K-SCORE: 97
Writer/Director: George Miller
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult
“a vault for all your wives is a fine idea”
Spoiler Level: Minor
This film is superb. I suppose you have to have a taste for violence, car chases, and bleak apocalyptic settings, but if you do then it’s a gem.
“ I want to see people kill each other over water!”
The film is so detailed that it can’t waste time explaining anything to the viewer. It starts wild, gets wilder, and ends just after peak wildness. Character names? Pah! Who needs ‘em really? Just have them grunted through an oxygen mask or shouted by a psychopath riding atop a truck speeding through the desert. Plot explanations? Look, we kind of get it. The one girl is trying to rescue the other slave wives in white rags by taking them to the mythical green place and Max is there with priorities like, ‘get this chain off me,’ or ‘get a drink of water,’ and the antagonist wants his wives back and is riding out to meet them. The brain-washed Nux, well he of course wants to ride eternal in Valhalla all shiny and chrome, one of the best movie lines… ever.
With that in place you can focus on the gorgeously imagined world and mind-blowing action sequences. George Miller decided to say, “screw CGI,” and film all of his stunts and crashes with professional drivers and Cirque du Soleil performers and the results are phenomenal. Any single minute of the film is exciting to watch and beautiful in that apocalypse kind of way.
Special credit to Willard here: but apparently Miller’s devotion to plausible destruction was just one of his obsessions. He also created a host of actual medical problems for all the characters, trauma and diseases. Max is used as a human blood bag for the first twenty minutes because his blood type is 0-, universal donor, and that is relevant later as well. Apparently the symptoms revealing Nux’s diseases are real. Furiosa’s collapsed lung pressure-release procedure is accurate. There are actual medical explanations for the little guy by the microphone and the giant son and the oxygen masks. Everyone is at least a little unhealthy, which makes this dystopian universe superior to others in the genre that tend to transpose healthy protagonists onto impossibly desperate worlds and circumstances.
From a narrative perspective, I was really thrilled to see that the film, if not always plausible, is at least logical and internally consistent. They fight over resources that would be vital if the world was so destroyed. Characters don’t magically transport anywhere or end up okay if they take a serious blow. People fall off cars and then are gone, crushed by tires or abandoned in the desert. The tyrannical controller of a single underground well would set up an organization of propaganda promises of an afterlife for his warriors, just like a vault for all your wives is a fine idea - you know - from a certain perspective. And when vital goods are that scarce and any problem spells disaster, people are extremely violent and territorial. This isn’t The Road with its inexplicably altruistic children and lots of slow sad walking; this is The Fury Road where even the nicest of characters literally rip other people’s faces off.
My only complaint is that they are too careless with water. No one would be letting torrents flow out of that giant citadel piping system and onto the ground and why are the wives bathing with that hose? Don’t drop a drop. I mean, this is a desert apocalypse. I want to see people kill each other over water! Uh… or… I don’t need… moving on.
The characters are kind of just enough. Tom Hardy’s Max is grunty and humorously mild-mannered. Apparently he doesn’t like to play any character that has to display emotion. Charlize Theron, I thought, gave the weakest performance just because she didn’t make Furiosa intimidating enough or feel a product of the world, but she did okay. Nicholas Hoult killed it again. That actor is batting 1.000. His brand of psychopath coming to realizations about his world and accepting his fate is awesome. And there’s something so compelling about that shiny stuff they spray on their mouth, obsessed with car culture and dreams of riding eternal and living again. Tragic, crazy, but compelling. And his performance is the most vital in a lot of ways because he provides the model for most of the characters you see doing epic stunts and dying in horrible wrecks on The Fury Road. It’s hard to appreciate what they’re doing without understanding the nature of their delusion that answers why. It’s an important story lesson Miller clearly has learned and that took this film from a fun, exciting, so shine, action film to really a masterpiece of the genre.
The only disappointing thing is that it lasts for just a couples ticks of the clock’s little hand. When hundreds of man-hours go into making every minute of cinema, you can’t have that many minutes. I wish there was a way around my LSD triangle so I could watch tales on The Fury Road and characters of the Mad Max universe for days on end. But at least this film’s rewatch value will be enormous.
Plus now I get to go about my life talking about living and dying and living again in Valhalla, all shiny… all shiny and chrome.