Needless
to say, and to my great surprise, Fury Road not only surpassed Beyond
Thunderdome, but arguably surpassed even the original Mad Max film, and
perhaps ties with The Road Warrior for the best installment in the
series. Fury Road is the fourth installment of George Miller's raw,
ultra-violent, high-octane demolition derby set in a post-apocalyptic
wasteland that famously solidified Mel Gibson's acting career in the
late 70s and 80s. The series follows ex-cop Max Rockatansky as he tries,
and ultimately fails, to defend his wife and baby child from a vicious
bike gang in the first Mad Max, helps a group of wasteland wanderers
trapped by the masked Lord Humungous and his band of BDSM-ready raiders
in The Road Warrior, and duels a developmentally disabled behemoth and
corrupt Tina Turner in Beyond Thunderdome. Fury Road comes as the next
entry in the series, some thirty years after the production of Beyond
Thunderdome. The film sees Max cross paths with Imperator Furiosa as
she tries to smuggle a handful of innocent women from the clutches of
Immortan Joe, the twisted dictator of the Citadel.
There
are several things about the Mad Max series that make it stand out
among not just other sci-fi series, but as a unique piece of cinematic
art. First, and perhaps most importantly, it is the first film series to
really introduce a post-apocalyptic setting to a modern audience.
Certainly, one could reference some of the old black and white sci-fi
films of the 1950s as examples of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic
fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still comes to mind), but the
generational divide between those and Mad Max is glaring. The series
post-apocalyptic setting is well established by The Road Warrior; war
and nuclear fallout have ravaged the landscape, and the surviving humans
have splintered into savage factions, competing for food and fuel. On
that note, the second thing that defines the Mad Max series are its
cars. Apparently, the one category of technology that survives the
nuclear fallout in the world of Mad Max is automotive technology, and
the wasteland wanderers endow their vehicles with an almost divine
status. However, it is important to point out that the vehicles are one
of the aesthetic highlights of the series. There is a high degree of
creativity and imagination about their design that needs to be
acknowledged: an old Volkswagon beetle covered in red, rusted spikes, an
oil tanker outfitted with bulldozer plating and chrome skulls, and
Max's jet black V8 Pursuit Special (a modified Ford Falcon) illustrate
the wide array of vehicles that take part in the metal mayhem. A third
important characteristic of the series was that it was ultra-violent,
and never pulled any punches. There is a rather iconic scene in The Road
Warrior where The Humungous' gang tries to intimidate Max and the
wanderers holed up in a well-defended oil refinery by strapping one of
their prisoners, one of the wanderers, to poles and setting him on fire
in the middle of the night, displaying him for the entire refinery to
see. Fourth, in line with the vehicle design, the character and plot
design was always very imaginative. For example, the opening scene of
the first Mad Max sees Max playing a game of chicken with an escaped
convict known as "The Night Rider", while The Road Warrior has Max
resisting the Humungous, a badly scarred, but hulking raider with the
help of a boomerang-wielding wild child, and Beyond Thunderdome has Max
fighting it out with a disabled muscle-man in a steel cage with an
assortment of weapons dangling from the top. Lastly, though no less
important than any of the other points, the series was quintessentially
Australian. In the first two installments of the series, the iconic
wasteland was set in the Australian outback, while all of the actors
were either Australian or British. This set the series out as unique
from other sci-fi series; with the rise of Hollywood in the latter half
of the 20th century, an Australian sci-fi series provided a new way of
looking at the genre, even if that meant something as simple as having
us experience the post-apocalyptic narrative from the perspective of
people who didn't have an American accent (Mel Gibson's accent is very
noticeable in The Road Warrior). When one takes all of these various
characteristics into consideration, it is easy to see why the Mad Max
series stood out as a unique sci-fi series at the time.
Fast
forward thirty years. Given the precedent that the series had set up
until this point, one can ask whether or not Fury Road preserves this,
and continues the uniqueness and innovation of the series in a 21st
century package, or if this reboot of an older franchise will be like
most other reboots of the past decade and do more harm than it did
benefit to the series. To my great relief, not only did Fury Road meet
the high standard set by its predecessors, but it stands out as one of
the best science fiction films of the 2010s so far, much like The Road
Warrior was in the 1980s.
