{"id":17494,"date":"2015-05-16T21:39:11","date_gmt":"2015-05-16T11:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=17494"},"modified":"2015-05-16T21:44:47","modified_gmt":"2015-05-16T11:44:47","slug":"mad-max-fury-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=17494","title":{"rendered":"Mad Max: Fury Road"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"madmaxfuryroadposter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Director: \u00a0<\/strong>George\u00a0Miller
\nWriter: \u00a0<\/strong>George Miller, Brendan McCarthy
\nCast: \u00a0<\/strong>Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron<\/p>\n

This review contains mild spoilers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mad Max: Fury Road<\/em> is a mind-bending and uncompromising new instalment in the post apocalyptic\u00a0Mad Max<\/em> series with veteran director George Miller returning to the helm thirty years after the last chapter\u00a0Beyond Thunderdome<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It’s extraordinary to think that at the ripe old age of seventy, Miller has found it in him to create something so strikingly original and visionary. \u00a0Fury Road<\/em> is a film that benefits from every last drop of modern special\u00a0effects technology when showcasing\u00a0its wild, bombastic chase sequences but the construction of those scenes, the ‘show don’t tell’ philosophy and wonderful characterization behind its oddball cast are all techniques honed by an ‘old guard’ director who still has a thing or two to teach the younger generation.<\/p>\n

When I think of\u00a0most of the other\u00a0major action films I’ve seen this year, they’ve felt by-the-numbers, designed by committee and very safe. \u00a0By comparison,\u00a0Fury Road<\/em>\u00a0exists in a gleefully bizarre and otherworldly universe. \u00a0There wasn’t a single scene in the film that felt it existed to placate an overbearing producer or please a test audience. \u00a0It is a film that is crammed with quirky observational\u00a0details about the world these people inhabit and it trusts that the audience will keep up and soak it all in.<\/p>\n

A news story that broke just prior to the film’s release about disgruntled Mens Rights Activists bemoaning the film as a work of ‘feminist propaganda’ spoils one of Miller’s greatest chances that he took with the script. \u00a0The film has a new Max – ably played by Tom Hardy – but he isn’t really the centrepiece of the story. \u00a0Instead that role belongs to Charlize Theron in her performance as the tenacious, ass-kicking Imperator Furiosa. \u00a0The character is destined to become a classic, a 21st century spiritual successor to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley.<\/p>\n

\"madmaxfuryroad\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“My name is Max. My world is reduced to a single instinct: Survive. As the world fell it was hard to know who was more crazy. Me… Or everyone else.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The film begins with a brief narration from Max (Tom Hardy) introducing us to the desert wasteland before he is captured by soldiers called Warboys who serve the imperial ruler Immortan Joe. \u00a0Max has an iron mask clamped over his face and he is ignominiously used a hood ornament and live blood bag for Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a Warboy who is slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning.<\/p>\n

Immortan Joe rules over the Citadel – a desperate and impoverished society that perform backbreaking labour (think of the machines in Fritz Lang’s\u00a0Metropolis<\/em>) in exchange for tantalizingly brief access to clean drinking water.<\/p>\n

The action kicks off in earnest when a convoy that Immortan Joe sends out to Gas Town suddenly takes an unexpected detour. \u00a0We learn that the driver of the war rig, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), has secretly taken the First Wives – five sexual slaves that Joe kept in captivity –\u00a0as her cargo and she has made a break for freedom. \u00a0She heads East, hoping to find The Green Place, a sanctuary from the harsh terrain and out of Immortan Joe’s grasp. \u00a0To get there she will have to travel through perilous terrain and outrun Immortan Joe and his goons – who are armed to the teeth with guns, spears, explosives, drummers and a guy in a red jumpsuit shredding an electric guitar.<\/p>\n

The action in\u00a0Mad Max: Fury Road<\/em> comes in thick and fast. \u00a0The film has a glorious kinect energy, with Furiosa’s war rig tearing across the desert at a break-neck pace, smashing, bouncing and bulldozing over anything in its path. \u00a0Miller shows he has a canny eye for shooting vehicular carnage. \u00a0Fury Road<\/em>\u00a0has dozens of explosions, crashes and minions getting squished but it never feels repetitive or confusing. \u00a0Miller does an excellent job setting the stakes and giving the audience a clear sense of the landscape and what is happening. \u00a0The cherry on top is the wonderfully creative window dressing. \u00a0The vehicles in Fury Road\u00a0<\/em>are rusty shitboxes that are covered in spears and are highly explosive. \u00a0The bit-part villains are a terrific pantomime gallery of weirdos – there’s a blind judge firing machine guns, a roided up wrestler who has a child’s mind and a big fatso called The People Eater.<\/p>\n

The film’s onslaught of action would count for naught if we weren’t invested in the characters and\u00a0Fury Road<\/em> benefits immensely from the performances of Hardy, Theron and Hoult, all of whom probably have a page of dialogue between them and largely rely on their physical performances to set the scene, picking the right times to show grit, determination, vulnerability and compassion. \u00a0I’ve always admired Hardy and Theron and both deliver superb performances in Fury Road<\/em>. \u00a0Hoult and his baby blue eyes looked familiar to me but I couldn’t place him. \u00a0Turns out he’s the little kid from\u00a0About A Boy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Special mention must be made of\u00a0Fury Road’<\/em>s excellent soundtrack which compliments the on-screen carnage beautifully with some heart-rending orchestral numbers produced by Junkie XL. \u00a0It’s appropriately loud, grinding and elevates the tension in some of the scenes to breathtaking levels (quite literally).<\/p>\n

What else is there to say? \u00a0Fury Road<\/em> is unexpectedly great and destined to become a cult classic. \u00a0It’s so self assured and unrelenting in its own\u00a0bizarre world\u00a0that I’m not entirely sure how much of a mainstream audience it will find. \u00a0But those who give the film a chance are in for a treat. \u00a0Fury Road<\/em> is a labour of love and a call to arms from George Miller to other action movie directors out there. \u00a0Let’s see if any of them can top that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Max and Furiosa are on the run in a desert wasteland from the treacherous warlord Immortan Joe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":17495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1275,2229,2228,2230],"class_list":["post-17494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-charlize-theron","tag-george-miller","tag-mad-max","tag-tom-hardy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17494"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17501,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17494\/revisions\/17501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}