Faster and Furiouser
Mad Max: Fury Road / directed by George Miller
Fury Road is a rootin’, tootin’ return to the primal struggle, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and questionable driving practices that George Miller elaborated with his trilogy of Mad Max films three decades ago. I’m not the one to definitively gauge the precise cultural impact of those earlier movies, only I know that they made a splash on our collective consciousness in a way that shockingly few sci-fi movies really do; they encapsulated a certain plausible vision of a degraded yet automotive future (perhaps the single most hellish aspect of its vision - civilization gone, but cars, like cockroaches, still thriving). Don't tell me I'm the only person who has used the phrase “like something out of Mad Max” countless times to invoke a ramshackle jerry-rigged technological and/or sartorial quality!
Fury Road is grim and glorious; you have the sense of a great consciousness at work here, an alternative apocalyptic universe created not in 7 days but over the course of years by Miller and his team. Within the first minutes of the film, Max (Tom Hardy) is taken prisoner by a patriarchal, primitive warrior society headed by a face-masked leader lording it over the masses who literally live in squalor below his rock-outcropping castle. “Don’t get addicted to water” he tells them early on, as they receive their stinting rations from bountiful supplies, which effectively sums up the inequality and cruelty of the whole accursed set-up. But balancing out the despair of this dog-eat-dog situation are the layers of detailed strangeness visible everywhere. Amazing human-powered pulley systems lower vehicles from the imperious heights; lactating women supply milk for the warrior class; human beings are used as living blood bags; multitudes of pale-faced “warboys” (who, unless I missed something, were all sired by the same father, Immorten Joe (Hugh Keays-Berne)) fight for the glory of dying and reawakening in Valhalla. And it’s impossible to fully list all the objects from the fallen civilization that have found a second life of unintended purpose. It all amounts to a recognizable but strange spectacle that draws us in and repels us at the same time; it’s like a hyper-kinetic Terry Gilliam dystopian universe, where the machinery of primitive action replaces the mechanisms of bureaucracy.
While Max’s capture within the first minutes of the film is our induction into this world, it’s the introduction of another character that actually sets the main action going. For despite its title, the true hero of this film is Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), Immorten Joe’s leading warrior. The fact that she’s the sole female soldier we see attests to her extraordinary reputation and rank in this society. But on this day, she’s no longer going to follow orders. She intends to return to the green land from which she was kidnapped as a little girl, and she’s carrying as hidden cargo Immorten Joe’s harem of “breeders,” the women who bear him his warrior sons. Theron is magnetic, and her performance is remarkably subtle in the midst of what must be counted as one of the greatest action movies of the past decade, and probably of all time. That she fights for principle, rather than domination, lends the film a moral underpinning that elevates all the spectacular action into a grander clash of visions for what the world can be.
But enough about the emotional underpinning of this film! Let’s talk about its driving machines. Clearly, years have passed since the last car dealership closed (or, more likely, in the context of civilizational collapse, was looted and burned to the ground), and in that time cars have both evolved and devolved: constructed out of pieces of the old, and frequently ridden by spearmen and other such primitively armed warriors (though the spears are tipped with explosives), they hearken back to horse-drawn chariots or Roman triremes - yet with their souped-up engines, individuality (we are far past assembly line clones here), and fearsome appearance, they are the primary force in this downtrodden world, at the top of the food chain. Mankind (at least the warrior class) lives in an intimate relationship with their vehicles, akin to Mongol warriors of old; in one memorable scene, men spit fuel into exhaust systems to get more power out of their machines.
In an action movie era where CG is king, Fury Road restores the power and the glory of the tangible. These driving machines have an unquestionable reality, and the sheer creativity and attention to detail are wondrous. From metal-spiked porcupine-looking cars driven by a band of marauders, to Furiosa’s badass war rig, to a muscle car on tank treads, you have a sense of irrepressible ingenuity that actually exists in the physical world. The movement of large numbers of these remarkable vehicles across the landscape is the signature image of this film, only in their phalanxed roll across invariably dry plains they are more like ships on a sea. Denied use of the skies, man has reaffirmed mastery of two-dimensional warfare (although that is a slight oversimplification, as the vertical is well-populated by buggies that caroom off hillocks and warriors who leap from one vehicle to the next via counterweighted pole vault devices).
After my first viewing of Fury Road, I was a little sympathetic to the commentary I’d read that the second half of the film felt redundant; but on a repeat viewing, I found the second half equally, if not more thrilling, than the first. Within the limitations of its road combat parameters, the action sequences continually feel fresh and original; new variations on mayhem are continually worked in. I don’t think there’s a single scene where the laws of physics aren’t followed scrupulously (it’s hard to think of a greater contrast with the Fast and Furious films than this movie), which makes the action persuasive and realistic despite its fantastical trappings. Fury Road is an exhilarating, even transcendent piece of action film-making; it may be a while before we again see its equal.