Mad Max: Fury Road

Is it? IS IT?!

"The future belongs to the mad."

Hello friends and welcome back to a new week of tags, lines, and the tags that are also lines. That's right, it's the Tagline! Over the weekend I got out to that most sacred of places, the movie theater, and saw Mad Max: Fury Road, not to be confused with my anthro fanfiction Mad Max: Furry Road. Starring Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky, former law enforcer, former family man, current wasteland wanderer and serious hallucinator. During his almost 100% insane wandering through the irradiated wasteland that is the outback, Max is set upon by the warboys, servants of the legit nuts Immortan Joe, a demagogue who is a divine figure for his followers. Max is used as a living blood bag for a warboy, and taken along in pursuit of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), one of Joe's enforcers who has gone rogue and abducted Joe's child brides, in an attempt to lead them to the green place, which we can all assume probably doesn't exist. Max is caught up in this extremely violent desert chase, as you are no doubt familiar by now this is a common occurrence in his life out in the Australian desert hellscape.

This is a troubled man.

Now let's talk about the dumbass things that people have said about this movie on the interwebs before I talk about my own thoughts on the movie more extensively. The most telling comment someone actually REALLY made was that the movie was one long car chase. Well yes genius, it was mostly a big car chase because WHAT ABOUT MAD FUCKING MAX DON'T YOU GET. The second movie was called The Road Warrior for fuck's sake, implying that a notable factor of his personality IS FIGHTING ON THE FUCKING ROAD. *ahem* anyway, that is a really stupid thing to think about the movie. Another perhaps equally stupid thing that people said about the movie was that it was somehow not a good movie because it wasn't enough about Max (I won't even acknowledge the lizardmen who were mad because it featured Furiosa too prominently because she's a woman). Anyone who believes that this is true A)lacks any understanding of this franchise and probably hasn't seen any of the other movies and also B) lacks even a rudimentary understanding of character development. So let's talk about that.

She is one seriously bad lady.

Aside from the original Mad Max, I don't think that any other movie in the franchise is MORE about Max than Fury Road. Spoilers ahead, but after the events of the first movie, and the death of Max's family, he becomes basically a being that exists only to keep existing. This is the person we meet at the beginning of Fury Road, someone who remarks that "hope is a mistake." The events of the movie are important because they help to bridge a gap that a lot of people felt existed between Max's personality in The Road Warrior, and his behavior in Beyond Thunderdome. Judging by the fact that Max begins Fury Road with his car, and sporting injuries fresh from The Road Warrior. The movie rather adeptly explains how Max becomes the person we see in Bartertown. While the main action might not be about Max, and while he might not be personally invested per se, the movie is very much a journey for him as a character.

Immortan Joe? Or Toecutter?

Now that I've talked about that, let's talk about the kick ass action in this movie, and the insane things that were done to achieve it. It's good to know that there wasn't a ton of CG involved in this movie, or at least not as much as you might think. That giant truck covered in subwoofers with the blind guy playing a guitar that was also a flamethrower? None of that was an effect. A guy was strapped into that thing spewing flames while he was shredding. If that doesn't strike you as insane and also awesome, then you don't get it. You might NEVER get it. I heard someone complain that the whole post-apocalyptic thing is cliche, and that's... wow. The REASON this sort of thing is cliche is because of Mad Max. It would be like complaining that The Matrix was cliche because of slow bullets and black trenchcoats.

The point is, Fury Road accomplishes what many movies try but few ever manage. It is an amazing action movie, of singular purpose that also is a fantastic character study. It also features a stunning female lead who is just a plain stunning lead. That all by itself would be worthy of note, but it's so much more than that. You should see it. You should see it many times. Go now.