That adjective in the title is so accurate.
Mad Max: Fury Road is a violent film, but the violent acts in this world don’t feel like arbitrary action beats — they emerge from a complete lack of other options or a firm sense of straight-up insanity.
George Miller’s new vision of Max isn’t a warrior. Rather, he’s a man driven by the memories of past sins to do little more than survive. He walks with the ghosts of those he couldn’t save, and his traveling companions have pushed him to the brink of sanity.
From the very beginning, Miller and his team do something that so many other filmmakers fail to do — they define the geography of their action. Rather than merely tossing the camera around in the vain hopes of creating tension, they constantly give the viewer overhead shots and clear physical dimensions of what’s happening and where we’re going. And then they blow it all up.
There are dozens of crashes, explosions, and flying bodies in “Fury Road,” and yet the piece never gets repetitive, especially as the emotional stakes increase with each sequence. Miller knows when to let the pace coast when it needs to, which is rarely, and then he pushes the pedal down and plasters you to your seat.
Mad Max: Fury Road is an action film about redemption and revolution.
Not content to merely repeat what he’s done before (even the first three Mad Max have very distinct personalities), Miller has redefined his vision of the future yet again, vibrantly imagining a world in which men have become the pawns of insane leaders and women hold fiercely onto the last vestiges of hope.
Fury Road would be remarkable enough as a pure technical accomplishment — a film that laughs in the face of blockbuster CGI orgies with some of the best editing and sound design the genre has ever seen — and yet Miller reaches for something greater than technical prowess.
He holds aloft the action template that he created with The Road Warrior and argues that Hollywood shouldn’t have been copying it for the past three decades, they should have been building on it.
Fury Road is a challenge to a whole generation of action filmmakers, urging them to follow its audacious path into the genre’s future and, like Miller, try their hardest to create something new.
For all the curious ones, this trailer would be very inspiring!
WATCH:
Now, go book your seat in a theatre near you!
