Quick, spoiler-free, spiel:
You need to see this film, and you need to see it on a big screen. It is a work of art. It is a spectacle of action. You will have heard, I assume, that this film is visually stunning. It is. The aesthetic of the world is as relentless as the action within. You need only watch the trailers, or see the posters, as the one above, to know what this film offers visually.
The plot is simple, but in the sense of being clear and direct within a limited framework. This is a good thing. The stakes are clear from early on, and the majority of the film concerns itself with the relentless action of the chase at its heart. Our (anti-)heroes have a clear goal, our villains are direct in their efforts to disrupt this.
It is balls-to-the-wall insane, and gloriously so.
If you have not yet seen the film, do not read on, there are spoilers everywhere below the jump. Go see it, then come back. Have fun. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
Spoilers below:
The first sense you get of this film being something special is in the sheer scale of it. Miller is willing, often, to dwarf the convoy-chase which is at the heart of the narrative with shots of such vast emptiness that the vehicles, let alone the people within, are mere specks.
But the film is one of competing scales. So much of it is over-the-top, dialed to 11, grandiose and epic. Yet within this, Miller positions his characters in cramped and crowded spaces: the tunnels of Immortan Joe’s citadel, the can of the war-rig, the hidden passages within. The War-rig is at once too big to stop, and too small to hold its cargo: Furiosa, Max, the wives, Nux, and later the Vuvalini. Miller zooms in on the small-scale for moments of character too. Max’s tragically premature thumbs-up, Furiosa’s concerned gaze, Nux’s transitional moment with one of the wives (I think Capable). When Furiosa realises that her dream of a return to the green place is impossible, she is alone in the sand, as is Max when he realises that he cannot yet make his own way while Furiosa remains unredeemed.
In the beginning, though, there is little by way of establishing character or setting. Max is introduced with a monologue, alone, and is for reasons unknown and unimportant briefly pursued and captured.
Furiosa makes her entrance entering the war-rig to which her fate will be bound for the majority of the film. She turns off her allotted course abruptly, and we – like her war boys – are made to guess at her motives.
Quickly enough the chase is on, and nothing else really matters.
The vehicles are each a work of brutalist art, each amalgams of other vehicles, welded and bolted together, the demented dreams of mad mechanics. The fashions, likewise, stylised. The faces and bodies of the characters mis-sharpen, scarred, diseased, dirty. Furiosa’s amputation is much less disturbing than the misshapen bodies that follow her, these distended, swollen, broken, tumourous, inhumans.
The vehicular mayhem is impressive for the visceral reality Miller brings to the screen. The minimalist use of CGI gives real physicality to the action. The chase proceeds with the weight of careening steel and the roaring pace of fuel-injected V8s (often dual V8s, joined at the gearbox just as the lizard of the opening was a who headed beast with a single body). Cars and trucks go cartwheeling, crashing, crunching, colliding. Bodies leap, tumble, fall, are thrown to an unforgiving earth. Flames and explosions and always at full throttle.
There is power in the brutal physics which cartoonish CGI can never match, no matter the verisimilitude of its unreality.
It is undeniably a violent film, and yet Miller does not revel in gore, indeed he pans away from it several times, keeps it off screen. Max sees The Splendid Angharad go beneath Joe’s wheels, but we do not. The premature caesarean is not shown. Max returns from a distant explosion bathed in blood not his own, but we don’t see how he came to be wearing it. Immortan Joe’s torn face is briefly glimpsed, but mostly hidden. The film has an R rating in America (18+) but MA here in Australia (15+) and in the UK.
The film has been called
a feminist action movie. In some ways this is reductive, in others
it is explicitly so. It was hard not to think of the Bechdel test as Furiosa returns to the Vuvalini. While the two men (described merely as dependable/reliable – I can’t recall the exact quote on one viewing) wait in the war-rig,
the screen is filled with women, 12 of them, multi-generational, discussing their world and their place in it, their history and their future.
But Bechdel is a limited metric to meet. Even more than leaping this low bar, in Fury Road it is the women who have agency, more so than the war boys such as Nux, certainly more so than the ‘blood-bag’ Max from the first part of the chase. Max’s destiny is shaped by his imprisonment, and by the decisions of others, especially Nux. In turn, Nux is manipulated by Joe’s deceit, his path chosen for him.
Not so Furiosa, nor the wives. They have re-shaped their destiny, have broken free of their imprisonments, and by their own power. No supernatural fortune. No rescuer come to their aid. It is revealed that The Splendid Angharad had been agitating for escape and speaking against the objectification of herself and the other wives. The wives were not stolen or abducted by Furiosa, but that they begged her to take them with her.
