to make good on the concept, to really build the world that he came up with 36 years ago. This is a great action movie, without a single dull character, or moment, or frame. This is worth seeing, and on the biggest screen you can find it on.