The first half hour of Mad Max: Fury Road may be the greatest action movie I’ve ever seen. But then the film keeps going, keeps piling on more cars and more explosions and more perfectly choreographed fight scenes, and quickly becomes one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, period. Really this review should just be me writing GO SEE IT WHAT ARE YOU DOING TELL YOUR BOSS YOU’RE SICK AND GET YOUR ASS TO A THEATER RIGHT NOW, because honestly, anything less is unethical on my part.
Now to give you a sense of where I stand: I like Mad Max alright, I loooooove The Road Warrior, and I’m really fond of Beyond Thunderdome. I was raised on a steady diet of Men with No Name, Cops on the Edge, and Cars That Explode For No Reason, and Hot Fuzz is in my Permanent Top Ten. In my mind, I am pointing my gun and shooting it into the air, while a car goes off a cliff behind me, pretty much all the time.
This movie felt like home to me.
The theater was pretty full (mostly dudes) and everyone fell completely silent as the film opened. This did not last. The action and stunts on display are extraordinary, and people cheered, applauded, and at one point yelled “What the fuck!“—trust me, you’ll know where— and applauded when the credits rolled. When the stunt people’s names came up, a lot of people started cheering all over again. As we came out a guy asked how it was, and we replied in sounds that approximated language. “I’ve waited 30 years for this,” he said. It was worth it.
Director George Miller has paced the movie perfectly—giving us a few scattered quiet moments amongst the action to make sure we don’t all asphyxiate. But then the battle music cues up again before you’ve quite caught your breath… There are lots of references to the old films—I’m not going to give any away cause it’s more fun to spot them yourselves— but they range from the sweet to the truly, twistedly ironic. Tom Hardy is fantastic as Max. He makes him maybe slightly more likable than Mel Gibson, but without ever making him cuddly, and he does a fun parody of Mel’s voice that gradually shades into his own interpretation. Charlize Theron is both believably tough and believably wounded, but, unlike Max, she doesn’t come out and tell us what’s been done to her. Hardy and Theron act with their eyes, and tell you their whole life stories…but they also keep those stories internal. It’s action that counts, and you can watch their relationship by tracking their body language.
The action sequences are, truly, seriously, some of the best I’ve ever seen. They are perfectly choreographed in the way, say, an old Jackie Chan fight is—you can always tell where everyone is. Weapons have real weight and heft, injuries matter, and physics is the hideous maniac that rules over it all. But more importantly, the action sequences are exhilarating. Anyone who saw Thunderdome and felt disappointed in its single car chase sequence will be pleased to learn that this film is almost entirely car chase. (There are no exits on Fury Road!) Since the action sequences serve as character development and plot movement simultaneously, Miller doesn’t need to stop to explain anything, and he takes this as an opportunity to try new things in each sequence. From flames to pole jockeys to bolt-cutters to chainsaws, each new battle introduces inventive weaponry and higher stakes.
So to give you a basic premise, Immortan Joe (the jaunty fellow in the tooth-mask) somehow got control of the only clean well in the area. He metes out small amounts of water to a community of very damaged and irradiated people, and also runs a car-based religious cult. He regularly has Imperators—drivers—raid the gasoline town down the road. He lives in a mountain citadel well above his followers, and trains groups of WarBoys: white-painted child soldiers who are raised to believe that dying in battle will send them straight to Valhalla. The basic plot is simple (skip this next sentence if you want to go in completely blind) Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa goes on a fuel run that’s actually a freedom ride. She smuggles the slave “wives” of cult leader Immortan Joe out with her, in the hopes of taking them to “The Green Lands.” Max ends up along for the ride, and has to decide whether to help them. (It’s basically an explosion-filled version of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.) The car culture of the original trilogy has been elevated (believably I think) into a full-on religion. A temple houses a pyramid made of removable steering wheels, and the Warboys genuflect before it as part of their battle preparation. They also spray paint their teeth silver, so they can be truly “chrome” and “shiny” when they meet their fellow fallen warriors in Valhalla.
