Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult. Dir. George Miller, Warner Bros., 2015
#1
This writeup is for potheads.
If you're prone to feeling a touch anxious when you get high, and if you get too high because you didn't smoke for a few days, and if you're hypertensive in the bargain, Mad Max: Fury Road is not your movie. It will start off fine, and remain so until the last 30 minutes, at which point director director George Miller has the tension ratcheded so high and is moving so fast you will have to turn off the TV and sit quietly and breathe until you don't feel weird anymore. I had to do just that 100 minutes ago. I ate a little, took a short walk. I'm almost calm enough to survive the last 20 minutes.
If that's not a rave, I'm not fat.
#2
After seeing Mad Max:Fury Road, you will never think of the abomination known as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome again. If, like me, your gold standard of relentless action movies has been Mad Max 2 since it was only known as The Road Warrior, prepare to retire your standard. I have seen many, many action movies in this life. I don't know that I've ever seen anything quite like Fury Road, however. It's a good thing Warners didn't offer life insurance policies as a promotion - they'd have to pay some grieving families.
Coming into Fury Road, even having heard so many great things about it, I still had to wonder if director George Miller could replace Mel Gibson. Mad Max made Gibson an overnight sensation. He and Max Rockatansky are one in moviegoers' minds. Were one, anyway.
Not so much now. The action is so intense, so fast, so in your face that there's almost no time to miss Gibson, and Tom Hardy's performance, while distinct from Gibson's, feels so authentic for this movie I no longer think of Max as Mel's role. Unlike, say, Roger Moore, Hardy completely eclipses the role's originator. Mel who?
In a way, the real key to this action movie is its occasional moments of inaction. In these, Miller's script has a few thoughts on both the danger and necessity of hope in a time when simple survival takes all a person's strength and wit, on the evils of slavery, and how love survives even an apocalypse. The storyline involves Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa stealing an evil warlord's beautiful, genetically perfect "wives," women he breeds for genetically pure babies and considers his personal property, but I think it's safe to say that while the storyline is coherent and compelling, it's also a chance for Theron and some of the most beautiful women in the world to kick the living bejesus out of anyone who gets in their way. Theron is a tiny person stood next to my 6'3", 235 lb frame and I'd never mess with her Furiosa. I don't think I can count all the ways she could kick my ass.
Theron, often recognized as one Earth's most physically perfect human beings, delights in roles which allow her to "uglify" herself, to challenge audiences' ideas about what makes people attractive or less so, to push people past the physical so that we have to deal with her, the person, not simply the package. Here, she's almost bald, gaunt, and missing most of her forearm and, if she remains scarily beautiful, it's her strength and ferocity and resolve that attract rather than a pretty face and nice eyes.
Speaking of beauty, Miller's first two Mad Max episodes focussed so intently on the action and plot it never occurred to me they're in Australia, one of the most beautiful, naturally striking places on our planet. In Fury Road, Miller contrasts the severe beauty of the landscape with the ugliness of mankind, showing us ourselves not as a people who learn their lessons and try to rebuild their world but as wild creatures more hellbent on annihilating each other than even before the apocalypse. It's a basic trick, and a good one - the uglier the antagonist, the more beautiful the righteous the protagonist appears.
Miller's warlord antagonists aren't simply ugly, mutated men obsessed with power and remaking the world in their own deranged image, they're the lunacy of powermadness and lust personified, their reliance on machinery and strength introducing surrealist, absurdist notes into the story. Outside Fury Road, I can't imagine the movie that could induce me to accept a crazed electric guitarist strapped to the front of a truck, his guitar shooting flames from its headstock as he provides the villains their realtime theme music as not only normal, but almost insignificant compared to the main villains.
This is the real triumph of Fury Road. Much of its asthetic and its ideas should seem ridiculous, yet Miller keeps the action so blistering and so constant we don't have time to do anything but accept and keep going. When I did get a breather, all I thought of that ridiculousness was that Fury Road would be less of a movie without it. Fury Road is George Miller's magnum opus, in which the surrealism and brutality of the first three films reaches its zenith.
