Mad Max: Fury Road is the sort of movie that I was always told “doesn’t get made anymore.”
It’s a massively sized, wonderfully offbeat and decadently violent auteur picture. One rich with ambitious stunt work and honest-to-god practical effects backing every sand-stained explosion. It’s a modern picture, granted every benefit of CGI magic, but with a director whose soul is still willfully lost in the ’80s. Fury Road doesn’t just deserve your attention this summer. It demands it.
Between The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead and every pretender to those two thrones, dystopia has become a played out trope. Every end-of-the-world picture has the same vision of a crumbling city, inhabited by supermodels who occasionally haven’t shaved in awhile. Fury Road looks at this contemporary apocalypse and turns up its nose. Flesh, metal, sand and fire are the four elements of this world, with which all meaning and destruction is constructed. Every moment of lore seems delicately constructed, giving an uncanny logic to the chaos within. You truly never know what to expect from one moment to the next.
The action on Fury Road is relentless. Aside from a few pit stops, this film is a two-hour car chase through the Australian desert. The pursuit never stops, leading to some stunning action sequences atop a moving canvas. Mad men leap from modified dragsters onto the backs of speeding semi trucks, often left with only inches to separate them from the sand. Every incredible moment is quantifiably real and will leave film fans agape with some of its most bombastic shots. Gasoline explosions litter the sky, painting the world in hues of blue and orange. Fury Road is simply gorgeous to look at, even at its most gruesome.
Along this road we meet our hero, Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, taking over from Mel Gibson), the quiet muscle of justice. It’s a simple role, yet Hardy portrays it beyond words. Despite often staying silent, Max’s intentions are always clear. To his opposite is Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a woman of unbreakable will and startling power. Together they’re the sort of team only built by apocalypse: united through mutual interest, lined with distrust. Their mission is virtuous, and dense with action. A powerful score backs every moment, clashing classical strings with hard rock guitars and booming tribal drums. It gets into your blood, pushing adrenaline right to the surface.
Action movies have been hitting subtle high notes for the past few years. But there’s something about Mad Max: Fury Road that eclipses just about every major studio action picture of the past decade. Nothing like it has quite been made before on this scale. It’s two hours of a seemingly simple premise, perfected. You’d never want to live in the world of Fury Road, yet you’ll feel empty once you’ve got to leave.