Movie Spotlight: Mad Max: Fury Road

Holy shit, for those of you who haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road, I’m wondering why you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road… because you NEED to go and see Mad Max: Fury Road… now!

This is the first Movie Spotlight I’ve done for the site and I’m glad it’s starting with Mad Max: Fury Road because it’s been a long time since a movie has gotten me this excited after seeing it. Hell, this is the first movie that I’ve gone back to see TWICE at the cinema. I was going to post this entry A WEEK AGO but decided to wait until I watched it a second time just to make sure the initial hype wasn’t blinding me… and it was not at all.

Witness a masterpiece of cinema

Back in my younger days, I would regularly go see movies at the cinema with my dad and enjoyed the experience greatly. Now that I’m older, I feel that a lot of movies aren’t really cinema-worthy. To put it simply, it’s more cost-effective to just wait for the Blu-ray and watch it on my home theatre, you end up getting a better experience from a home theatre setup than you do from a cinema… in most cases.

Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the few movies I recommend that everyone should see at a cinema.

Why?

Because you want it to be on a huge screen and you want it to be loud… as obnoxiously loud as possible. The few people who have a gigantic projector with a ridiculously loud surround sound system will be able to replicate this at home with their home theatre systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars, but for the 99% of people who don’t have that, you owe it to yourself to experience this movie at a proper cinema.

When you’re watching Mad Max: Fury Road at a cinema, the sound is turned all the way up to 11 and it is so LOUD. Loud to the point of obnoxiousness that is just perfect captures what is going on on-screen. It is unapologetically loud with only a few short moments of peace throughout the entire film. It’s loud and it does not give a fuck.

It’s like one of those asshats who drive a suped-up V8 Holden Commodore (for those of you who aren’t Australian, it’s basically a type of Australian muscle car) down the road, in front of your house, after midnight with the engine roaring and waking up the entire neighbourhood. But instead of just one of those asshats, there’s over a hundred of them… with a blindfolded dude strapped to a mobile-rock concert truck playing a flame throwing electric/bass double neck guitar.

This movie is ridiculous and I love it.

Throughout this film, your heart is pumping and the music is pumping along with it and the action on-screen. It’s intense right from the start to the very end.

However, don’t confuse Mad Max: Fury Road as being just another mindless action movie.

The madness in the details

Many movies that have mass audience appeal do so, not because they’re particularly intelligent movies, but because they go out of their way to easily explain what is going on in the movie so that even the most unaware person viewing it can understand.

Some films do this terribly, bogging the viewer down with enormous amounts of awkward expositional dialogue or downright telling the viewer directly what they should be feeling or thinking in any given moment.

Others have mastered this and give this exposition to the viewer in clever ways using the same methods mentioned above that seem to work for whatever reason, some director’s just have that gift.

Then there are movies like Mad Max: Fury Road that does not tell the viewer anything. There is no exposition scene where two characters are awkwardly talking about things going on in the world around them to get the viewer up to speed.

One can easily dismiss Mad Max: Fury Road as being a dumb action movie with no substance if they expect to be fed exposition. This isn’t a movie for people who expect to be told what is going on, this is a movie for those who want to find out for themselves.

The viewer is expected to pay attention to everything that is happening in the film and figure it all out for themselves. Every word spoken, every event witnessed, every expression given, every mistake a character makes, every decision, every detail is what paints a very breathtakingly harsh and intense picture of what is happening in this post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max.

There is a very intelligent story being told throughout this carnage of action and twisted metal, and it’s being told without Thor flying in out of nowhere and explaining what an Infinity Stone is and why people should care.

A story, all shiny and chrome

Fury Road takes us back to the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Mad Max series and does so with what can only be described as a two-hour long chase scene through beautifully harsh surroundings. The world has ended and the survivors are dying slow and horrible deaths, riddled with disease and radiation poisoning. They live only to die and whatever life they do lead seems all but pointless for most.

You learn all this simply from seeing the living conditions of the people of the Citadel, the brainwashed notions of the War Boys and the power that Immortan Joe has over them all. Everyone is suffering in a multitude of ways and there doesn’t seem to be any way to escape.

