The heroes of Mad Max: Fury Road -- George Miller's thrilling new installment of his cultish post-apocalyptic franchise Mad Max -- plod onwards to save the world: to redeem it, as Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) wishes, and perhaps to instill a little hope in it, which Max (Tom Hardy) thinks it to be an improbable task. Her rescue mission is simple, and it forms the backbone of the simple plot: she is rescuing a group of women the tyrant Immortan Joe has jailed as breeders. From the Citadel -- the headquarters where Immortan Joe rules over an impoverished community with an army of white eunuch-warriors -- she departs with one of the strongest vehicles in the Empire.
Her plan is executed with blind faith, even stupidity: one wonders what Furiosa would do without Max and Nux (Nicholas Hoult), Joe's lieutenant who turns to their side, guzzling gasoline into the engines and shooting away the bad guys. When she arrives at her destination, with only old women bikers to be found, “the green place” Furiosa hoped to reach seems to have been decimated ages ago. They decide to return to the Citadel -- Immortan Joe's headquarters -- and find solace there. The dangerous journey seems like more like an odyssey of Redemption for Furiosa than a journey towards a promised land. Maybe we secretly knew it never existed at all; or if it did, was it ever assumed they would be safe to live there, unperturbed by Immortan Joe's forces?
Her plan is executed with blind faith, even stupidity: one wonders what Furiosa would do without Max and Nux (Nicholas Hoult), Joe's lieutenant who turns to their side, guzzling gasoline into the engines and shooting away the bad guys. When she arrives at her destination, with only old women bikers to be found, “the green place” Furiosa hoped to reach seems to have been decimated ages ago. They decide to return to the Citadel -- Immortan Joe's headquarters -- and find solace there. The dangerous journey seems like more like an odyssey of Redemption for Furiosa than a journey towards a promised land. Maybe we secretly knew it never existed at all; or if it did, was it ever assumed they would be safe to live there, unperturbed by Immortan Joe's forces?
Theron imbues Imperator Furiosa with an opaque resilience, a determined somnolence, as haunted and troubled as our main character Max is. Even by the end, though there is hope and a dead dictator to inspire the oppressed masses, neither Furiosa nor Max seem close to expunging the grizzly pain which undergirds their troubled pasts. They seem at one primarily with the machines that surround them.
This is the haunting poetry of Mad Max. As troubling as George Miller’s world of corrupted souls is, the only thing keeping anyone alive is the thrill of the chase and the aspirations towards something -- though that "something" is an both an elusive and illusory concept for our heroes. It is not a quest towards something, but the quest for something. It's what keeps this bold engine of action, art and humor running and coughing at a brilliant pace, even when its ambitions threaten to combust the brilliance at work.
This is the haunting poetry of Mad Max. As troubling as George Miller’s world of corrupted souls is, the only thing keeping anyone alive is the thrill of the chase and the aspirations towards something -- though that "something" is an both an elusive and illusory concept for our heroes. It is not a quest towards something, but the quest for something. It's what keeps this bold engine of action, art and humor running and coughing at a brilliant pace, even when its ambitions threaten to combust the brilliance at work.
Nux would welcome this spontaneous combustion, at least in the beginning -- his religious aspiration to reach Valhalla, the heaven Joe has promised all the warrior-eunuchs for their service, is extreme yet genuinely felt by Hoult. Joe drugs his soldiers by coating their teeth in gray spray-paint, and there appears to be an almost orgasmic satisfaction they all experience in the moment before reaching their deaths. “What a lovely day,” Nux yells out as he accelerates into the fiery jawls of his ever-approaching death. His conversion to the other side comes after he finds love, and he experiences disappointment in relation to the unfulfilled promises of his leader.
Hoult’s brilliant performance turns this pitiable creature into a comical creation, doomed by his foolishness and allegiance to abstract ideals. He joins the side of Imperator Furiosa and dies advancing the cause of hope -- someone else’s cause, of course, though he certainly caught a bit of the bug. He lives only for others, not for himself, and his innocent gaze and Hoult’s magnetism gives the character a potent and mesmerizing humanity, one that helps ground the film's theme immensely.
Hoult’s brilliant performance turns this pitiable creature into a comical creation, doomed by his foolishness and allegiance to abstract ideals. He joins the side of Imperator Furiosa and dies advancing the cause of hope -- someone else’s cause, of course, though he certainly caught a bit of the bug. He lives only for others, not for himself, and his innocent gaze and Hoult’s magnetism gives the character a potent and mesmerizing humanity, one that helps ground the film's theme immensely.
Hope, humanity, salvation, patriarchy -- these are tropes in 2015, tirelessly bludgeoned by the onslaught of post-apocalyptic films and books and television shows and video-games that seem more popular than ever. What makes Mad Max a refreshing, enlightening and brilliant realization of the genre is not its guiding ethic of humanity or philosophical undercurrent, but its visual poetry and meta-commentary on the machinery of the action film. My favorite example: Immortan Joe and his motley crew of suicidal ghouls find it necessary to bring with them literal musical accompaniment (there is rarely a moment where there isn’t music). It feels as calculated and plastic as a game of Battleship, yet Miller and production designer Colin Gibson absorb us into the nature of their form and craftsmanship by bringing a self-aware absurdity to it all. The biker-grandmas, the Beckettian tree, the rockstar with a guitar of fire, the drummers, the porcupine omnibuses, the coked-up white-guys, the large, propelling sticks (is this a 1920s silent film?), the circus-like cat-and-mouse of the chase -- it all feels like a joke, albeit an excruciatingly entertaining one.
Mad Max: Fury Road recalls last year’s Snowpiercer, Alfonso Cuaron’s highly regarded Children of Men, the overbearing The Fast and the Furious franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series. But it builds on them, more daring in its unapologetic style, more spontaneous and quick-witted with its camerawork, and more touchingly humane in its acting. Mad Max has video game-level insanity, certainly, but one with a heart and a soul. Miller never allows the emotional stakes of the character to interfere with the intense determination of the mission at hand. Its seemingly simple rapport conceals a deeper psychological engagement with the grander question of motivation and purpose in a world dominated by impulse, the senses and the desperate drive to survive.
There’s a poetry to the savagery, extremism and cruel desperation of Man. Mad Max: Fury Road feels as close to art as the action movie has been in recent memory, or as close as we’ll get for quite some time. The performances ground the madness, as they play around and subvert the action-formula to create a hypnotic reverie. They constantly enliven the senses and shoot adrenaline into the heart.
Fury Road is terse and philosophical, explosive yet often funny. The sheer combination of it all is its idiosyncratic madness -- or put another way, its undeniable genius.
Fury Road is terse and philosophical, explosive yet often funny. The sheer combination of it all is its idiosyncratic madness -- or put another way, its undeniable genius.
Grade: A