Max clambers inside and outside the vehicle, trying to fight off the dozens of soldiers, when suddenly he is snatched up by an enemy. He is actually snatched up, out of the vehicle and into the sky — Joe’s troops have built vehicles that let them sway from one vehicle to the next, and Max has just gotten grabbed by one. Then, in a sequence that I am still smiling about a day later, Max fights off his man, and tries to get back to Imperator’s vehicle.
Ah, to see it: Max in his perch, swaying gently through the air, entering screen right and smoothly, gently swinging to screen left … as every single thing behind him explodes. It’s a stunning and gorgeous juxtaposition, the gentle flight of Max through the air, the carnage and fire below.
That juxtaposition is at the heart of Mad Max: Fury Road, a film at once gentle and violent, sublime and beautiful.
You’ve probably gathered the plot from the trailers or the above description, and it’s not a complicated one. For all intents and purposes, the world has ended. Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne) is an evil warlord who controls one of the last places with water on earth. Our hero Max Rockatansky is a prisoner, being used as a blood donor supply for Joe’s soldiers. Imperator Furiosa is Joe’s best driver. One day Imperator takes Joe’s four wives, all desperate to escape, and makes a run for it. Max, still connected via a literal blood line to one of Joe’s soldiers, gets dragged along in the chase.
We have ourselves a movie.
The names in this film alone are worth the price of admission. Max Rockatansky has always been a top ten name in movie history. But now he’s joined by Imperator Furiosa, Nux, Immortan Joe, Rictus Erectus, Toast the Knowing, The Splendid Angharad, Cheedo the Fragile, The Doof Warrior … looking at this IMDB page makes me want to sit down every indie rock band in Brooklyn and yell at them for not being able to come up with names half this good. “We live in a world with The Splendid Angharad and you went with THE FIELD MICE?! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT.”
This is an old-fashioned picture. It’s a chase film. There isn’t much dialogue — Max is wearing a metal mask for a good third of the movie — and Charlize Theron does a lot more acting with her eyes than she does with her voice. For most of the movie, bad guys chase the good guys. That’s it.
But how Miller manages to undermine the old-fashioned setup is what makes this movie so wonderful. When you walk in, you expect Mad Max to be the hero. The film is named for him, after all. And while Tom Hardy is quietly spectacular in this film (what other actor alive can get a laugh out of a theater from an eye furrow?), about halfway through you realize that Max is not the hero at all. It’s Imperator Furiosa. This is her movie. Hers is the personal arc we care most about. She is the toughest character, the bravest, the most loyal, the most honest. At one point, Max himself seems to realize this, as he rides on the side of the vehicle during a massive battle and pauses, only for a moment, to admire Imperator as she goes about the business of kicking total ass.
The other performances are wonderful as well. Nicholas Hoult shines as Nux, one of Joe’s soldiers who is committed to dying for his boss, and can never quite seem to pull it off. Rosie Huntington-Whitely is surprisingly great as the aforementioned Splendid Angharad, displaying a toughness and grit I didn’t know she possessed.
If this move sounds overly violent and action-packed for you, let me just say that this movie has plenty of quiet, serene moments, as well as moments of just plain fun. At one point in an early chase, a guitar chord rips through the soundtrack, and the camera pans left to see one of the vehicles hooked up with a wall of amplifiers and, swinging in front of them, a soldier wailing away on a double-necked electric guitar. I wanted to stand and applaud right then. Imperator Joe is a horrible tyrant, but you have to appreciate a man who remembers to bring tunes for the ride.
In the end, what I will remember most from this film are the images. In an early chase scene, which I’m told lasts 30 minutes but I was too busy clinging to my box of popcorn to get an accurate count, Furiosa tries to lose a caravan of pursuers by taking them into a dust storm. Everyone braces for impact, and they cross the threshold, and then … it’s hard to describe. It’s the closest thing probably ever captured on film that approximates Dante’s Inferno. Miller isn’t making a post-apocalyptic film here, no. This is the apocalypse itself. This is a Hieronymus Bosch painting brought to life. We’ve killed the world, the film tells us, and as Max clings on to the back of a vehicle and dune buggies ride waves of fire and sand, we see the nightmarish remains.
Sad as it makes me, this will not win the Oscar for Best Picture. Knowing the Academy, it’ll go to some capital-I important film where a well-dressed Colin Firth overcomes a lisp, or maybe a limp. Don’t worry about any of that. Mad Max: Fury Road is the best movie you will see this year.
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