Director: George Miller
Writers: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nick Lathouris
Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton
Runtime: 120 mins.
2015
The current age of Hollywood has been defined by the resuscitation of long dead intellectual properties. Film producers have been picking through the elephants' graveyard of defunct franchises in an effort to find bankable properties that have preexisting brand recognition. The idea is that if we recognize a string of words in the title of a new product as something familiar that existed ten or twenty or thirty years ago, that's free advertising. It's treading water. It's safe.
So we've been given the dubious gifts of humongous updated versions of Robocop, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek, and The Evil Dead. Coming down the pipeline are new Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Terminator, and even National Lampoon: Vacation updates. Not to mention the impending annual release of Star Wars film after Star Wars film.
These safe choice reboots elicit little more than a shrug from folks with the slightest degree of better judgment. Dipping into the pool of nostalgia just because it is relatively risk-free never produces anything worthwhile. The businessmen at the top do this because the built-in fanbases will bring in enough $$$ to turn a profit on these films regardless of quality. They aren't passion projects. They're where passion goes to die.
I can't wait for the Full House reboot.
But what about reboots that see the original creators return to the franchises they birthed decades ago? Surely there is some merit in this, surely the passion can be rekindled? Unfortunately we have seen this a few times, and we have let ourselves be excited, only to have the rug pulled from under us. George Lucas returns to Star Wars in 1999. Steven Spielberg returns to Indiana Jones in 2008. Ridley Scott returns to Alien in 2012. Crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment after crushing disappointment.
Everything mentioned above is what Mad Max: Fury Road is not. Now let me tell you what Mad Max: Fury Road is.
Fury Road is the culmination of a thirty year wait since Beyond Thunderdome during which series mastermind George Miller has been refining his craft. Miller has been trying to make this movie for over ten years, and has had the concept rankling around in his head for even longer than that. No greedy studio suits coaxed George Miller back into the world he once created--the guy never left. Instead, he was the one coaxing the money out of them. And he finally got what he needed.
Fury Road is a two hour long car chase. The action is more propulsive and constant than anything else in English language cinema. You can find examples in foreign cinema of films that are primarily composed of action choreography, especially in the strong Asian cinema tradition of martial arts. A recent example is the excellent tower-climbing police siege movie The Raid. Hollywood isn't audacious enough to attempt something like that. As Hollywood understands it, dialogue = story, action = spectacle, and the story is the excuse for the spectacle. That mindset couldn't be more wrongheaded. What is action, after all, if not dialogue made physical? A strong action beat is the same as a strong snippet of dialogue, and bad action and bad dialogue are kindred spirits. Two characters shouting at each other pointlessly is the same as a good guy and a bad guy trading blows with no real weightiness or stakes. Fury Road understands action-as-storytelling just as well as our best action storytellers (Jackie Chan, for example). Every action beat exists within a clockwork system of action/reaction, changing stakes, and visceral geometrically schematized space. The action in Fury Road is real.
Fury Road is one of the only contemporary action blockbusters to use CGI correctly, which is to say, as sparingly as possible. Twenty-two years ago, the bar for CGI special effects was set high by Jurassic Park. Since then, despite all our technological advancement and increasing experience, most movies have not touched the verisimilitude of Spielberg's dino thrill ride. That's because Spielberg was prescient (or perhaps limited) enough to use CGI in artful combination with practical effects and animatronics. Between those three tools and masterful editing, Jurassic Park was visually a near perfect movie. Two decades later and it's still a revelation to us how incredible a film can feel when CGI isn't splashed haphazardly all over the screen. Maybe George Miller, a seventy year old man, is just old fashioned, but he was determined to shoot his vision of Fury Road chronologically, on location in the Namib Desert, and with almost all practical stuntwork, CGI only being employed for things like erasing Charlize Theron's arm, and making safety rigging invisible. Fury Road functions as a desperately needed wake-up call to the visual effects artists of contemporary cinema. Sometimes the easy way isn't the best way.