Acquiescing was Furiosa’s decision, as was the moment she turned from the road between the Citadel and Gastown. She knew the risks and made the decision. She acted, and it was her act that initiated the chase and in cascading cause and effect drew Max and Nux into her story.
Later, when Max establishes his plan for return and redemption (which was always Furiosa’s goal, not his own, as the final shots of the film demonstrate), it is Furiosa’s agreement, on advice from the other women, which transforms the plan from thought to action.
More powerful even than the women’s screen presence and agency, is the respect they are afforded, both by Max, and by Miller.
The film also features a cast of scantily-clad supermodels, and at one point Megan Gale naked, yet Miller does not encourage the viewer to see them through a sexual lens. Even white-clad and wet in the desert, the wives are not objects of Max’s desire, and though Joe wants their return it is not framed in terms of his sexual desire for them. Undoubtedly he has impregnated them, or at least one of them, against their will. In this he is rapist, and they are survivors of rape, but the film clearly frames this as a battle for their reproductive powers, rather than revenge or retaliation. They do not wish to destroy Joe, only to escape him. They forgive his war-boy Nux, keeping him from being killed, despite Nux’s earlier attempts to return them to their prison. The wives are revolting against their objectification, against a life in which they are nothing more wombs.
This is explicit in the graffiti they leave in the prison where Joe had kept them.
Likewise, Miller does not subject any of his female characters to rape, or threats of rape. They are not denigrated as bitches or whores or subjected to sexist degradation. It is not an assumed part of the world that rape is tolerated, or that it even occurs outside of the forced breeding by Immortan Joe. Even this is not presented as a sexual act, but as an act of control, literally an attempt to control resources, in the same way that he controls water. Women can reproduce, and that is their value to Joe, just as the women producing mothers’ milk (seen early in the film as a resource for Joe, at the end of the film it is these mothers who release the water for the people, freeing themselves and the water from Joe’s control).
It makes Joe undeniably the villain, but for the same reasons that his hoarding water and food while others starve make him villainous. It is a crime not only against the women, but against the whole community (as indeed rape is).
Miller has his women fighting in the front line, and in each case they hold their own. They fight without fear or favour. The Vuvalini, the wives, and especially Furiosa. Here is a character who could be so easily disempowered by the narrative, both as woman and as amputee, and especially when Max arrives. But Miller doesn’t have Max take her leadership from her. He becomes at times a tool at her disposal, eventually, at most, her trusted equal.
This is the respect Max shows. When he first approaches the women, he respects the threat they represent. He doesn’t allow Furiosa to come near him with the bolt-cutters, making one of the wives bring them instead. Even down the barrel of a shotgun (unloaded, in a beautiful nod to mad Max 2), and even without her bionic hand attached, Max marks her as a threat. And he is right to. Despite his precautions, she attacks. She does not hesitate to pull the trigger. The fight scene that follows was amazing in its choreography, and in how it managed the various pugilists. The interplay between Max and Furiosa, and between Nux and the wives and the combinations between, was magnificent.
Later, with one shot left and having missed twice already, Max knows that Furiosa should take the shot. She does, and she makes it where he could not. She was the superior marksman (pun intended). Max accepted this without comment or complaint. He did not see this as an insult or a challenge to his masculinity (unlike some of the MRA complaining in his behalf). He respected Furiosa’s skills. Just as they took turns driving or repairing the war-rig.
In short, I loved this film.
I loved it for the cars and the crashes, for the explosions, for the insane stunts and the sheer brutal reality of them.
I loved it for its epic sandstorm and fire tornadoes that could lift a car.
I loved the madness if it all, the doof warrior harnessed and blasting guitar riffs across the already blasted landscape.
I loved that it was a Mad Max film, like the final chase in Mad Max 2 (Road Warrior) dialed up and up until there was no scale for it to fit.
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I loved the mad war-boys screaming ‘Witness!’ and plunging to suicidal glory.
I loved Charlize Theron kicking arse, and Megan Gale too – briefly.
I loved the biker gang of septuagenarian women who hoarded seeds but weren’t above killing for the right cause.
I loved the brutal hand-to-hand.
What didn’t I love?
Not much.
Hardy was kind of in and out. His accent was sometimes pseudo-Australian, other times not even nearly. At one point he delivered a line (I’m not sure which, in the cab of the war-rig about 3/4 through the film) where he seemed to be doing his Bane voice.
Furiosa made a miraculous recovery from a stab wound and a collapsed lung. Another stab cured her. And a blood transfusion. I guess her and Max were the same blood type? Or something?
(Edit: It has been pointed out to me that Max is established as a universal blood donor in the opening sequence by the tattoos Joe’s War-boys put on him. I must have missed that detail. Even my minor quibbles are invalid.)
I’m quibbling. No one cared about that. We forgive our films those details for the sake of an heroic closing image.
J M Melican 