It has been 30 years since Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
concluded a trilogy of post-apocalyptic films by Australian filmmaker George
Miller and featured the adventures of Max Rockatansky, a cop who lost his
family to a gang of marauding bikers in Mad
Max (1979), came to the rescue of a group of survivors in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), and
was the savior to a group of children in the aforementioned Thunderdome. Over the course of the three
films, Max underwent a complete character arc, going from a man who loses his
humanity in the first film, begins to regain it in the second film and comes
full circle in the last one.
For Miller, Thunderdome was intended to close the
book on this world… or so he thought. Several years ago, ideas for a new Mad Max film came to him and he even
came close to making it on more than one occasion, including originally with
Mel Gibson returning only for him to eventually be replaced by Tom Hardy, but
forces beyond his control delayed production until a couple of years ago. The
end result is Mad Max: Fury Road
(2015), Miller’s return to his distinctive brand of kinetic action and visual
storytelling that made the Mad Max
films so influential, spawning countless imitators.
Miller starts things off
quickly and economically as he establishes Max’s (Tom Hardy) backstory and the
world he inhabits only to see him immediately captured by a vicious cult led by
their leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) who doles out water sparingly to
his impoverished population. He sends out his warriors, known as War Boys,
chief among them the bionic-armed Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), to
scavenge for precious fuel.
The scale and scope of Joe’s
post-apocalyptic civilization is incredible, putting the Bartertown from Thunderdome to shame. Miller makes a
point of showing how this society functions and sustains itself by growing food
and using women’s breast milk for sustenance with the populace living in fear
of the tyrannical Joe who rules with an iron fist.
Max is enslaved and used as a
living source of blood for sick War Boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult). When Furiosa
takes off with Joe’s Five Wives, beautiful women specifically selected for
breeding, he saddles up his considerable motorized armada and goes after her.
Max is chained to the front of Nux’s vehicle like a hood ornament. Furiosa not
only has to worry about Joe and the War Boys, but also other marauders from
neighboring turfs known as Gas Town and Bullet Farm respectively. Through a
series of mishaps, the resourceful Max escapes from captivity and forms a very
uneasy alliance with Furiosa as they try to escape Joe and his army to a land
she calls the “Green Place,” from her childhood. The rest of Fury Road plays out in a series of
intense chase sequences punctuated by scenes that allow the characters (and us)
to catch our breath.
Tom Hardy, a Method-y,
physical actor, is perfectly cast as Max, stepping into the iconic role
originally portrayed by Mel Gibson. As an actor, Hardy possesses little vanity,
wearing a metal mask over his face for a good 30 minutes of the film, barely
saying anything and when he does Max turns out to be a man of very few words or
a grunt. He barely speaks early on because he’s been out in the wasteland for
too long, starved of human contact only to be enslaved where he’s brutalized
into submission. It is only once he spends time with Furiosa and the Five Wives
does he begin to speak again. Over the course of the film they humanize him. Max remains something of an enigma, which is how he works
best as a character. The less we know the better. We only get fragments of his
past through nightmarish visions and fevered-dream hallucinations.
Hardy is an excellent foil to
Charlize Theron who plays a more verbal character – one that is driven to a
cause: take the Five Wives to the Promised Land and finally be free from Joe’s
oppressive rule and his world where women are breeders, subservient to men.
Furiosa is as tough as Max if not more so but she also has a reason to live
unlike Max who functions on a primal instinct of survival. She and Max have a Howard
Hawksian relationship born out of mutual respect as they work together towards
a common goal. Like Max, she is a survivor, dealing with her own painful past,
hoping to outrun it as she hopes to outrun Joe and his army. She is Max’s equal
and as much a protagonist of the film as he is.
Miller takes us through a
series of spectacular chase sequences, one more insane and ambitious than the
next, including one that takes place in a massive sandstorm complete with
twisters and cars exploding! Fury Road
features some of the most crazed stunts and they are all the more impressive
when one realizes that they were all done practically with a minimum of CGI
enhancement. In this day and age of CGI-saturated blockbusters there is something
refreshing about Miller’s fusing of an old school approach with contemporary
technology.
The vehicles are brilliant
Frankensteinian creations courtesy of Colin Gibson who seems to be channeling
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth on acid. He has assembled a funky hodgepodge of hot rods
and muscle cars fused together in extreme ways so that they make the ones in The Road Warrior look like tinker toys. Some
of these vehicles are outfitted with metal spikes so that they resemble
motorized porcupines. There’s one that takes the body of a 1970s Plymouth
Valiant and adds tank treads. Joe drives something called the Gigahorse – two
1959 Cadillac Coupe de Villes welded together and then souped up with a pair of
big block Chevrolet V-8 engines. Max’s iconic 1974 XB Ford Falcon Coupe from
the first two films even makes an appearance.
In a fantastic coup, Miller
managed to get legendary cinematographer John Seale (The English Patient) out of self-imposed retirement to give Fury Road a distinctive look. Instead of
resorting to the drab, monochromatic look of so many films of its ilk, he and
Miller adopt a sunbaked look for the day scenes and a cool, gun-metal blue look
for the night scenes. Just because this is a slam-bang action movie doesn’t
mean it can’t look stunningly beautiful at the same time.
Fury Road reinforces just how safe and formulaic blockbuster action movies
like the Fast and Furious franchise have
been for years by delivering a deliciously subversive film that contains all
the requisite thrills you expect from the genre and then some. As Miller said
in an interview, “I just love action movies. For me, the most universal
language and the purest syntax of cinema is in the action movies.” Every frame
of Fury Road is instilled with this
love and infectious energy – an impressive feat for a 70-year-old filmmaker who
has once again has set the standard for everyone else. I imagine, like with the
previous Mad Max films, they’ll be
countless imitators. Accept no substitutes for this film is the real deal.
SOURCES
Hill, Logan. “Mad Max: What It Takes to Make the Most
Intense Movie Ever.” Wired. May 11, 2015.
Walker, Michael. “How Mad Max’s Megacars Were Melded.” The
Hollywood Reporter. May 12, 2015.
Outstanding! Your use of visual language and detail really makes this a terrific write-up!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
Delete