There are moments in Mad
Max: Fury Road where I sat gaping at the screen in exhilaration and awe,
convinced this film is the car chase masterpiece to which all of cinema has
built. That's heat-of-the-moment hyperbole, but it sure is
indicative of how enveloping and sustained this exhilarating action film is. I
thought back to the jaw-dropping truck chase climax in writer-director George
Miller’s first Mad Max sequel, 1982’s
The Road Warrior, and how blown away
I was as a hurtling pyrotechnic stunt display neared its twentieth minute. Fury Road pushes past its fortieth
minute, then its ninetieth, racing towards two hours with no signs of taking
its foot off the pedal. People careen between tanker trucks, zoom souped-up
jalopies and armored muscle cars protruding jagged metal and long, pendulous
spears as guns fire, knives jab, bombs explode into the desert, and vehicles
crash and flip. Every rest is simply a suspenseful pause before the chased spy
their pursuers roaring over the horizon.
Miller returns to the sand-swept post-apocalyptic outback he
left behind in 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome,
summoning up every ounce of his prodigious imagination, filmmaking prowess, attention
to fantastical detail, and moral heft to create the most soulful and exciting
action film in ages. The Mad Max
films’ worldbuilding works wonders by staying small and specific, with stakes
tactile and personal. We follow the taciturn rover Max into unique and
fascinating corners of the ruined world each time out. Here we discover yet
another place where water and gas are currency, and where human life has been
organized in convincingly cruel and cracked ways. Max (Tom Hardy, flawlessly
taking over for Mel Gibson), suffering PTSD from his earlier exploits, finds
himself captured by War Boys and held prisoner in their automotive death cult
in a cavernous oasis they call The Citadel.
A persuasive and disturbing dystopian society fully
thought-through, The Citadel is ruled by an evil warlord, Immortan Joe (Hugh
Keays-Byrne), who breathes with a tooth-studded oxygen mask and has his putrid
body sealed in plastic armor. He controls the water, and therefore his
subjects, men covered in tumors and scars willing to die for a drink and
promise of an automotive Valhalla afterlife. The women are treated as property,
good for breeding with the Immortan and providing milk. These enslaved young
women (Zoë Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and
Courtney Eaton) sneak off with a rare free female, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize
Theron), in her tanker. The women flee across the desert, Joe’s vehicular army
close behind. One driver (Nicholas Hoult) straps Max to the front of his car,
muzzled and dripping blood as he’s reluctantly pulled into this conflict.
Miller, writing with Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris,
has concocted a story perfect for a feature-length chase, lean and expressive.
It’s a tour de force of perpetual motion, briskly characterizing its
participants through actions while organizing witty, complicated fast-paced visual
spectacle. Always on the move, but never exhausting, the film varies its speed
in natural, and suspenseful, ways. Filming real cars barreling across a real
desert, Miller finds terrific weight in every movement, a sense that violence
matters. This makes the most visceral of crashes and smashes, and every moment
with people crawling around and between vehicles, feel impactful and dangerous.
Cinematographer John Seale’s wonderfully textured images capture the brilliant
stunt work (comparison to Buster Keaton’s The
General seems apt), sweeping across vast spaces and squeezing into tight
corners. Editor Jason Ballantine elegantly whips up suspense and finds poetry
in motion amidst the growling engines, grisly gore, saturated colors, and CGI
enhancements. As new combatants join the chase, the momentum keeps things
hurtling along with nerve-wracking, teeth-rattling, white-knuckle thrills.
The visual and moral clarity of Fury Road is impressive. We know at every moment what dangers
confront our characters, drawn in broad strokes and colored in with Miller’s
creative specificity. Wild leather outfits, bright streaks of makeup and motor
oil, and steam-punk prosthetics are the ensemble’s costumes. Within them are
fiercely primal performances. Theron’s the best, tearing through the scenery as
an avenging warrior, bold, bald, smart, wielding a burning glare and artificial
limb with deadly serious intent. The villains are grotesque men, sickly
dripping disease and rot in impressively gross makeup effects. Their fleeing
victims are angelic innocents wrapped in flowing white cloths (though never
mere damsels in distress). And then there’s Max, in his cool jacket and affect,
perhaps the last noble man left on Earth. He’s principled and troubled, is reluctant
to fight, always wanting to save his own skin, and yet unable to ignore the
danger faced by those around him. The moral stakes of all this turmoil is
agonizingly clear.
It’s this strong, simple core that makes the action of Mad Max: Fury Road so particularly
intense. Not only does Miller stage spectacular crashes and explosions,
communicating an invigorating sense of pain and drive, but he quickly makes it
matter. I was drawn into the fascinating world he created, cared deeply about
the characters in peril and what becomes tenderly moving about their
relationships. The movie charges forward, asking an audience to lean in and
catch up. How exciting to enter a fully drawn world with an immediately
gripping scenario of emotional and thematic weight, and find absorbing chaos. This
is popcorn filmmaking at the highest level, a master filmmaker proving
relentless noise and fury can be artfully shaped, and carry a genuine,
meaningful wallop. Miller considers his characters' choices as carefully as he
choreographs their cars, in both cases as exhilarating for what they do as how
they arrive there.
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