By now, you've probably heard an incredible amount of hype for Mad Max: Fury Road: that it's a non-stop car chase, an unabashedly feminist thrill ride, the bane of misogynists, and a critic's wet dream.
With only two negative reviews out of 177 raves, the film currently stands at a 99 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and pundits are already analyzing its chances for Oscar success after its Cannes premiere generated multiple rounds of spontaneous applause throughout the film. So far the common theme among audience reactions seems to be "my head exploded."
Why? What is it about this film that's culling such an abnormally high amount of praise?
Much has been made of the brilliance of director George Miller's decision to create such a high-concept action film, but the mechanics of how he's done that are even more breathtaking than the fact he dared to do it at all. Miller has taken the physical tropes of action films and re-imagined each one of them. Instead of being a linear trajectory, the standard high-speed chase becomes a complete cat-and-mouse at one point, when the pursuer abruptly becomes the pursued. Instead of having a single threat from overhead in the form of an aircraft, Miller engineers a jawdropping sequence involving tall, swaying rigs on moving cars to create the harrowing, chaotic effect of innumerable villains dropping out of the sky. The chase ultimately extends off the ground and becomes the equivalent of the kind of three-dimensional battle you'd expect from Star Wars.
Miller then systematically demolishes that landscape in an obvious metaphor, one of many metaphors in the film for the destructive nature of capitalist oil dependency. From a purely aesthetic perspective, though, it's brilliant, because it not only gives us what we came for—opulent explosions in a fully realized, grittyDieselpunk setting—but makes us feel increasingly unmoored. By the time the "war rig" finally gets destroyed on the last leg of the journey down Fury Road, it feels as though we've lost one of the film's actual characters. (And in fact, on the Mad Max Sydney website, each of the cars received their own character posters.)
And considering how surprisingly strong our connection is to these characters, that's saying a lot.
Logically, a film this dedicated to action should have skimped on characterization; instead, Fury Road uses its lack of development for each character as an advantage rather than a hindrance. We don't know why Charlize Theron's Furiosa is seeking redemption here in the desert, but the glimpses we get of the Wasteland's starving society and Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the despot she's been working for, leave us with plenty of guesses. We don't know the backstories of each of Immortan Joe's escaped wives, the sex slaves whose flight catalyzes the events of the film; but at the same time we do, because the story of violence against women is universal.
We don't know why Tom Hardy's Max carries his own Greek chorus, credited as "the Accusing Dead," with him in his head, but we see in every wince and flinch away from human contact—wonderfully conveyed by Hardy even though he's forced to wear an iron muzzle for the first 40 minutes of the film—that his particular brand of "madness" arises from guilt and loss. When they finally help one another to find the redemption they've been seeking, the emotional resonance feels like a more powerful climax for the film than any high-charged explosion could be.
Mad Max : Fury Road Trailer (2015) :
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