MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015)
A review by James Kislingbury
I find it completely baffling that it
took thirty years for another Mad Max to come out. That's four
presidential administrations. That's longer than my entire life. It's
insane. It's even more insane to think that after three decades out
of the theaters, we have another one in the form of George Miller's
fourth installment in the series, Mad Max: Fury Road. Having watched
it, having done the math on this, I've come to the conclusion that
the thirty year wait was worth it.
What is Mad Max? What are you, one of
those cult kids in Texas? It's Mad Max. It's a series of films that
launched an entire aesthetic. What other movies can you think of that
can describe an artwork or a song or a jacket in short hand than Mad
Max? These movies loom large in our imaginations, in our culture. For
a good chunk of time the original Mad Max was the most profitable
film of all time. The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2 if you're naughty) is
one of the gold standards of action films. Even maligned Beyond
Thunderdome lives beyond its flaws in the form of the title alone. As
this Warren Ellis brain-projection will tell you, to at least one
person on earth it's his Star Wars.
Fury Road's strengths are not so much
that it's an excellent sequel, but that it is an excellent film. It's
a film that is worth of its name, but also worth of its legacy. It's
a film that like the first films, will be recgnozied for the wake of
creative wreckage that it leaves behind it.
It's also a bone-crunchingly intense
film from beginning to end. Almost the entirety of Fury Road consists
of a chase. It's broken up, intelligently into bite-sized chunks. In
its fury, it manages to relent just long enough to make us care a
little bit more about the characters and get our appetites whetted
for the next blast of carnage. In that way Fury Road doesn't seem so
much like a sequel to Beyond Thunderdome as it does a strange spawn
of Apocalypto.
Now, we could talk about the acting and
the directing and the music and how great they are, but to me what i
indicative of all of those things is the art design. You look at the
design of this film and you understand everything else that went into
it. One cannot be separated from the other. This film is details. A
team of people lovingly crafted this film. They wanted to make this
movie the best movie that they could and it shows. As a viewer you
see this movie and you know it's no bullshit. It's clear in each and
every frame that this is a movie helmed by a man who loves his
subject matter, who respects his audience, and still wants to make a
lot of executives happy.
Why does she have a robot arm? Because
when you see it you understand everything you need to know about this
woman (though her Alien 3-era Ripley hair helps). We're not dumb. We
see that and we understand who she is. No monologues, no Basil
Exposition. Just cinema beamed directly from the screen to your brain
and it's awesome. It's these small things that add up into something
much larger. Something much more monstrous and loud and awesome.
God, it's awesome, guys.
As much as Fury Road is a movie about movement and the universal language of aciton, it is a movie that's also about ideas. It's funny, because as loud as the movie is, it has thoughts to spare. Fury Road is a spectacle film that
works in a way that something like Interstellar does not. It's themes are as much as part of the story as the story is a part of the themes. Like the design and the
direction, the two are inseperable.
Fury Road is fundamentally about genders roles and, as Uhh Yeah Dude would phrase it "The relationaship between man and woman." It's a world of the hyper-masculine and the hyper-feminine, mixed in with pair of the baddest warrior monks this side of Lone Wolf and Cub (actually, is Furiosa a "battle nun?"). The film is about the interplay between all of these factions, between the aggressive male and submissive female, between freedom and oppression. And about, you know, cars smashing into shit. It has me thinking about gender roles
in a way that I haven't thought about them since, like, Alien. Maybe
that's more a mark against myself than it is a mark for the film.
There's also something personally
edifying about the successes of Mad Max: Fury Road. I love the fact
that the public seems to have embraced it in the way that they have.
William Gibson was re-tweeting about it. So was Patton Oswalt (though,
what doesn't he tweet about?). My co-workers are talking about it.
Rotten Tomatoes is ranking it as one of the best reviewed movies of
the year, aciton or otherwise. To me it proves that people want
something to bite into. They want something bigger and better than a
movie that is simply bigger and better.
Disney's Marvel's The Avengers 2: Age
of Ultron seems like the antithesis of this film. Even the people who enjoyed it didn't really seem to enjoy it. They seemed to vaguely tolerate
it. They seemed to aprove of its spectacle in a way that I find to be
profoundly depressing. I'm not even going to get into the amount of think pieces this movie generated. While I wasn't a huge fan of the first one (In
short: too long, too all over the place, and too safe), that movie
had fans the world over. They were people of all religions, races,
ages, genders, whatever. People loved that movie. To many it was a
triumph of the genre. To its manufacturers, it was a financial
triumph, as well.
Fury Road seems to have an energy
behind it that DmtA2:AoU doesn't seem capable of. There's something
in the air that makes me feel that Fury Road is this movie that
everyone was waiting for. They didn't know they needed it until it
was here. It's like some sort of violent, cinematic messiah. Like a
thief in the night, here comes Fury Road, all eight-cylinders and
pumping blood. What is more is that Fury Road is worthy of this
energy. People recognize that it is not so much a bill of sale, as it
is a work of cinema. It's a carnival. It's cinema. It's what we go to
movie theaters to see. It isn't the artifice of spectacle or what
we're told spectacle looks like, either. It's pure in a way that
people can see. Fury Road is a movie with weight.
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Fury Road does
what so many big action movies haven't done in what feels like
forever: It is as awesome as it is good. It is a film full of
creative energy that feels like nothing else I have ever seen. It's pure energy played out on a forty foot screen. I know
it sounds like I am speaking in hyperbole, but I feel rather strongly
about this film. It is a movie that needs to be seen in theaters, at
great speed, and with as many friends as you can muster, because like
Max himself, Fury Road is a creature that seems to be increasingly
rare in the world it lives in.
I can't wait to see it again.
James Kislingbury is a survivor. He podcasts about cult movies. He's working on a book. He has a Patreon up if you want to fatten him up a bit.
