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.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

With X-Men (2000), Bryan Singer helped revitalize the comic book superhero movie after Batman and Robin (1997) turned off mainstream audiences and Hollywood studios alike from the genre. It proved that people would go see this kind of movie if it were well-made. While X-Men, based on the Marvel comic book of the same name about a team of mutated human beings born with their own unique super powers, had its flaws, it showed promise, which Singer capitalized on with its vastly superior sequel X2 (2003). After its impressive commercial and critical success, 20th Century Fox naturally wanted him to direct another one, but he decided to jump ship to the DC Universe and make the ill-fated Superman Returns (2006). The X-Men franchise continued on without him until the prequel First Class (2011) (which he helped produce) convinced him to direct another one (that, and I’m sure the financial flop of Jack the Giant Slayer). Loosely based on the 1981 Uncanny X-Men storyline of the same name by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, Days of Future Past (2014) ambitiously features cast members from all four previous X-Men movies.

In an alternate future, the world has been ravaged by a destructive war between humans and mutants. Giant robots known as Sentinels have driven the mutants underground and to the brink of extinction, forcing them to band together, even Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), who have a wildly disparate worldviews. Singer effectively sets up this bleak futureworld with an exciting action sequence that sees a group of Sentinels kill off several mutants with brutal efficiency.

Professor X and Magneto devise a desperate plan to prevent their future by stopping the Sentinels from being created. To do this, they decide to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from killing Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), designer of the Sentinels, which kickstarts the creation of said robots. It won’t be easy as Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) are at bitter odds with each other. Mystique, once an ally of the former, now sides with the latter. Wolverine must bring Professor X and Magneto together and convince them to stop Mystique from killing Trask.

Singer manages to successfully wrangle a large and diverse cast of characters without confusing the audience or overwhelming them. Hugh Jackman returns yet again as Wolverine and plays him as a slightly calmer guy who must maintain focus and keep his berserker rage in check in order to stay long enough in the past to complete his mission. James McAvoy is good as a self-pitying burn-out who has lost his direction life. Professor X takes drugs to keep his powers submerged and has to find something to care about again. Michael Fassbender does a nice job of incorporating elements of Ian McKellen’s Magneto yet still make the character his own. The scenes he has with McAvoy are infused with tension as the two men’s opposing worldviews clash. They must find some kind of common ground, some kind of reconciliation if only temporarily.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Mystique as a ruthlessly driven mutant fighting a war that was started by Magneto, but one that she continues in his absence because she is tired of seeing her kind tortured and killed out of fear and intolerance. Peter Dinklage is quite good as Trask, a man who believes that mutants will make humanity extinct and has the conviction of someone who thinks he’s right. Like any formidable villain, he doesn’t see himself as such, believing he is completely justified in what he does. Singer’s presence clearly inspired everyone to bring their A-game and there is nary a bum note among the cast. He wisely knows exactly when to bring certain characters center stage for their chance to shine in a way that feels satisfying. A minor quibble is that with the exception of Jackman, most of the original cast are given glorified cameos with an emphasis on the First Class characters.

This is easily the most ambitious X-Men movie to date as it goes back and forth in time and spans several countries while juggling a sizable cast of characters. It is great to see Singer back at the helm as he brings a stylish pizazz that was missing from The Last Stand (2006) as evident with a slick, amusing sequence where Wolverine, Professor X, the Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Quicksilver (Evan Peters) break Magneto out of the Pentagon all scored to Jim Croce’s 1973 hit “Time in a Bottle.” It’s a virtuoso sequence that showcases Evan Peters’ scene-stealing turn as a lightning fast mutant and gives the movie a much-needed dose of levity amidst the prevailing serious tone.

In many respects, Days of Future Past thankfully pretends that The Last Stand never happened (touching upon it only briefly) and feels like not only the logical conclusion of First Class, but also X2. Simon Kinberg’s screenplay does a nice job of showing how the mutants’ exploits affect history and in turn how it affects them. It also manages to successfully raise the stakes on an epic scale from any previous X-Men movie while keeping us invested by showing the personal dilemmas that several key characters face, from Professor X learning to control his powers to Mystique learning to be more tolerant of the human race. Singer expertly orchestrates the various story elements, guiding the movie to an impressively staged climax in both future and past timelines that provides the requisite show-stopping CGI workout, but one that feels deserved and never excessive (unlike, say Man of Steel). He has made what is easily the best X-Men movie since X2 and maybe even better than that one.