There are those saying that Max is essentially pushed out of his own movie and upstaged by Imperator Furiosa, but I’m left wondering if those people have actually seen a Mad Max movie. Max is never the center of these films. He’s also essentially passive. He becomes Mad Max in the first place as a response to tragedy. He seeks vengeance because he and his family are acted upon. In The Road Warrior, he only helps Refinery Town to get his car back. In Thunderdome, he only enters into a deal with Auntie to get his stuff back (again) and he only helps Savannah to rescue her and her friends from certain death. He’s never the active party—Max is essentially, reactionary. Fury Road is actually unique in the series because it actually gives him multiple choices to make. For the first time in the series, Max gets the opening narration. He’s telling his own story for once, rather than having those he saves tell it for him, and, ultimately, he gets to decide who he is.
So far, the summer 2015 movie season is all about consent. First, we had the various monsters of Age of Ultron, two of whom, Banner and Widow, had basic rights of choice taken away from them. (Banner can’t always control The Hulk, and Widow’s training program took harsh measures to turn her into a superspy and soldier instead of a human.) Now we have Fury Road, which is about sexual slavery, child soldiers, religious cults, and whether anyone in a post-apocalyptic wasteland has the right to make their own choices. The trauma that each of these characters has suffered is evident, and the film doesn’t downplay it or shy away from it, but it also chooses to tell a story of survival. This magnificent two-hour car chase is also a story of people healing.
The other underlying theme in the series is the nature of “home.” If you’ll recall the second chorus line of “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” Tina Turner’s immortal song: “We don’t need to know the way home.” Each of the Mad Max films revolves around this idea. In the first, Max leaves his home, and it’s while he and his wife are traveling that they are terrorized by Toecutter’s gang. In The Road Warrior, the refinery town wants to pack up and seek out a place they’ve learned about through a travel brochure. And obviously in Thunderdome, Savannah Nix wants to lead her tribe away from their canyon paradise, and back into the city, thinking that that’s the way to restore civilization. Here the “wives” want to get away from the citadel to choose the way their children will grow up, far away from Joe’s warrior cult. Furiosa has a home she was taken from. Max has a home that was destroyed. Can they start over? Is it possible to find home, or hope, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland?
Some reviewers have called these women Joe’s wives, but they’re no more wives than the children kidnapped by Boko Haram. They’re slaves. Their bodies are commodities, and they’re used as such, as are Max and all the Warboys. This runs throughout the film—there is no giant hero speech here, but what this film is truly about is a group of people fighting for the right to be human. Max has never been a Mary Sue, and neither is Furiosa, and neither are the wives. People are believably battling for survival in a harsh landscape, against brutal people.
Now giant thematic stuff aside, I want to make it clear that this movie is fun. Miller’s sick humor pops up again and again, and have I mentioned the action? It’s primarily real people doing this shit. There’s very little CGI, and all the fights and explosions have real weight.
Finally, just to get this conversation out of the way: Is it feminist?
Max Max: Fury Road treats its female and male characters with equal agency. So fuck yes it’s feminist.
Leah Schnelbach maybe didn’t mention this but she loved this movie, and she thinks you should go see it!
What about Mister “What a Lovely Day” from the trailers? I’m guessing he is a warboy, but it was his line in the repeated trailers that sold the film (to the point where myself and others joked it ought to have been called “Mad Max: What A Lovely Day”) and gave the trailers their oomph. I’m not asking for substantive spoilers, but is he a substantive character, living prop, or red shirt? Feel free to Rot13 any spoilers you don’t want to give out.
It’s funny because I kind of left the film yesterday going ‘well, it’s not quite a five star film’ mostly because it felt a little bit underwritten (basically I wanted to know more about the characters – I get it’s written like that deliberately, but it got frustrating), and the editing felt odd during all of the quiet scenes (which sounds picky, but it threw the flow of the scenes out for me)? I mean, it’s all kinds of awesome and I did love it (and you have to go see it, no question), but it’s missing things.
But of course I can’t get the bloody thing out of my head now (there is the fact that you end up missing quite a lot of dialogue because it’s being screeched/howled over a very loud engine/batshit crazy guitarist (can I just… the guitarist though) so of course I need to go and see it again now. Preferably in the next couple of days.
And the worldbuilding was so fabulous, and done so effortlessly, and the mirroring towards the end of what happened to Furiosa and Max was just one of my favourite things.
