You can probably count the number of times you blink during Mad Max: Fury Road on one hand.
It opens with Max Rockatasky (Tom Hardy) speeding through glowing orange deserts, only to be captured by the ghostly War Boys, footsoldiers of dictator Immortan Joe who runs the story’s dystopian world by providing dehydrated masses with small doses of precious water. Then there’s Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). One-armed military woman gone rogue, she’s fleeing aboard a war rig, searching for a mysterious ‘green place’ as refuge for her cargo, the Wives – five beautiful women used by Joe for Handmaid’s Tale-style heir creation. Soon Max escapes too, tied by blood transfusion device to sympathetic War boy Nux (Nicholas Holt), and after a hasty standoff the two sides team up to escape. Of course, this doesn’t go to plan, and soon the gang of outsiders have the entire desert bearing down on them. It’s a lot to take in.
George Miller, director of the previous Max films (along with high-octane thrills such as Babe and Happy Feet), has revived a visceral world, fitting flame-throwing guitars and countless explosions into an light-footed plot that’s far from profound but doesn’t feel the need to intrude in storytelling to set up a franchise. Hint hint, Marvel. It’s unrelenting to the point of exhaustion – the film is essentially one big, long sandy tank chase, and god, is it loud. The man behind me swore enthusiastically during one sequence. I barely heard him, but agreed with the sentiment. However, Fury Road is fantastically tactile: you feel the heat it’s emitting, searing through the screen, grabbing you and shouting. Despite being a reboot of a thirty year-old franchise, it feels new, retina-burning and wonderfully edited. Character development is the only thing about the film that’s quiet – you do wish you knew more about how this apocalypse came to be – but Hardy, at his best when allowed to really perform, brings physicality and semi-silent magnetism to the titular road warrior whilst exchanging the odd meaningful glance (a coy thumbs-up to Joe’s pregnant wife Splendid is a comedic highlight).
However, it’s clear who the film belongs to: not the name in the title, but Theron’s Furiosa: a hell of a heroine, descended from Alien’s Ripley with her shaved head and deep-seated need for redemption. The Wives, plus countless women (actresses involved are aged anywhere from eighteen to eighty) are what anchor the film’s world and sometimes it feels as if Max is a stranger passing through, which is a tricky move, but it works. They throw themselves into a deeply masculine world, standing their ground with bazookas and a clear feminist message, calling out both the film’s antagonists and seemingly the genre itself: “we are not things”. Like many other aspects of the movie, it’s far from perfect – both sensible clothing and diversity are somewhat lacking – but it’s a hell of a place to start.
Brimming with oversaturation and exaltation, Mad Max: Fury Road is a great big weird triumph, mad by name and most definitely mad by nature. Maybe take some earplugs.
words by Lara Peters