Like I said, I've saved the best for last. Mad Max: Fury Road was out today, and it was amazing. Seriously, I cannot recommend it enough. Before you read this review, go and see it - I promise no spoilers, but it just cannot wait, you've gotta go see this movie. See, here's the thing: it doesn't really do anything new, but it does Mad Max really, really well.
I've seen the first Mad Max. I've seen The Road Warrior. Both are certainly very interesting movies, and with the first you can see what George Miller wanted to do, even if the budget or the technology wasn't there. But now, he's got the budget; he's got the gear. And he does an amazing job.
If you've seen the first two films, you'll probably feel the plot is a little familiar (maybe even if you've seen Beyond Thunderdome - is it any good?). It winds up that Max has to drive a big-rig away from a war camp of dangerous drivers, it's effectively straight out of The Road Warrior. The twist here, that this is no deception - this time Max has to win, or people will die. He's got lives at stake, rather than simple fuel: five young women, one of them heavily pregnant with the villain's child; trophy wives of Immortan Joe, one of the unique crazies to inhabit the post-apocalypse Earth. Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa is attempting to drive them across the desert to a better life, and she enlists Max's help to do so.
What's great is the imagination that goes into everything in Mad Max. The world is unique, strange, it's like a fantasy. The only thing it's missing is the magic. But what takes the part of the magic is the sheer, incredulous over-the-top vehicles and environments. Miller takes his ruined Earth of The Road Warrior and runs with it, creating a vast empty desert which is somehow populated with diverse, interesting characters. Everyone has their own design, a specialised sort of war-paint for their tribes but for cars instead. The vicious Buzzards have cars menacing with spikes, Immortan Joe's Wardogs have fifties-style hotrods with hazardous backplates, the canyon-dwellers ride simple dirt-bikes with their life possessions on the back. Everything feels tailored to the environment, Miller and crew have really thought about how people would survive and trick out their cars in this world.
One of the best things about Fury Road is the camera work. Miller doesn't just use typical camera techniques and editing, and one of the things I loved about the first Mad Max film was the way Miller used fast-forwarding to give his action sequences more speed. At the time it looked kinda goofy; in Fury Road he's got it down, it's refined, distilled. And he only uses it when he needs to. His high-speed forwards are used to keep the action going; when there's a lull in the middle of battle and the characters have a moment to catch their breath, Miller forwards past it and then hits us with a slow-down at the point of impact. His use of fast-forward and subsequent slow-mo is unique to Miller, or at least he's the only one who does it this well.
This is just his own personal trademark on the Mad Max films. He uses shaky-cam sparingly and symbolically, and in the beginning it works really well with the fast-forward effects to create a mad, psychotic scramble out of a chase through Immortan Joe's compound. He uses bizarre perspectives and worms-eye-view angles to skew our vision of a scene, and the colour in the film is often minimalist - we get a series of blue-shaded scenes, then a flash of red through the fog as Max takes out a vehicle in the dark. And the desert gives us a lot of reds and oranges against the contrast of a blue sky, except the sandstorm which bathes everything in orange-browns interspersed with stark black-and-white cuts as lightning flashes. It's very comic book.
That's what I like. It's got none of the Age of Ultron pretense, it doesn't try to be fake-deep. It's a huge car-chase movie, it gives us the story and no philosophy. So chill, Mens Rights Activists; there's no feminist ideology in here. There is, however, a whole host of female characters. Against Immortan Joe's all-male Wardogs, Charlize Theron and a host of new talent play Imperator Furiosa and the Breeders, Joe's trophy wives who are attempting to escape.
And in the middle of it all is Max. That's interesting: Max is never really the hero of these stories. He saves lives, sure, but even in this he feels like an observer as he does his part, taking out savages and fighting atop vehicles. When the climax comes along he goes into full-hero mode, though with everyone doing their part he still feels like a bit-part. He really is overshadowed by the women in this movie.
Okay, so the problems. First, the climax and finale. I felt like there'd be more for Max's own car to do - his Interceptor, captured in the opening moments and turned against him for the rest of the film. And the payoff at the big climax was surprisingly little, it a gimmicky 3D thing which irritated me a little. I saw it in 2D, and there were very few jump-out bits like that, which made it feel very out of place. And many of the villains felt very one-note and flat for their quirks, and while they may have had more lines than Max they didn't feel very fleshed out. Immortan Joe and his "family" were very underutilised for most of the film, they just sort of disappeared for a bit before returning near the end.
So, the good. The fights are really cool you guys. The finale is amazing despite its issues, the main fight of it before the payoff is visceral and surprisingly understated for a Mad Max movie. And Miller treats his audience as intelligent people, he gives you the clues to the solutions without calling them back explicitly when they're used.
Miller is very good at using few words, actually. It almost feels as though he wouldn't need to use words at all, he tells everything so visually. He's also good at passing up unnecessary dialogue, blending into the background noise or drowning it out with music. In another time, he could've been famous as a silent-movie director. And Miller keeps the tension running high with the threat of constant pursuit; when we finally get a release from that, it's switched with highly emotional scenes. Fury Road is a boiler of a movie, building tension quickly and releasing it in small bursts, only to build again until the climax.
Mad Max: Fury Road then. It's an amazing movie. Give it ten years, it'll be a classic; artistically, cinematographically, it's a masterpiece. There's so much I haven't had a chance to talk about - the way surround sound is used so expertly, the amazing music, the brilliant use of flashback and madness - but rest assured, you need to go see it.
Adieu!
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