This is a movie that strains at the leash of the possible, a movie of great visionary wonders.
I did not write that line to describe Mad Max: Fury Road. Roger Ebert finished his review for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with those words. After reading them all I could think to myself was “Roger baby, you ain’t got no idea.”
30 years (!) after Thunderdome director George Miller finally returns to his favorite character and transcends anything you’ve seen in the original trilogy by miles. Fury Road is a masterpiece, a fully realized world that fleshes out what lives inside the mind of a mad man. That mad man is not our boy Max. It’s Miller.
I like to think that part of the reason for the epic grandeur of the film comes from the notion that this is the action flick, drive-in/B movie version of Boyhood. Like Linklater’s coming-of-age story, this Mad Max took 12 years to make. Not that it filmed for over a decade but Miller struggled to get the film made for that length of time. So in his head, it gestated and warped. There were issues with Mel Gibson (not the first time that sentence has been put to paper), delaying the project for a handful of years so Miller (who directed both Happy Feet movies) decided that the only way to achieve his vision was to animate it. So he scraped the script in exchange for a giant stack of storyboards.
He pre-visualized the entire film and was able to not be hindered by funny little things like physics and reality. Once the cartoon version of Max fell through (I don’t know why to be honest. Let’s blame Mel for that too.) Miller took those storyboards and used them to make what we have here before us; the glorious Fury Road.
The film is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It almost doesn’t seem to take place in the barren wastelands of the original Max flicks (it was filmed in Africa while the trilogy was distinctly Australian). This world is amplified in every respect. Bigger and faster cars, more mutated mutants and a Mad Max character that only speaks in sentences containing 4 words or less. Tom Hardy as Max is perfect for the role and uses his face to tell the story. It looks like it hurt to be in this film and his efforts are much appreciated.
It’s 2015 and Miller knew that he had to do more than just heighten the action, he heightened the stakes as well. Instead of the film worrying about protecting some truck full of fuel, innocent people are the precious cargo. Max teams with a badass, one armed terror of a woman named Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to save a group of young woman from the uber-villain Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Bryne) so it is Max aiding to protect something pure in a world of melted death. But aiding is the imperative word. This is a female driven flick in many ways and Theron gives us a hero that is the strongest woman to smash a skull since Ripley in the original Alien film.
You have heard that this is a 2 hour long thrill ride that never stops. That is mostly true but be sure that Miller expertly balances the piles of car chases with enough time to focus on the characters. This makes the movie near perfect. Even though we are traveling a 100 miles an hour down Fury Road you know who are in the monster vehicles and why you want them to survive.
I could keep going and going. The movie is beautiful, alternating between color pallets that wash the screen with yellows and reds, blues and purples. The scope is enormous. And most impressively, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 100 million dollar film that is opening on 3,500 screens as a summer tent pole that is this bizarre, this abstract. This bat-shit crazy.
It is a feat, top to bottom. To quote one of my favorite movie nuts, Mad Max: Fury Road truly is “a movie that strains at the leash of the possible, a movie of great visionary wonders.”