Accordingly,
we can ask what Fury Road does that earns it such distinction,
particularly those things that other reboots seem to persistently miss
the mark on. I think there are three core things: 1) as outlined in the
above paragraphs, Fury Road preserves everything that was unique and
good about its predecessors, and 2) in those areas where it did deviate
from the rest of the series, it provided new perspectives and
innovations that gave the series a 21st century spin (i.e. a compelling
story and the introduction of a major female protagonist to the series),
and, perhaps the most simple, yet extremely important detail, 3) Mel
Gibson did not reprise his role as Max, and it's clear that this was an
important component of Fury Road's success.
As
mentioned, Fury Road preserved all of the important elements of the
series that came before it. This was to be somewhat expected; George
Miller returned to produce and direct this installment, just like he had
done with the rest of the series up until now. Accordingly, if the same
mastermind behind The Road Warrior is also producing Fury Road, it is
not too unreasonable to expect some element of cinematic beauty in Fury
Road. Of course, one must still keep his skepticism about him; it is
safe to say that Steven Spielberg's later works are lacking the genius
of his 80s and 90s work, so the assumption that Fury Road will
automatically be good simply because George Miller is working on it is a
faulty one. Nonetheless, unlike Spielberg, Miller not only knew what
was good about his series beforehand, but also knew how to bring those
things to a 21st century audience. For example, I had mentioned that the
Mad Max series was famous (or infamous) for being ultra-violent and not
pulling any punches, uninterested in catering to the politically
correct. This characteristic is the most apparent in Fury Road. There
are several notable scenes that illustrate this. Early on in the film,
we are made aware of the fact that Immortan Joe has several mildly obese
women hooked up to breast milking machines, harvesting their milk for
himself and his sons. The camera pans over the women, unashamed. Some
may even find this scene all the more disturbing due to the fact that
Joe's sons are adults, one of whom just casually samples the milk and
gives his father a quick nod of approval. And later on, during an
intense chase scene where Joe and his War Boys are chasing Furiosa and
Max through the wasteland in order to try and re-capture Joe's kidnapped
brides, one of them, Splendid, pregnant with Joe's child, is thrown
under a speeding car and turned into roadkill. I confess a degree of
amusement with this scene; in today's cinematic landscape, dominated by
Hollywood, I highly doubt the idea of throwing pregnant women under cars
would even be entertained, likely deemed to be too extreme by your
various mainstream studios. The fact the George Miller would include
such elements in the series where others won't is enough alone to merit
some degree of praise, even before one considers all of the other things
that Fury Road does well. Speaking of which, another one of the several
things that Fury Road preserves is the fact that the overwhelming
majority of the cast is British or Australian or some other kind of
English speaker that is not American or a major Hollywood actor,
maintaining the series' characteristic British feel to it. Tom hardy,
Charlize Theron, and Nicholas Hoult, while major actors, do a fantastic
job at reminding us that one does not need Hollywood to produce a great
piece of cinematic art, or that one does not need to be American to have
a great science fiction experience. Again, the list of things that Fury
Road does well can go on, but as a simple rule of thumb, refer back to
the things that I mentioned characterize the series before hand, and then
refer back to the film. I am confident that one can find all of them in
Fury Road.
However,
there are several things the film does that are new innovations to the
series without deviating too much from the things that make the series
great. Perhaps the most important of its innovations is the introduction
of Charlize Theron's Furiosa, the first major female protagonist in the
series. Granted, there have been other women in the Mad Max films up
until Fury Road, but none of them were particularly memorable (in fact,
the only two other notable female characters in the series before
Furiosa were probably Max's wife, Jessie, in the first Mad Max, who most
people forget about, and Tina Turner's Aunty Entity in Beyond
Thunderdome, who most people find laughable). The introduction of
Furiosa does several things for both the series and the larger cinematic
landscape. First, in the scope of today's science fiction and action
films, Furiosa is everything other recent female protagonists are not.