Critics have spent the last five years praising Fury Road as one of the greatest action movies ever made. It is that, and is at least a candidate for the best movie Miller ever directed. Two more sequels, one centered on Furiosa, are due by 2023. I can't imagine how Miller could start to top himself, but after Fury Road I have faith in his ability.
Meet the new boss
If that's not a rave, I'm not fat.
#2
After seeing Mad Max:Fury Road, you will never think of the abomination known as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome again. If, like me, your gold standard of relentless action movies has been Mad Max 2 since it was only known as The Road Warrior, prepare to retire your standard. I have seen many, many action movies in this life. I don't know that I've ever seen anything quite like Fury Road, however. It's a good thing Warners didn't offer life insurance policies as a promotion - they'd have to pay some grieving families.
Coming into Fury Road, even having heard so many great things about it, I still had to wonder if director George Miller could replace Mel Gibson. Mad Max made Gibson an overnight sensation. He and Max Rockatansky are one in moviegoers' minds. Were one, anyway.
Not so much now. The action is so intense, so fast, so in your face that there's almost no time to miss Gibson, and Tom Hardy's performance, while distinct from Gibson's, feels so authentic for this movie I no longer think of Max as Mel's role. Unlike, say, Roger Moore, Hardy completely eclipses the role's originator. Mel who?
In a way, the real key to this action movie is its occasional moments of inaction. In these, Miller's script has a few thoughts on both the danger and necessity of hope in a time when simple survival takes all a person's strength and wit, on the evils of slavery, and how love survives even an apocalypse. The storyline involves Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa stealing an evil warlord's beautiful, genetically perfect "wives," women he breeds for genetically pure babies and considers his personal property, but I think it's safe to say that while the storyline is coherent and compelling, it's also a chance for Theron and some of the most beautiful women in the world to kick the living bejesus out of anyone who gets in their way. Theron is a tiny person stood next to my 6'3", 235 lb frame and I'd never mess with her Furiosa. I don't think I can count all the ways she could kick my ass.
Theron, often recognized as one Earth's most physically perfect human beings, delights in roles which allow her to "uglify" herself, to challenge audiences' ideas about what makes people attractive or less so, to push people past the physical so that we have to deal with her, the person, not simply the package. Here, she's almost bald, gaunt, and missing most of her forearm and, if she remains scarily beautiful, it's her strength and ferocity and resolve that attract rather than a pretty face and nice eyes.
Speaking of beauty, Miller's first two Mad Max episodes focussed so intently on the action and plot it never occurred to me they're in Australia, one of the most beautiful, naturally striking places on our planet. In Fury Road, Miller contrasts the severe beauty of the landscape with the ugliness of mankind, showing us ourselves not as a people who learn their lessons and try to rebuild their world but as wild creatures more hellbent on annihilating each other than even before the apocalypse. It's a basic trick, and a good one - the uglier the antagonist, the more beautiful the righteous the protagonist appears.
Miller's warlord antagonists aren't simply ugly, mutated men obsessed with power and remaking the world in their own deranged image, they're the lunacy of powermadness and lust personified, their reliance on machinery and strength introducing surrealist, absurdist notes into the story. Outside Fury Road, I can't imagine the movie that could induce me to accept a crazed electric guitarist strapped to the front of a truck, his guitar shooting flames from its headstock as he provides the villains their realtime theme music as not only normal, but almost insignificant compared to the main villains.
This is the real triumph of Fury Road. Much of its asthetic and its ideas should seem ridiculous, yet Miller keeps the action so blistering and so constant we don't have time to do anything but accept and keep going. When I did get a breather, all I thought of that ridiculousness was that Fury Road would be less of a movie without it. Fury Road is George Miller's magnum opus, in which the surrealism and brutality of the first three films reaches its zenith.
Critics have spent the last five years praising Fury Road as one of the greatest action movies ever made. It is that, and is at least a candidate for the best movie Miller ever directed. Two more sequels, one centered on Furiosa, are due by 2023. I can't imagine how Miller could start to top himself, but after Fury Road I have faith in his ability.
Meet the new boss
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