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The world has gone to hell in Mad Max: Fury Road, and damn, does it look great.
The movie makes a fume-drunk, totally convincing case for how thematically
lavish and awesome-looking the apocalypse can be, as long as you don’t have to
live there.
It’s not necessary to have seen the early Mad Max movies to get the gist of
where things lie in the indeterminate future of Mad Max: Fury Road, though it’s
funny to look back at the Australia of the first installment and remember that
it had diners and a court system and that its main character had something
terrible happen to him while on vacation. Fury Road is so beyond those trappings
of civilization that it’s practically alien, taking place on an Earth that’s all
wasteland, a desiccated, dusty stretch as far as the eye can see. What survivors
are left prey on one another out on the open road or by way of tyrannical tribal
societies.
These survivors exist among the tattered remnants of mankind, in the kind of
place that would drive a fellow insane. And the title character is pretty
solidly off his rocker, though judging by the unsurprised reactions of everyone
he encounters, this is not an uncommon condition. He’s come a long way from the
Max Rockatansky of the first movie, too, so far in fact that he’s a new man. Tom
Hardy, taking over for Mel Gibson, portrays Max as a feral animal, grunting out
his few lines and, in the first moment we see him, chomping on an unfortunate
lizard that happened to scurry by.
Even by the franchise’s fuzzy timeline, Max should be getting on in years, so
there’s
something reassuring and fantastic about the way the recasting suggests that, in
the 30 years since we last saw him, he’s barely aged. Like James Bond, he’s
become as much an idea as a person, wandering eternally into and out of the
lives of humankind’s remainders like the reworked, cataclysmic Western antihero
he is. In Mad Max: Fury Road, he blunders into the path of Imperator Furiosa (a
terrific Charlize Theron), who drives an amped-up big rig for warlord Immortan
Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in the first film), and who’s about
to make a risky bid for freedom along with the man’s five formerly captive young
wives.
Mad Max: Fury Road, which director Miller wrote with Brendan McCarthy and Nico
Lathouris, is one gigantic chase sequence in which Furiosa and the women in her
keeping make a wild run for a maybe-mythic sanctuary they call “green place,”
while multiple war parties chase
them down. The details of what’s become of the world trickle out at the sides of
the action — there is, blissfully, no stopping so that someone can unleash an
informational monologue about how Immortan Joe’s warped excuse for a community
works.
We understand that Immortan Joe has built a death cult with his War Boys, a set
of young men with terminal illnesses who look interchangeable with their skull
makeup and other scarification, and who chase destruction because of the
promises of Valhalla. (One of them, Nux, played by Nicholas Hoult, manages to
emerge from the nearly identical pack.) We also understand that Immortan Joe
controls the only regular, non-toxic water supply in the area, doling it out to
the hardscrabble crowd living in his shadow and cautioning them not to get
addicted, as if the need for water were a matter of willpower.
Miller appreciates that every aspect of the world doesn’t need to be explained
for it to feel solid. Why provide an explanation when you can sear it into the
brains of your audience with such savagely evocative imagery? This includes a
series of escalating high-speed battles in
which characters leap or are thrown
from vehicle to vehicle, hurl spears strapped with explosives, and swing back
and forth on poles like dangerous metronomes — Wacky Races as reenacted with
flesh-and-blood people who are either crazed or desperate enough to take
unimaginable risks. It’s so richly detailed that you can read volumes into
passing observations, like the fact that Immortan Joe rides with a decadent
doomsday equivalent of war drums — a truck outfitted with massive speakers and a
gimp-masked man playing a flamethrower guitar.
But more than the dizzying clashes on the road, Mad Max: Fury Road troubles the
mind with recurring glimpses of human beings being harvested. Bodies have become
the most important resource at a time when everyone’s covered with tumors,
sores, and deformations from their increasingly poisonous environs, not to
mention scars and wounds from their encounters with each other. When Max first
ends up in Immortan Joe’s Citadel, it’s only because he was unlucky enough to be
spotted by scavengers. He’s been captured to be used as a source of reenergizing
bodily fluids for the more sickly War Boys.
Nux, who takes Max into battle chained to the front of his car like a hood
ornament, refers to him, almost affectionately, as “Blood Bag.” Women are shown
getting milked like cows. Cannibalism may never be depicted, but it’s the
undercurrent of every grotesque glimpse of life in the compound. If the human
species is going down, the strong are going to be the last ones standing,
warming their hands over the burning corpses of everyone weaker. Conversely, one
of the movie’s most poignant moments involves a character willingly offering up
blood to someone who’s been hurt.
The bodies of the young women Furiosa is trying to rescue, played by Rosie
Huntington-Whiteley, Zoë Kravitz, Riley Keough, Courtney Eaton, and Abbey Lee,
are also commodities, ones Immortan Joe and his allies are willing to risk
everything to retrieve — especially those pregnant with a possible future heir.
He even demands from one the baby she’s carrying, insisting it’s his stolen
property. That female bodily integrity has been torched in this
testosterone-filled nightmare state isn’t a surprise — what is, pleasantly, is
the way that Mad Max: Fury Road refuses to let this be an excuse to also treat
its women like so much meat. The wives emerge as distinct and disparate
personalities, even if all of the time we spend with them is on the run.
Splendid (Huntington-Whiteley) is defiant, while Fragile (Eaton) is so shattered
by her experiences she tries to return to her abuser rather than risk making him
more angry, and Capable (Keough) forms a wistful connection to an unlikely
character.
These characters are not McGuffins, not just objects over which the men can
fight, and Furiosa is no sidekick. She’s as much the protagonist of the movie as
Max, with whom she at first comes to blows before settling on a cautious
detente. The two arrive at a deeper understanding over the course of their
journey, all without bothering to talk things out — they’re just two fearsome
survivors who recognize in one another some last flickers of humanity.
With her shaved head and her robotic arm, Furiosa has all the trappings of an
iconic action heroine, but Theron channels her emotional performance through her
eyes, which are steady but haunted beneath the black war paint. Furiosa knows
she’s probably going to die, and has decided it’s worth it to chase one last bit
of hope for a place that hasn’t gone completely deranged. Sometimes you search
for a home, and sometimes you have to make one. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the
ultimate glory isn’t in how extravagantly and brutally the world is being
destroyed, with its explosions like blossoms across the desert, but in how its
characters beat back those who are reveling in its destruction.
A mind-boggling exercise in pure action Mad Max: Fury Road is overwhelming,
achieving a sort of visual poetry. Utterly unhinged, magnificently inspired,
hugely ambitious, deeply weird, emotionally resonant, and brilliant in every
possible way. All the other summer movies may bow down in deference.
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