She is not the over-sexualized, young, former Soviet assassin that is
The Avengers' Black Widow. At the same time, she is also not the spunky,
sidekick type who ultimately gets subordinated to the support role that
we saw from Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire in Jurassic World. Rather,
Furiosa takes a much more active role in the plot development of the
film. In fact, Furiosa is the one who lights the fuse on the gory car
chase that defines the movie, and there are times where she even seems
to be a more active participant in what's going on than Max. For
example, for about three quarters of the film, Furiosa is more or less
dictating the direction of the chase; she has a set destination in mind
as to where she wants to take Joe's brides, and she is extremely
passionate about getting there, while Max seems to simply be along for
the ride.
Lastly,
another characteristic of Fury Road that seems to have greatly
contributed to its success is actually the absence of Mel Gibson and the
introduction of Tom Hardy as the new Max. This was a great move on
Miller's part; one of the things that Hollywood does that is so baffling
is that, whenever there is a reboot of a series, the historical actors
for the series just have to reprise his or her role, despite the fact
that this reboot is some thirty to forty years after the original film
was made (the Terminator series keeps making this blunder). The inevitable
result is that you have the original actor, who is otherwise unfit for
the role, trying to make us believe that whatever series he or she represents still
has relevance. Imagine, for example, if it were actually Mel Gibson
portraying Max in Fury Road. We would be asked to try and accept an old
man who had a phase of religious fanaticism fighting his way through
hordes of young wasteland raiders, who has since lost his Australian
accent and indie-film flare. The result would certainly be quite
laughable. What George Miller realized is that you don't need Mel Gibson
to have Mad Max, and that, in fact, the character of Max can be just as
well portrayed by another suitable actor. Enter Tom Hardy. On the
surface, Hardy meets all of the prerequisites for what it takes to
portray Max: British, a proven track record with action films (see The
Dark Knight Rises), and the potential to portray a unique, yet subtle,
character (again, see The Dark Knight Rises and Inception). Given the
tendency of movie series to lose a little bit of credibility when one
starts shuffling actors around (i.e. the various permutations of John Connor in the Terminator series), there was
understandably some skepticism at the prospect of Tom Hardy successfully
pulling off Max. However, it is clear that Hardy studies the previous
Mad Max films well; Hardy's performance invoked all of the quirks and
mannerisms of Mel Gibson's Max from the 80s, at times seemingly paying
homage to Gibson's portrayal of the character. At the same time, Hardy
was also able to make the character his own; this Max is definitely more
aggressive than Gibson's, and has a certain degree of cynicism about
him that was lacking in previous iterations of the character. The
impressive part is that Hardy was able to portray all of this mostly in
action as opposed to words. Interestingly, Max has been a character that
has had very little dialogue in the series, preferring more to actually
do things as opposed to say things, which Miller appears to have picked
up on and preserved in the script for the film. Accordingly, it was up
to Hardy to portray the character of Max with very little dialogue (Max
has a total of maybe a couple dozen words throughout the entirety of Fury Road)
while preserving everything that was unique about him created by Gibson,
which he did almost effortlessly, it seems.
Overall,
Mad Max: Fury Road is a must for anyone who claims to be a fan of
science fiction, and is easily one of the best movies of the year.
George Miller hasn't lost the genius he displayed in the previous
installments of the Mad Max series, and both Tom Hardy and Charlize
Theron deliver performances that reflect the character that has by now
been well-established, in the case of Max, and bring a new, memorable
face to the series, in the case of Furiosa, as well as preserve the
distinctive British/Australian feel to the series. And any fan of
post-apocalyptic fiction will acknowledge that Fury Road does a
fantastic job of bringing the series up-to-date, painting its wasteland
with many of the elements used in more recent post-apocalyptic fiction,
while understanding that it more or less defined the genre. One could
even argue that Mad Max: Fury Road is inspiring. You know the film did
something right if you walk out of it feeling like you need to get into
your car and immediately go enter a demolition derby.
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