Mad Max: Fury Road. Released:
May 15, 2015. Runtime: 120 mins. Rated: R for intense sequences of violence
throughout and for disturbing images.
Australian cinema began to attract the attention of discerning
filmgoers internationally in the 1970s. (Before then who even knew that there
was such a thing as “Australian cinema”?) But that cinema really exploded from
Down Under into the consciousness of mass audiences and onto screens worldwide
in the 1980s with the Mad Max
trilogy: Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). These
postapocalyptic, ultraviolent, hyperkinetic films brought critical acclaim to
director/writer George Miller and superstardom to lead actor Mel Gibson. They
also had great and continuing influence on films in the action and
science-fiction genres.
Now, after a hiatus of 30 years, there is a fourth entry in
the epic, Mad Max: Fury Road. Max
(played now by Tom Hardy—but as at the same age as Gibson in the trilogy) still
wanders on his motorcycle, solitary and violent, through the wasteland world
created by the “oil wars.” And he is still ready to battle the bizarre bands of
barbarians that roam that world. But agents of a warlord, Immortan Joe (Hugh
Keays-Byrne), manage to capture Max and bring him to Joe's Citadel. At the
Citadel Joe uses his control of the “three major resources”--gasoline, bullets,
water—to rule over masses of dehydrated wretches. An array of shirtless,
tattooed, white-painted baldies—the War Boys—act as Joe's enforcers. The look
of life (if you can call it that) at the Citadel seems to combine elements from
such films as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)
and a potpourri of '50s sword-and-sandal sagas. But everything is given an
original spin by Miller. For example, Joe is costumed, and his costume includes
a mask that seems to combine both a skull and a horse's head, while also having
the look of a front view of a motorcycle.
An important agent of Immortan Joe's is Imperator Furiosa
(Charlize Theron), who drives a tanker truck. The beauteous Theron, originally
a model from South Africa, has developed an estimable acting career, including
several roles as a tough character. (She received an Oscar for playing a serial
killer in 2003's Monster.) Here she
is a very tough character indeed, with beauty obscured by brush cut, one arm a
prothesis, axle grease for eye shadow.
But Furiosa has determined to rescue Joe's Breeders—some
lovely young women in diaphanous robes—from his harem and take them to The
Green Place, which she has a vague recollection of from her childhood, before
she had to live in the deserts that came to dominate the landscape. Concealing
the young women in her tanker, she sets off on the metaphorical Fury Road,
pursued by a wild and wooly posse of Immortan Joe's forces. Max, for his part,
finds himself strapped to the front of one of the posse's vehicles as a kind of
hood ornament. (A rock guitarist plays frenziedly on the front of another of
the War Boys' War Rigs.)
The garb of the posse ranges from the austere shirtlessness
of the War Boys to outfits that seem to mix and match (not!) fashions from
homeless shelters, KISS-type bands, and the Greenwich Village Halloween parade.
The War Rigs also are hybrids. They comprise bits and pieces from:
agricultural.construction/military vehicles; monster cars and trucks; '50s big
and befinned “dream cars”; stock car jalopies; drag racing “muscle cars”; and
more! Many are rocket-powered to boot.
The superbly cinematographed War Rigs' chase of Furiosa and
the young women across trackless wastes is truly a sight to behold, behold with jaws agape. So, too, are the
chase's innumerable spectacular crashes and brutal fights. Miller, for the most
part, shuns the computer-generated imagery that other action and sci-fi epics
overuse and relies instead on superb stunt work, constituting in some cases
stunning acrobatic achievements. (Some of his cast are from Cirque de Soleil.)
Eventually, both Max and Nux (Nicholas Hoult), one of the
War Boys, manage to get onto Furiosa's rig. The changing relationships between
Max and Nux and each of them and Furiosa and the women add to the virtually
nonstop action but also provide the few breaks in that action.
Miller's movies are often described as “over the top” and
“hallucinatory.” Miller himself has been described as a “visionary” filmmaker.
When the man from Down Under looks over the top, what does he see—and make us,
through his creative imagination, see? Is it hallucinations? Actually, no. Like
the great medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch, Miller presents gripping images of
people in this world who already are in hell but don't necessarily know it. And
like all great works of science fiction or future fantasy, Miller's world of the
future is essentially a projection of realities already present in today,s
world.
The world of the Mad
Max movies is brutal and bizarre, but we today also have barbarians
committing atrocities in desert lands. Consider, too, what phenomena occur when
we carry to extremes gun culture, car culture, motorcycle culture, the culture
of tattoos and piercings, rock/rap culture, extreme martial arts, etc. And we,
too, have to contemplate the possibility of global destruction.
Yet the genius of George Miller is such that he shows us
that the possibility of love and liberation can still exist, even at the end of
Fury Road. See the movie to see how.
“Footnotes” to the
film: (1) Even the notoriously bleak Outback of his native Australia was,
apparently, not bleak enough for Miller. He did much of the location filming of
Mad Max: Fury Road in the desert
regions of Namibia and South Africa. (2) Miller, who is also a physician,
showed a kinder, gentler side to his filmmaking in the years between Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Mad Max: Fury Road. Among other works,
he wrote, directed and produced the humanistic Lorenzo's Oil; wrote and produced the family friendly Babe; and wrote, directed and produced Babe: Pig in the City and the animated
classics Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two.
