Mad Max: Fury Road

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.

Prometheus

Early on his career Ridley Scott proclaimed, “The time is ripe for a John Ford of science fiction films to emerge. And I’m determined to be that director.” And he was well on his way with the one-two punch of Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) – cinematic game changers that presented incredibly detailed future worlds. And then he attempted to adapt Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune but the project slipped through his fingers. As if that wasn’t enough, his big budget fantasy film Legend (1985) was a box office flop and received a critical mauling. Understandably frustrated, Scott turned his back on the science fiction and fantasy genres and spent the next few decades tackling a host of other ones, from the cop thriller (Black Rain) to the historical epic (Gladiator) to the war movie (Black Hawk Down) to varying degrees of success. However, fans of his early work had always held out hope that he would return to the genres that established him a cinematic force to be reckoned with.

Not only does Prometheus (2012) mark Scott’s triumphant return to science fiction but it also sees him revisiting a franchise he helped start – Alien. Touted as a prequel of sorts, the veteran filmmaker has been rather coy in admitting this new film’s link to the original, stating that it contains “strands of Alien’s DNA.” However, the impetus to make this film came from Scott’s curiosity as to the origins of the extraterrestrial being, nicknamed the “space jockey” by fans, that piloted the derelict spaceship discovered by the crew of the original film and which contained the series’ alien antagonists. Prometheus has come along at a good time to breath new life into the Alien franchise, which had hit an all-time low with Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). While the film was financially successful many felt it was creatively bankrupt and there was a desire to return the franchise to its roots and who better to do that than the director of the first one?

It is 2089 and in Scotland, Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) uncovers ancient hieroglyphs that are actually a star map, which may provide the location to an alien home world whose residents may have visited Earth several thousands of years ago. She believes that these aliens will have the key to the origins of humanity. Four years later and Shaw heads up an expedition into outer space with a crew of 17 including an android named David (Michael Fassbender) and Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), an executive from Weyland Corporation, the company that funded the mission.

Shaw and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), her lover and fellow archaeologist, believe that the planet their spacecraft, the Prometheus, arrives at, deep in space, may have inhabitants that created humanity. Vickers is not too crazy about Shaw’s mission, a pet passion project of her father’s, Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), and quickly exerts control, which sets up an intriguing antagonistic relationship between the idealistic scientist Shaw and the hard-nosed pragmatist Vickers.

Shaw and an away team make landfall and investigate a massive structure, one of several, in a canyon, which reinforces Ridley Scott’s mastery of establishing a specific mood and atmosphere through incredibly detailed set design and gorgeous cinematography. This results in evocative settings like the pristine sterility of the sleek futuristic Prometheus ship to the dark, dank cavernous interior of the alien structure, which takes what we glimpsed briefly in Alien and elevates it to another level. As with all of his films, the production design is of the highest quality and rich in detail, creating a fully realized and believable world. He also knows how to create a mood of foreboding mystery as our protagonists explore the alien landscape and we wait for something bad that we know is going to happen to these unfortunate people.

As with previous films in the Alien franchise, the Weyland Company doesn’t care about the crew, aside from David, just on how they can make money off whatever Shaw and co. discover. Not surprisingly, David, much like Ash in Alien, has its own agenda and is not entirely trustworthy. If you’ve seen any of the Alien films then you pretty much know how things are going to go down – the humans mess around with something they don’t understand and run afoul of a xenomorph that is hostile.

The seemingly ubiquitous Michael Fassbender is a real standout in Prometheus as the logic-based android with a hidden agenda. The actor is quite believable as an artificial person complete with slightly stiff expressions and gestures that look real enough and yet only have the illusion of humanity. It is a tightly controlled performance complete with precise speech patterns that is fascinating to watch. Noomi Rapace is excellent as the inquisitive scientist whose ambition proves to be her undoing. Over the course of the film she conveys a wide range of emotions as her character is put through the wringer and this is evident in a scene where Shaw is forced to deal with an alien that has invaded her body. It’s an intensely harrowing sequence that comes the closest to recapturing its famous equivalent in Alien. Shaw struggles with notions of faith versus science and is the heart and soul of the film.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Charlize Theron plays an icy corporate executive at odds with Rapace’s Shaw and yet she is given a scene or two to show, perhaps not a softer side, but that there is more to her than being strictly a business type. With the exception of the always excellent Idris Elba, the rest of the cast is just fine but largely unremarkable but only because they play disposable characters. Like any skilled character actor, Elba makes the most of his limited screen-time, playing the grizzled captain of the ship.

While an easy target for helping engineer the prolonged tease that was the popular television show Lost, screenwriter Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott should be commended for creating and then getting a major Hollywood studio to release a serious-minded science fiction film during the summer blockbuster season – a time when multiplexes are populated by dumb action films loaded up with car chases and loud explosions or mindless comedies rife with dick and fart jokes. Prometheus wrestles with weighty themes and the big picture (i.e. who created us and why are we here?) while fulfilling one of the oldest tropes of the genre by presenting a story that acts as a warning – don’t meddle with things you don’t understand.

Whether the filmmakers were successful or not in conveying these important themes in a thoughtful and engaging way is certainly open to debate but at least they tried. The film’s third act is certainly problematic as it basically loses its mind and devolves into a pretty conventional action film with a weak climactic battle. This is too bad because the first two-third of Prometheus is so strong and thought provoking. A well-intentioned film loaded with ambition like this one should be championed despite its flaws (weak characterization, plot holes, etc.). The end result is easily the best Alien film in the franchise since James Cameron took over the reigns with Aliens (1986).

Check out The Film Connoisseur's fantastic take on this film and also the Sci-Fanatic's in-depth post, comparing it to Alien.