Despite this, Imperator Furiosa betrays Immortan Joe, taking a War Rig full of supplies as well as his harem of wives and takes off into the unknown. This is the catalyst for a two-hour chase scene of epic proportions in which Max Rockatansky finds himself caught in the middle.

Though he is the title character, Max is not the hero of this story, even if he does a lot to help Furiosa try to escape Immortan Joe. Rather, Max is our guide to this post-apocalyptic world, we see through his eyes and witness what’s left of the world through his point of view, sharing in his madness along the way.

I live, I die. I LIVE AGAIN!

A lot of people probably feel that the only true Mad Max is Mel Gibson, since he was the one to breathe life into the role. However, Tom Hardy, despite lacking any sense of an Australian accent many people believe is essential to the role, is in every way the successor this movie needed to fully realise Mad Max in 2015. Hardy plays Max as a man who has been out there, all alone in the wastelands for a very long time. He speaks very little, but his expressions are perfect.

However, the two who really make this movie special are Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult, who play Furiosa and Nux respectively. Theron brings real weight to the character of Furiosa and every moment with her is 100% believable, she is tough and she has been through things that are worse than hell. She may have had her arm amputated in the past, but we don’t even need to see that to know that she’s been through a lot. It’s all played through he eyes, her look of experience and her general demeanour. She is a very different person from Ellen Ripley of the Alien series, but I can’t help but compare Furiosa to Ripley simply because these two characters are the two COOLEST women in film.

And Nux played by Nicholas Hoult? Never have I seen such a wonderfully played out arc of a character I thought would remain in the sidelines as a support cast member. Hoult’s innocent looking face on a War Boy looking for his chance to die and be reborn, all shiny and chrome in Valhalla paints a character in which the world has twisted. Every character in Mad Max: Fury Road gets their moments to shine, and boy, does Nux sure get his moment.

Then there are the villains, Immortan Joe and his army of War Boys, his son Rictus Erectus and their allies, The People Eater and Bullet Farmer… and let’s not forget the Doof Warrior. What awesome names these characters have and you only hear some of them mentioned once if at all. Just like the main cast, each of these deformed creatures of the wasteland have their moments in which they shine. It was a real pleasure to see so many interesting villains in a single movie and be satisfied with the way each of them went out.

The main threat, Immortan Joe himself, is played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, the same man who played Toecutter, the villain in the first Mad Max movie. He comes back to play a totally different character and like many of the other cast, he plays his role intensely with his eyes and his actions. Keays-Byrne knows how to be menacing behind a mask and he is extremely intimidating even though we see in his very first appearance in the movie, that he’s a withered old man who is decaying just as badly as everyone else.

My world is fire. And blood.

I’m glad I went and saw Age of Ultron before I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, because while Age of Ultron was a good movie, it comes nowhere near to the level of awesomeness that is Fury Road. I realise this movie isn’t going to make anywhere near as much money as Age of Ultron and that the mass audience probably won’t enjoy it as much as I have, but I still want as many people as possible to see this movie.

Everything about it is so well done that it deserves to be seen and enjoyed. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a movie that is a REAL movie and not a set piece for some big studio to make money off. George Miller has come back after 30 years from his last full action movie, which happened to be Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and through that 30 years of Babe and Happy Feet, he has come out and shown everyone how to make a REAL action movie.

This man is a master at what he does and he’s proven it with Mad Max: Fury Road, it’s amazing how many action movies can get it wrong time and time again and then this guy comes along and blows everyone away in so many ways.

Mad Max is no longer a relic from the 1980s that people continuously reference, it’s a force to be reckoned with in the twenty-first century too and this is only the beginning. After this movie, I’m hyped to see more Mad Max coming our way, starting with the Mad Max game being developed by Avalanche Studios, the creators of the Just Cause series.

Anyway, any more and I’ll start rambling into spoiler territory… I hope that, if you have read this and Mad Max: Fury Road is still showing at cinemas, this review has convinced you to go and see it right away. If you have found this review after that time, it’s still a hell of a movie that is still a must see on home video.

“Oh what a day, what a lovely day!”