Also if you had told me after Transformers 3 that I would be talking about how good Rosie Huntingdon-Whitely was, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Angharad holds the first part of the film together, and she was actually brilliant (ok everyone was brilliant, I just didn’t see the Rosie thing coming).
@random22 I’m pretty sure that was Nux, who’s a fairly substantive character comparatively? And utterly unrecognisable as Nicolas Hoult… (not really spoilery, he’s one of the bigger name actors in the cast)
Nux has such a substantial role I’d almost argue this would be a great film if it just focused on him and Furiosa and didn’t have Max in it at all.
@1: The “Oh What A Lovely Day!” guy is a warboy, and I can say that his role is freaking awesome without spoiling anything!
@2 The more I think about it the more I tease out themes and references! Not just to the original MM trilogy but also to Blade Runner and, weirdly, The Dark Crystal? And Huntingdon-Whitely is brilliant as Angharad. Personally I was OK with the spartan dialogue, probably because I just rewatched the original trilogy, and I felt like they overstated the themes of Beyond Thunderdome so much that Fury Road felt even more refreshing. Plus Tom Hardy manages some really evocative grunts. :)
OK, this wasn’t on my list of movies to watch, but now I’m thinking of adding it. You’ve succeeded. Thanks!
This looks pretty crazy. My friends were blown away so I am excited to see the film in the biggest cinema possible.
They were disappointed that this film conveniently ignores conflicts in the previous film, but who can remember that far back anyway?…
Enjoy the show.
My wife and I are going to see this at the Drive In tonight – which is the only proper way to see a movie like this.
@5 Landstriders!
> Now to give you a sense of where I stand: I like Mad Max alright, I loooooove The Road Warrior, and I’m really fond of Beyond Thunderdome.
That’s why I’m just a bit worried here – I thought the second Mad Max movie was the weakest because it was nothing but a big car chase. It’s starting to sound like Fury Road is basically an extremely good remake of the second movie – even down to the plot being “convey to people to safety while being chased”.
I guess I’m in anyway – it does look impressive.
@10. teapot7
It is a giant chase, but you do get engaged by the characters, and their goals, and the dangers they face. It’s an incredibly gripping film, and not just for the action, in my opinion, but for the way that action and character become intertwined. It’s an astonishing film.
my new favorite movie
#2
I kid you not, when the first shot of the guitarist came on the screen, I could hear a bunch of people at my cinema just going Holy Sh**!
This movie was just so insane.
@14 I found out yesterday (via MTV appropriately) that the guitarist was actually performing live in all his scenes (he had six weeks rehearsal time apparently), whilst dressed in that jumpsuit and made up to look blind, strapped with bungee ropes to the front of that truck that was literally built out of gigantic working speakers, and the playable electric guitar is actually also a working flamethrower.
Also, his character is called The Doofmaster.
Plus there’s entirely credible backstory as to how and why they would have a Doofmaster.
I don’t think you can give the Propsmaster on this film enough props, quite honestly. The stunt co-ordinator apparently retired just after they finished as well….
I know I’m late here, but I just wanted to add another voice to the chorus that this movie was awesome.
I shamefully admit I have never seen any of the other Mad Max movies. I know of them, and the general premise, but I have never seen them. I meant to watch at least the original before seeing Fury Road but I never got around to it, and I can’t say it hurt my experience at all.
This movie is just… so… good. Like, for a movie that is really just a single car chase it has more emotion, more depth than most of the movies I have seen lately. I also can’t say I can think of a single movie that has literally had me “on the edge of my seat” like this one did. So many times I had to force myself to remember to breathe, it’s just that engrossing!
What really amazed me was the wives, and how not-disposable they were. In most movies, these gals would just be plot devices, MacGuffins, objects to get us from point A to B. But nope. Even though we don’t get full backstories on all of them, each of them is given enough character in their few scenes together to make them all impactful, and each one I saw as an individual rather than just “one of the wives”.
@2 I don’t agree on the “underwritten” feel (see above). I think it said plenty enough without going into hours-long exposition on every single character. I don’t need to know why Imperator Furiosa is as badass as she is, nor do I need to know every single detail of why the “wives” want to escape — I’m given just enough to understand the circumstances and draw my own conclusions. But I get that can definitely be a subjective thing.
