Michael C here to review my most anticipated film of the summer. Isn't it wonderful when anticipation and quality go together?
With each passing Summer the concept of the Event Movie gets a little more cheapened, a little more downgraded. Like eyes adjusting to darkness, we see weightless CG blurs collide with other weightless CG blurs and deem it good enough. That is until a film like George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road comes along to rip the curtains down and let the light flood in. No, that image is not strong enough. Fury Road tears through the multiplex like a great cleansing fire, leaving the great herd of lesser, timid blockbusters scattering to escape its path.
It may seem an odd declaration to make about a franchise reboot, itself the third sequel in a series dormant since 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome. But Miller proves that any project can attain greatness with the right spirit of reckless ambition. The prevailing mentality is that an established brand is an excuse to play it safe, to scrub a rehash of the original story down to a neutered PG-13 so as not to risk alienating a single ticket buyer on Earth. George Miller goes full tilt in the opposite direction, embracing the franchise’ twisted id...
Fury Road finds the zenith of the previous films’ balls-to-the-wall insanity and uses that as its starting point. And if that happens to be too weird for a large swath of potential ticket buyers so be it. Miller is content to thrill those willing to hang on for the ride. Fury Road will surely be the only blockbuster this summer to feature a wasteland goon casually twirling an umbilical cord, and god bless it in all its fucked-up, grease-smeared glory.
Where to begin in praising the other-worldly quality of the action sequences? George Miller’s direction of large forces in motion has a clarity that would make Buster Keaton proud. The weightlessness that infects modern action films like a cancer is absent, replaced by a visceral sense of constant, unforgiving gravity. Fury Road’s editing can match the pace of the most frenetic action movie, but unlike most of the current breed it doesn’t sacrifice coherence for energy. Like City of God or Moulin Rouge, its cutting is like a state of hyper-awareness, seeing multiple views simultaneously, never losing track of the relative spatial relations of the players. It also has the elasticity to stretch out and slow down, losing none of the urgency for those (rare) moments when bodies are not in motion.
Above all else, it is startling just how damn beautiful it all is. Already an Oscar winner for lush deserts of The English Patient, cinematographer John Seale pushes that vision into the surreal, giving us a dried out hellscape that is both breathtaking and alien. The only times the action risks losing the audience’s attention are those moments when one is overwhelmed with the painterly majesty of it all.
Tom Hardy might be the one stepping into Mel Gibson’s scorched boots in the title role, but Fury Road's balance actually tips in favor of co-lead Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, a fearsome renegade driver thrust into a tense cooperation with Max. Hardy is an oasis of steady cool and is terrifically expressive in what borders on a silent performance, but it’s Theron whose rage radiates off the screen. To put it into terms this fuel-obsessed franchise can understand, Theron’s burning anger is the lifeblood that powers Fury Road. It’s a display of badassery on the level of Linda Hamilton in T2 or Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
Here I am seven paragraphs in and haven’t even begun to describe the plot. There is scarcely any reason to. We get all we need to in the first frames. Apocalyptic wasteland. Lone anti-hero. Breathless chase. The need to articulate a cumbersome mythology is the first thing Mad Max jettisons in its attempt to reach new cinematic speed records. We follow the action with unusual intensity because we are not passively watching movement, but trying to catch up to a story already underway. Given that the plot is assembled on the fly, it’s a surprisingly sturdy construction. Fury Road develops roughly a dozen main characters, maps out clear stakes, and, against all odds, manages invest us emotionally in its gallery of grotesques to the point where its final emotional beats are quite moving.
Among the many ways Fury Road shames lesser action films, top of the list is its wealth of strong female characters. Not that all the women are uniformly as badass as Theron’s character. They are allowed the same range of individuality as the men, one of those things that should not be a cause for special celebration, but totally is. One gets the welcome impression that the screenplay depicts a range of three-dimensional female characters not out of some politically correct calculation but because the writers could not conceive of writing them any other way. It’s the best kind of statement: the kind doesn’t appear to be a statement at all.
If I’m going overboard in my praise it is because I think there is something heroic in the amount of respect for the audience George Miller shows here. So many films feel like they set their ambitions at “good enough to get your ticket money and no better”. Now here is George Miller to say audiences deserve riches in return for their ticket money. The spirit of Fury Road can be best captured in the bonkers character of a guitarist that travels everywhere the malevolent hordes go, shredding a double-headed flame-throwing guitar while standing atop a vehicle moving at breakneck speed. You wouldn’t think a deformed warlord and his loyal death cult would keep a musician on the payroll, but that’s Fury Road in a nutshell. Everyone’s going that extra mile.
Grade: A