Based upon characters and situations created by George Miller
Screenplay Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy & Nico Lathouris
Directed by George Miller
**** (four stars)
RATED R
Never will I ever forget the first time I became introduced to the dystopian ultra-violent world of Mad Max.
I was 13 years old in the summer of 1982, and on opening day, my parents and I ventured out to the River Oaks theater in Calumet City, IL. to see Writer/Director George Miller's "The Road Warrior." Starring the then relatively unknown Mel Gibson as the perpetually haunted and hunted post-apocalyptic nomad Max Rockatansky, the film's bare bones of a plot involved Max aiding a small community residing within a dilapidated oil refinery against the horrific onslaught of a warlord and his Mohawk adorned, leather clad wearing, motorcycle riding marauders, a battle which culminated in a fever dream of a car chase through the desert wastelands. The film felt like a jet propelled ride into oblivion and was also a feature during which I shielded my eyes more than once, and jumped out of my seat in applause often. Due to its unrelenting rapaciousness, inventiveness and ferocious shock and awe inspiring visuals and velocity, it was a film unlike anything I had ever witnessed before...and equally so for my parents.
You see, when going to the movies with my family, we were habitually late, missing previews and sometimes as much as the first reel of a film, thus making us remain in the theater to view what we had missed during the subsequent screening. The same occurrence happened with "The Road Warrior," where we maybe missed the first 15 minutes or so. As the film's next screening began, and my cages already supremely rattled by what I had already seen, I watched the beginning of the film to the point where my parents and I originally entered and to my surprise, my parents made no attempts to rise and leave. Before I knew it, we had watched the entire film for a second time and then we left the theater to head back home. On the way home, I asked my Father why he and my Mother didn't make any motions to leave, especially as I was convinced that they had been repulsed by every single minute of the thing. My Father then answered with with the following: "I just couldn't believe it! I have never seen anything like that and I just had to see it again to make sure that I really saw what I saw the first time!" That was almost exactly how I felt too.
Granted, it would be nearly impossible for any new entry within the "Mad Max" series to re-capture the feeling of experiencing this character and this world for the first time, but I have to say that George Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road," the first Mad Man film in the 30 years since the third installment "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" (1985), comes pretty damn close. At the age of 70, George Miller has returned to and has essentially re-created his signature cinematic creation with a blood boiling level of skillfulness and creativity that filmmakers decades younger than him have been wholly unable to grasp.
"Mad Max: Fury Road" now stars Tom Hardy in the titular role made famous by Gibson. Almost immediately, Max is pursued, captured, and imprisoned by the chalk skinned army of the War Boys, the militia of the self-imposed dictator Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a terrifying figure with flowing gray hair, battle plates covering his muscular body and a face mask of long, gnashing teeth making him appear as being somewhat of a cross between Darth Vader and Bane from Director Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight Rises" (2012).
In the land of the Citadel, Immortan Joe rules over the environment through his control over the area's water supply, as well as having additional influence over the nearby locations of Gas Town and Bullet Farm. Even more atrociously, is his imprisonment of five wives (all played by Courtney Eaton, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Zoe Kravitz and Abbey Lee) as his society's breeders, plus the additional imprisonment of all other able bodied women as sources of nourishment as their milk is being harvested.
But the one armed Imperator Furiosa (a volcanic Charlize Theron) has her own plans to at last thwart Immortan Joe once and for all and Max, again finding himself in the center of a violent vortex, adheres to his strict moral code as he aids Furiosa in her righteous quest.
George Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road" is a film of ravenous, rampaging momentum, as it is basically a film that exists within a perpetual sense of motion. Yet unlike most films that succumb to ADD editing techniques and an arsenal of CGI special effects that underwhelm rather than elevate, Miller keeps the CGI to a relative minimum and utilizes the craft of combining white knuckle performances, superior cinematography by John Seale, set and costume designs, practical effects and a world class team of stunt players to inject a visceral realism into the hybrid landscape of Westerns, punk rock aesthetics, grim Sci-Fi, and comic book/graphic novels. Instead of being a cinematic experience where you are numbed by the audio/visual bludgeoning, Miller makes you feel every physical and emotional impact like a body slam. Let's face it, "Mad Max: Fury Road" puts most action films to miserable shame and definitely makes "The Fast And The Furious" franchise look and feel like preschool kids riding Big Wheels on the playground.
It is truly amazing to me that Miller has created a film that functions as a 120 minute car chase film peppered with scant dialogue which resonates as much as it does, especially when I could easily go for quite some time without ever seeing a car chase or explosion ever again. What Miller achieves with "Mad Max: Fury Road" is undeniably exhilarating and exhausting, operatic and overwhelming and to do so with the barest bones of a plot is remarkable indeed, for Miller has richly envisioned a full cinematic universe with its own rules and codes, while it simultaneously and gleefully breaks down the boundaries of what the movies can actually achieve.
On a purely visual level, "Mad Max: Fury Road" delivers the goods with sights and sounds that dazzle triumphantly. A car chase through a lightning filled sand storm. A quieter but no less intense sequence set at night and within a blue hued field of mud during which Max and Furiosa attempt to get their rig unstuck as Immortan Joe's forces rapidly approach. And man, did I love the sight of the literally flame throwing guitarist strapped to a giant rig that was also augmented by War Boys pounding on a set of war drums, as they provided the film's villains with their own soundtrack into battle, much like the iconic sequence form Director Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979), where Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) and his troops drops napalm bombs set to Wagner's "Ride Of The Valkyries."
