Mad Max: Fury Road
is the first of the series to come out in 30 years and the only one not to
feature Mel Gibson. Each of the Mad Max movies is successively longer
and Fury Road ends up being exactly
two hours in length. Australian
director, George Miller, who besides the Mad
Max series also directed Babe and
Happy Feet, seems comfortable here
not departing too far from formula. This
is another stark, apocalyptic and futuristic western – yet better than most of
its kind.
Traveling to the theatre to watch this film didn’t seem too
promising. In a packed house, I was
seated next to someone who seemed to have had too much to drink and was treated
to close to twenty minutes of previews that contained little else than loud soundtracks
and explosions. When the film Mad Max: Fury Road actually began, I experienced
much of the same thing.
Max (Tom Hardy) becomes a slave at the hands of the evil
Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Joe
controls all the water and therefore the entire population. Miraculously, salvation comes to Max due to
the efforts of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who is on a humanitarian
mission to save the many wives of Joe from Joe’s clutches. With five of Joe’s wives on her big rig, this
sets off a chase orchestrated by Joe. The
evil henchmen bring Max along as sport. Max escapes and decides to help Furiosa. He
convinces her that the only means of truly bettering their lives is to have Joe
killed and return to his empire to free all of his slaves.
This is an abbreviated summary of the plot. Max succeeds in his venture and, the film
leads us to believe, returns to the desert where he continues on with his
roaming. Throughout the film we watch
large number of car chases, gunplay, fights, stunts and a number of visual
effects. Other than this, there’s little
dialogue and few surprises.
Still, compared to message films like Avatar or movies featuring comic book heroes, Mad Max: Fury Road is refreshing.
It doesn’t preach at us, never gets sentimental, and never pretends to
be something it is not.
The movie is more about the character of Furiosa than
Max. The subplot casting Theron effectively
as a sort of feminist hero is the film’s one unexpected surprise. Theron plays a strong but relatively
unglamorous character. Both Furiosa and
Max have experienced enough hardship to seek something decent in the
world. Without such efforts to do the
right thing, there’s very little else to live for in such an unpromising
landscape.
Miller originally created the Mad Max series in his Australian homeland to match the spaghetti
western films cropping up in America during the 1960s and 1970s. The heroes of such films are generally more
conflicted than the heroes in westerns filmed twenty or thirty years earlier. In these films, the main character needed to
struggle to do the right thing. We don’t
always understand the heroes’ motivations in these films and the script does
not give everything away.
Though well done in a Hollywood that produces nothing but
excess, I prefer Mad Max: The Road
Warrior to this film. The Road Warrior came first, didn’t have
the $150 million budget and yet essentially accomplished the same thing. Having said that, the virtues of Mad Max: Fury Road includes much more than
special effects.
Judging by Mad Max:
Fury Road’s success, other sequels in this film series will likely follow.
© Robert S. Miller 2015
May 17, 2015
