3.5 Dystopian-wastelands out of 4
There’s something to be said about our society when a post-apocalyptic film in which a man plays a flame-throwing double-headed guitar can be called restrained. Make no mistake, George Miller’s fourth installment in the Mad Max franchise is every bit the maddening, pulse-pounding, visceral experience that fans of the series are seeking. However, at the core of this eclectic film is a simple story of freedom and breaking chains.
In a sense, all of the films in the Mad Max series are defined by their themes of freedom and escaping the bonds of servitude, society, or—in the case of Fury Road—patriarchy. I’ll be the first to admit that I went into director Miller’s film expecting the typical, hyper-masculine offerings of the summer blockbuster season. I was expecting loudness, visual aberration, violence, and irrevocably insensitive masculinity. Of that list, three are still undeniably present.
Fury Road is set at an unknown time in the Mad Max chronology. The titular character, Max Rockatansky is haunted by visions of those he was unable to save, including his daughter, and wanders the Australian wastelands avoiding vagabonds, stragglers, and roving gangs of the mentally deranged. Captured by the War Boys – led by the masked Immortan Joe—Max’s O-Negative blood type leaves him as a living blood bag for a dying War Boy, Nux.
The film’s real conflict, however, is instigated by the hands of Imperator Furiosa—played by Charlize Theron, who delivers a hauntingly complex and layered performance—who kidnaps Joe’s fives wives in order to save them from their existence as slaves and breeders. Miller’s script, penned with input from Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris—and The Vagina Monologues creator, Eve Ensler, who served as a script doctor—uses phrases like “breeder” and “blood bag” to shock its audience.
In an age when gruesome horror is present in theatres, on television, on the news, and all over the internet, it is rare for a film to actually be able to resonate with an audience based purely on language. Fury Road, then, is the rare film that is able to degrade its characters in a manner that should be immediately detestable to its audience, without resorting to physical intimidation. That Miller’s film is capable of touching on themes of womanhood, masculinity, freedom, and liberation, and that it’s a summer blockbuster to boot, is indicative of the care and effort employed by Miller and his team.
For a film that touches on such difficult, heavy subjects as it does, Fury Road is an immensely entertaining, octane-filled thrill-ride, whose blood and oil premise is always on full display. Throughout the film’s 120-minute runtime, there are approximately three moments where the action slows down to allow the audience to catch its breath. The remainder of the movie is filmed as a sustained series of car-chases, and it’s a delight to see that George Miller limited his use of special effects to the practical kind. Yet again, barring instances where it would have been almost impossible to create a scene without computer-generated effects, every explosion, every car crash, every car, every motorcycle, every instance of over-the-top action is captured and created by practical effects.
There are numerous scenes where a creature dressed in red is strapped to a giant rig of amplifiers connected to his double-headed guitar—that is also a flamethrower. Not only is the rig real, not only is the guitar real, not only is the person real, but so are the flames, and Miller’s eccentric camera captures it all.
Especially noticeable is Miller’s decision to avoid using impossible—and also computer-generated—camera effects to capture his scenes. Miller is aided in this effort by cinematographer John Seale, whose orange, brown, yellow, and white colour palette perfectly captures the film’s tone and its setting. Barring black-and-white films, there have been few other movies less lacking in colour that produce more resonance in its audience than Fury Road.
On a final note, there have been critics of who have claimed that Miller’s script is dull, far-fetched, and, most deridingly, anti-man. In response to this criticism, I must say that I found a story about five women attempting to escape the bonds of their tyrannical, maniacal, obsessed captor to be less anti-man and more anti-slavery. In the same sense, the fact that Max and Furiosa actively compromise and co-operate, and the fact that I believe the main character in this story is Furiosa, and not Max, is less indicative of a pro-woman stance, and more indicative of a pro-human/pro-story stance.
It is evident that action movie heroes are often men—for no truly discernible reason—and I believe that George Miller agrees when I say that it’s about time movies featured strong female characters unburdened by society’s antiquated expectations of their gender.