Anyway, highly recommend this movie! I honestly might go see it again…
@16 actually, the second time I saw it, it didnt feel nearly as underwrìtten, and all makes a lot more sense – you can see all the clues planted that support the plot and the characters, and it’s really quite elegantly done. I think the first watch is just overwhelming slightly… plotting a third watch now!
Also now I’ve heard the idea somewhere that Furiosa possibly cut off her own arm to avoid ending up like the wives when she was younger, which I kind of love the concept of… so, yep, the lack of exposition is getting more interesting.
I just came back from this, and I was very underwhelmed. I’m not a fan of the originals (except Road Warrior, which I liked), but this was a beautiful looking movie that used every.single.trope — Carmina Burana, love in the middle of the battle, etc. I think had I been expecting an ok dumb chase movie (i.e. Fast & Furious X), I’d have been pleased.
Yes, the female and male characters have equal agency & development (the latter being close to nil for all involved), which is good. But it’s hollow and just not as much fun as I’d been expecting.
I think all the reviews here are making me seriously consider renting this movie when it is available for rental (don’t judge, we have toddlers, going to movie theaters is just not a thing we do right now) even though I am really not into car chase movies at all (blah blah blah, serious driving phobia, blah blah blah). But I’ve heard enough interesting things about this movie that I am willing to endure that (and probably cover my eyes for a good portion) because I am intrigued.
Question: am I required to invest the time to watch the other ones first, or is reading a few plot summaries going to be sufficient? It looks like at least one other commenter was in the same boat.
@20
They all more or less stand alone – Max is the quintessential Western movie Loner, who drifts into a story, STUFF HAPPENS, and then drifts back out again mostly unchanged while the story carries on without him.
I understand there are a number of references back to earlier movies in this one, but they are more of a wave to the fans.
However I would definitely recommend watching The Road Warrior if you have never seen it, as it is a great movie. There were some good writeups of the previous movies here on Tor as well which will give you the necessary background if you want it.
@20/Lisamarie: I’ve never seen a Mad Max movie before, and I had no trouble following the story, although I could tell there were some backstory allusions about Max that I’d no doubt find clearer if I’d seen them. Still, I gather that this is a series with very rough continuity at best, and that this is something of a soft reboot that has continuity conflicts with earlier films (notably how old and well-established the post-apocalyptic world and cultures seem to be, compared to how relatively young Max is). I gather that every film in the series can be seen as pretty much its own distinct variation on the theme.
This wasn’t a film I normally would’ve been interested in, but all the hype about how brilliant it was and how female-positive it was really got my interest. Actually I didn’t find the abundance of well-drawn female characters all that novel, because it seems fairly routine on TV these days to have female-led shows, and certainly a lot of the prose I read (and write) centers on female leads. The fact that it’s evidently rarer in feature films just shows what a backward, insular world feature films have become these days. And maybe that’s why I don’t see that many movies.
Still, Furiosa and the “Brides” were an effective set of characters, and the fact that the film was openly making a statement against patriarchy and its toxic effects on both women and men (the death-obsessed Warboys being just as much victims of Immortan Joe’s aggression-based society as the Brides and, err, milkmaids were) does elevate it above a typical action film.
I think this may be the first Charlize Theron movie I’ve actually seen (I may have seen The Italian Job once, but I’m not sure if it was the whole thing or just snippets). Furiosa isn’t quite as amazing and overpowering a character as I’d expected from the hype, but maybe that’s good, that she’s more human, less exaggerated than the villains.
Still, now that I’ve seen the movie, I have to conclude that the real hero of the film is neither Max nor Furiosa. It’s the bolt-cutters. Is there anything they can’t do? ;)
The bolt-cutters are the BEST. Yeah, there’s really no need to see Max’s movies in order, because I think George Miller sees these films more as loosely organized folktales that just all happen to have Max in them as a character. That’s part of why recasting Max doesn’t cause a problem – he’s more of a James Bond-type character, who could theoretically keep having adventures far into our dystopian future, whether or not Mel Gibson, Tom Hardy, or even Miller himself are involved.