Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. The time has come and I'm afraid I'm going to have to add to the avalanche of ecstatic reviews for George Miller's return to the world of Max Rockatansky.
Fury Road is everything I wanted it to be and more. Gorgeous, thrilling, brutal, oddly emotional, epic, badass and weird as shit... you know, everything you really need from a Mad Max movie. On top of all that there are some really smart character moves that I think might go unnoticed thanks to the grand spectacle on display and will only enrich the experience on repeat viewings.
I'd hesitate to call Max a reluctant hero... that's Luke Skywalker. Max is something darker, closer to Snake Plissken levels of anti-hero and always has been. He has a heart and his stupid conscience almost always seems to get in the way of his self-preservation instincts, which makes him a fascinating point of view to see any sort of story unfold, especially one as weird as this one.
And I do mean weird. It's a minor miracle this film exists and I'm not just talking about its troubled road to production or the fact that it comes almost exactly 30 years after the last installment in the franchise. No, I'm talking about the content of the story.
The bones of the film are simple. Max is on the run and he's being chased. From first frame to last, he's running (or trying to get away) from something, be it his past or the various factions of the wastes that give chase throughout the story, including the main threat of the body-painted Warboys. It's a simple, direct and adrenaline-pumping skeleton to serve as the foundation for the massive diverse world that Miller builds.
In this world it is just accepted that a dude will play a flame-throwing guitar on top of a speeding vehicle made mostly of giant speakers as a kind of portable soundtrack for the bad guy's army. It's the kind of “Fuck you, this is my world and you're going to accept it” attitude that's so sorely missed in this day and age of big budget filmmaking.
This film is a miracle because somehow a huge R-rated action chase film where the lead speaks less than the supporting characters while being pursued by mutated freaks made it through the studio system. The Wachowskis are the only other filmmakers working right now that gets similarly weird stuff through the system (and both at Warner Bros), but unlike Jupiter Ascending Mad Max: Fury Road has more going for it than just being unique.
From a visual storytelling point of view George Miller is on fire. I'm going to do something crazy here and compare this film to The Wolf of Wall Street. Bear with me, I swear it'll make sense. When I saw Martin Scorsese's last film I was not only in love, but also astounded at the energy of it. The Wolf of Wall Street was a young man's film, not the work of an established filmmaker in his 70s. I had the same feeling about Fury Road. This is the work of a young director with something to prove, not a dude late in his career resting on his laurels.
A lot of times when a filmmaker tries to go back to the well he just seems lost, not really understanding the world they made in the first place. Not so here. Miller isn't just trying to give us the same imagery we've come to know and love from the previous entries to this series, he does the impossible and creates a whole new mythology and throws Max right into the middle of it.
It would have been easy to stylistically recreate the tone of the other films, but instead he goes for something new that somehow feels exactly right. I can't even pretend to understand how he did that... how do you give us something new, but not out of the realm of expectation? I don't have a clue, but this crazy bastard did it.
I mentioned the characterization work and that's the real strength of this film. Among the chaos is some really fantastic character work. The bad guy, Immortan Joe, is about as flamboyant a heavy as you can get. He's got a crazy gas mask and shouts almost all his lines, but he's not just a symbol. There's an emotional reason he's after Furiosa and Max and he has a few moments of true, righteous anger that doesn't quite get you on his side, but makes you understand his motivations besides “the script needs a colorful bad guy.”
Tom Hardy is great in the role and sells so much of his character with just a simple look or facial tic. He's 100% committed and comes off very well onscreen. Knowing that Miller had set up this movie for Mel Gibson to return does make you wonder “What If” a little bit during the film. It would have been this exact movie, but with older Mel. I'd have loved to have seen that if only because it would have been a bit of a return to form for Gibson and a great continuation of the character he originated, but if someone was going to continue on the Max tradition then they got the best guy to fill Mel's leather jacket.
Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is a major player here. She's pretty much a female Max, but that doesn't mean she's just a guy with boobs. I've heard some talk about this film being a feminist masterpiece and I think you'll see a lot of really smart writers tackle that angle as the film enjoys its release. I'm not nearly knowledgable enough to try to tackle that, but I can say as a character Furiosa is damn near perfect.
She's tough, determined, smart and takes absolutely no shit from anyone. The relationship that forms between her and Max is one of mutual respect and I expect that she's one of the very few creatures of the wastes that could earn Max's respect. At no point is Furiosa the one that needs saving, even when she's in peril! She needs Max only in so much as anybody needs strong-willed people with common goals and enemies.
The MVP of the movie, though, is Nicholas Hoult. That's not to say that Max and Furiosa aren't on point, but Hoult's Nux gets to have the biggest journey of any character in the movie and is at once completely sympathetic and bugfuck insane.
Nux is a Warboy, an initiate of Immortan Joe who only wants to impress the big man because he's brainwashed a whole population into believing he's their key to Valhalla. His journey takes him from faithful follower to disillusioned skeptic and weirdly I found myself sympathizing with him every step of the way. If there's hope for Nux then goddamnit, there's hope for us all!
In terms of pacing, the movie is a chase from open to close and that's not an exaggeration. There are a couple of calm moments, but even then everything is still moving. I believe Nordling described it as the Truck Chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but for the whole movie and that's not too far off.
What that means narratively is that you don't have characters telling you who they are via dialogue, but through action and reaction. That is pure cinema. Visual storytelling is a big deal for me as a viewer and I always react positively to it, so you can imagine just how over the moon I was at seeing that for pretty much the whole movie here.
I have no idea how mainstream audiences are going to react to this one, but I hope it's successful financially because we need more tentpoles like this. Real cars, real stunts and only the bare minimum of CG. The CG in the movie is good and used sparingly, mostly when doing it for real would have likely killed somebody. That said, there's an insane amount of real stunts in this thing.
The world could use more movies like Fury Road and I hope George Miller has another half-dozen similarly inspired films in him before he gets tired with making movies.
If Star Wars: The Force Awakens is as fulfilling a return to a cinematic universe as Mad Max: Fury Road was then 2015 will be a year for the record books.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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