Fury Road is a deliberately and explicitly feminist text. I don't think anybody expected this from a seventy year old white man. I don't think anybody expected this from a new entry in the Mad Max series, which isn't exactly known for its gender politics (Max becomes the tortured hero he is today because of the murder of his wife and child, of course.) Nonetheless, here it stands. One of the finest feminist treatises ever espoused by an action blockbuster. George Miller says that one of the idea kernels that birthed this movie was: What if the MacGuffin that motivates the central chase was actually a person? Five people, to be more specific. And everything else unfolds from there. Those five people are the wives (or "breeders") of the movie's villain, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). They are spirited away from his citadel by the film's real main character, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Fury Road is about the ways the patriarchy exercises objectifying claims over female bodies. Fury Road is about the way the patriarchy utilizes the material-ideological one-two punch of religious control and control over resources (water, gasoline, munitions) to keep the population in check. Fury Road is about women trying to reclaim their identity in the wake of trauma and masculine despotism. Fury Road is a movie in which we are expected to care about two men, sure, but also over a dozen women who are fleeing from the hypermasculine pursuit hoards. Fury Road is a movie that explicitly asks, "Who killed the world?" and implicitly answers, "Men." Fury Road is a movie in which a kick-ass band of old women called the Vuvalini are just as powerful and dangerous as the men--and nobody ever doubts this. Fury Road is a movie that called in Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, to consult with the five wives about the deep psychology of abuse culture. Fury Road is a movie in which the title character (Tom Hardy) treats a young attractive woman as an equal, and sometimes even defers to her as a superior, without ever questioning her authority, bringing up her sexuality, or condescending to her in any way. Fury Road is a movie in which damsels are only in distress because they are busy flinging themselves into harms way for the good of their community of companions: when they are saved it is by those companions regardless of gender, and when they are not saved we genuinely mourn them. Just as Fury Road needs to be a revelation for visual effects artists, Fury Road needs to be a revelation for men, and male filmmakers more specifically. Who Killed the World? the movie asks. We Are Not Things, the characters proclaim.
Fury Road is beautiful. Raw beauty that cannot be generated by a green screen. The Namib desert is stunning. Miller went into this movie knowing he would pursue beauty, but also that he would pursue color. Too many postapocalyptic films are drab and colorless to the point of disinterest. Miller defies that. We are in a wasteland, yes, but shouldn't that mean these characters will scrounge up and cling to as much color and visual personality as they can find? The movie is shot in sequences of bright orange and deep blue, two of the most difficult colors to use in cinematography. But Miller and DP John Seale craft one of the most engaging visual worlds I have ever seen.
Fury Road is a thematic goldmine. You come for the action, and you stay for the action, but you are blown away by the incredible depth this universe possesses. Fury Road tackles no less than issues of gender, patriarchy, religion, power, fanaticism, community, redemption, ableism, ideology... and none of it is talked about. We don't get treatises from dialogue dumps. We learn about these things because they exist as forces in the world, forces that we glimpse via the physicality of the characters, their costumes, their decisions. The golden rule of the visual medium of cinema is show don't tell, and George Miller shows us a full universe that is too busy being and doing to take time to tell us anything. We aren't spoonfed information. The filmmakers themselves are the only ones who know the backstories of all the characters, places, costumes, and even props--and they're the only ones who need to, because they're the ones who make these things come alive.
Fury Road is a performer's vehicle. When's the last time a character was revealed to you not through dialogue, but through an action beat? Miller unravels these characters, their motivations, and their inner worlds not through their mouths, but through the presentation of their entire bodies as fluid, decision-making physical forces. Then, when a rare snippet of dialogue does drop, it feels like a pebble in a pond, rippling through the entire film and achieving an almost mythic sense of purpose. Even the characters who are given one or two lines of dialogue make their presences felt. Basically, if it's onscreen, it's grabbing your attention and jerking it around.
Fury Road is a movie in which a blind man with bullets for teeth can dual wield machine guns while screaming, "I AM THE SCALES OF JUSTICE!" atop a combination muscle car and tank, and it can feel not only plausible, but a natural progression from what has come before.
Fury Road is a punk rock Valhalla. It's a balls to the wall ballet of bullets and devastating kinetic movement, mechanical fetish objects crumpling as they are flung around like crazed clockwork. It's a receptacle of pure manic energy, essentialized emotional registers, and primal human forces. It's a grimy grotesque mechanic's wet dream nightmare. It's a flailing thunderbolt, a feast for the eyes, a punch to the gut. It's a grand mythic stage for the frantic fumblings of mankind in an unsympathetic world, a window into the future functioning as a window into the past functioning as a window into the present. It's a sideways skew that moves us away from reality and towards truth. It's a furious yowl, a contorted expression, a demented theme park extravaganza. It's in theaters near you.
Fury Road is only the second movie in Post-Credit Coda history to be deemed functionally perfect.
5 / 5 BLOBS
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