Mad Max: Fury Road will 'leave other summer spectacles choking on its dust'
George Miller's return to the post-apocalyptic genre opens in theatres Friday
In a summer of fast and spurious car chases and an avalanche of avengers, director George Miller has returned to the post-apocalyptic terrain he first explored in 1979 to show audiences what fury really feels like.
And his Mad Max: Fury Road will surely leave other summer spectacles choking on its dust.
Miller's movie was storyboarded rather than scripted, making it a visual delight, filled with a dazzling array of attack sequences, battles between bikes, trucks, flame-spouting dune buggies and deadly pole dancers, trained by members of Cirque de Soleil.
Rattle your bones sequences
It would be simple to look at Fury Road as a film that spits in the eye of today's CGI-encrusted action spectacles, but Fury Road is not anti-tech, it's just judicious in how it employs it.
For the stunts, Miller relied on a small army of drivers and stunt men and computer graphics to erase the harnesses that kept his cast safe.
As Miller said while speaking to CBC, "Why CG it when you can do it for real?"
What makes the chase sequences really rattle your bones is a rolling camera rig called the Edge Arm. It's a gyro-stabilized digital camera, mounted to a 24-foot-long crane, which is attached to an off-road racing truck.
Miller loved the rig so much, he used two of them.
This is what gives Fury Road its relentless momentum: the camera tracking inside the motorized melee; the lens inches from tires kicking up dust, or tilting up just in time to catch an attack vehicle cart wheeling in the sand.
A dash for redemption
For all the sophistication in the filmmaking, the story is rather simple.
Charlize Theron plays Imperator Furiosa, a war rig driver who ferries fuel for the reigning warlord, Immortan Joe, played by original Mad Max actor Hugh Keays-Byrne.
When the deception is discovered, Immortan Joe goes after Furiosa with everything he has. His vehicles, driven by the hooting cavalry of his War Boys, fill the horizon.
Richly depicted road warriors
Here is where we get a sense of the real richness of Miller's latest instalment.
These road warriors aren't a faceless horde. They're a primitive neo-tribe complete with their own language and religion. Raised on visions of Valhalla, Immortan Joe has shaped them to become the perfect cannon fodder, soldiers ready to die for a taste of fuel-injected paradise.
Miller pits these three figures — the soldier, the rogue and the driver — on a collision course.
With his furrowed brow and brawn to spare, Hardy easily inherits the mantle of Mad Max from Mel Gibson. But as good as Hardy is he's just along for the ride.
Max Mad: Fury Road firmly belongs to Charlize Theron.
Like Max, Furiosa has been marked by what she's seen and been forced to do. Another film may have played her for the victim but with her killer stare, and her eyes framed by a slash of axle grease, Miller gives Furiosa all the agency she needs.
The power of change
Like the spaghetti western-style that's soaked into the skin of Miller's movie, there's not a lot of dialogue in Fury Road. But there's one line that rings false.
Yet if there's a through line to Miller's movies it is that sense of hope. From the talking animals of Babe, to the singing penguins of Happy Feet, to the continuing adventures of Mad Max these are films celebrating of the power of one.
More than the battles over "guzzoline" and other precious fluids, in Mad Max: Fury Road the most precious cargo is the innocent women and what they represent: something better.
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