Thankfully, Miller understand that his film cannot resonate through mindless violence alone. Quite the contrary, and especially surprising within a film that contains so little dialogue, "Mad Max: Fury Road" not only has much on its mind, it is a film of surprising humanity and profundity. I have to say that with Tom Hardy slipping into the role made famous by Gibson, I felt that in addition to his incredible physicality and expressiveness, he injected a level of soul that I had not really experienced in quite the same way in past Mad Max adventures--a feat made all the more impressive as he spends what could be the first third of the film trapped, powerless and eventually manacled to the hood of a car.
Yes, the character of Max functions as a variation of David Carradine's Caine from television's "Kung Fu" (1972-1975) or most certainly, Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" character. Truth be told, Max is not really the engine that drives the stories of his films. He is the eternal drifter who finds unwittingly finds himself caught in situations he never created and somehow retains a certain moral compass within a lawless landscape. For me, Hardy completely nailed that unique haunted/hunted quality that exists within the soul of Max but for the first time, I really felt that sense of Max forever combating his specialized brand of physical, psychological and existential anguish. It's not Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome but Constant Traumatic Stress Syndrome! Mad Max is indeed the man who is desperately trying to remain sane in an insane word yet who always somehow finds whom to temporarily align himself with on his path of justice, fairness and survival.
Even as good as Hardy is, "Mad Max: Fury Road" emphatically belongs to Charlize Theron. As Furiosa, she also possesses her own specialized haunted/hunted quality but within the course of this film she is fueled by a bottomless supply of vengeance and a personal crusade that borders on the Biblical. Much has already been written about the feminist subtext of "Mad Max: Fury Road" (as well as the preposterously infantile male backlash) and to that I feel the need to quibble with those articles just a little bit. In this film, the feminist attributes it contains is no mere subtext, it is the story itself, the real engine that drives the film straight down the white line nightmare. And frankly, any film that contains a clan of women warriors named "The Vulvari" is certainly wearing its heart upon its sleeves.
What else does a figure like the cult leader Immortan Joe and his atrocities represent and reflect but real world monsters like the organization of Boko Haram and their atrocities against girls and women, for instance? Additionally, we have the War Boys, who do serve as radical extremists driven to acts of voluntary suicide with Immortan Joe's promises to live again in Valhalla, and how those promises play out in the conflict that brews over the course of the film within the ailing War Boy, Nux (played by Nicholas Hoult).
But even greater is Millers' explorations within the ideas of what women represent and ultimately are in the post-apocalyptic future of "Mad Max: Fury Road" and it is dehumanizing indeed. In this world, women have been devalued and dehumanized to simply functioning as nothing more than commodities to be owned and therefore, tortured, raped, abused and ultimately, discarded. The most beautiful are to be under Immortan Joe's lock and key as his band of wives, while all the rest are utilized as living milk machines.
With women being reduced to existing as "things," where does this leave a woman like Furiosa? With her one arm, that is often augmented with a mechanical appendage, perhaps Furiosa is a women who is not even seen as being a woman at all, as she is considered to be "damaged goods." She is neither dominated sexually or through any sense of nurturing or nourishment. Since she is not seen as being an equal to the men, and not even as an equal to the women, she is only an unknowable and underestimated "other" and with that, Furiosa becomes a weapon that Immortan Joe never saw coming.
For all of the women within "Mad Max: Fury Road," Furiosa is the defender and the emancipator and Charlize Theron provides her with a rightful gravity, rage and yes, empathy that provides the film with a depth that it otherwise would not have if it was solely one car crash after another. I also feel that by having Theron front and center, Miller has trumped the powers-that-be at Marvel (i.e. Disney) and especially DC who are falling all over themselves with attempting to explain just why they feel that their comic book feature films just cannot have a woman at the core. Furiosa is the possibly the most vital and vibrant action film heroine I have seen since perhaps Uma Thurman's "The Bride" in Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" series (2003/2004) and believe me, it should not take another 10 years to come up with a new heroine.
If I had any criticism against "Mad Max: Fury Road" it would have to be with a slight choppy quality to some of its action sequences. There were just bits and sections where everything appeared as if the film had been sped up faster-a quality I felt to be initially disorienting as it seemed to be a bit of a cheat. I guess that I missed seeing a certain fluidity to the chases, like what was seen in Director Steven Spielberg's peerless truck chase in "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" (1981) or the outstanding freeway chase section in The Wachowski's "The Matrix Reloaded" (2003), for example. But after a while, I got used to it as I felt it lent itself greatly to the film's rabidly hallucinogenic quality. Even so, as Miller proceeds with the next installment, which he has already revealed to be entitled "Mad Max: The Wasteland," I do hope he smooths things out a little bit.
That said, quibbles are just quibbles, especially for a film that is as bracing as this one and functions near the very top offerings of George Miller's oeuvre, including the Satanic, suburban satire of "The Witches Of Eastwick" (1987), the harrowing medical drama "Lorenzo's Oil" (1992), the dark, surrealistic children's fantasy of "Babe: Pig In The City" (1998) and of course, "The Road Warrior."
Certainly it can never be as good as the first time. But to start anew...George Miller's "Mad Max: Fury Road" makes for a blistering beginning.
SAVAGE POSTSCRIPT:
Just to keep you informed, "Mad Max: Fury Road" is indeed rated R for intense scenes of violence throughout. Even for a film that is as bombastic and violent as this one is, George Miller shows considerable restraint as to what is shown on screen and the violence is unusually bloodless. That being said, your friendly neighborhood film enthusiast strongly recommends that you parents out there to not take any children under 13 to this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment