If you look back at the last few decades of popular cinema, it’s possible to see the state of the art form as being a pendulum swinging back and forth between realism and fantasy. The New Hollywood movement of the 70s ushered in an era where everyone was making movies that were gritty and street level, the rise of the blockbuster created an era in the 80s where everyone was making genre films that were sillier and more escapist, the independent boom of the 90s swung the pendulum back the other way for a while, and then the exploding popularity of things like Harry Potter and Marvel superheroes firmly put us back in a place where a premium has once again been put on the fantastical and the strange.
Recently, modern Hollywood’s penchant for only investing in properties that have built-in name value has led to a new trend where things from the past keep getting relaunched, rebooted, and reconceptualized. So, seeing as genres like sci-fi and fantasy are all the rage right now, of course the film catalogue of the 80s has been raped and plundered in order to create a whole new generation of the same old franchises. The problem with most of these remakes is that they’ve been shit. They’re glossy and generic and they lack all of the insane personality that made the originals stand out back in the day. The new Mad Max reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road, has a big advantage over the rest of those boring studio-led reboots we’ve seen so far though—it’s brought Mad Max’s creator George Miller back to write and direct. If you haven’t seen a George Miller movie, he’s kind of a unique talent who’s hard to put your finger on, so his involvement has resulted in a nutty new take on the post-apocalyptic action genre that’s blowing a lot of people’s minds.
All you need to know about a Mad Max story is that they take place in a decimated future wherein water and gas are scarce, the people who have survived now travel around in tribal gangs of insane warriors who man tricked out vehicles that feature various kinds of armor, pointy spikes, and weaponry, and our hero is always Max, a former officer of the law (back when there were laws) who’s become unhinged thanks to past traumas. In the original trilogy Max was played by Mel Gibson, but for this reboot he’s been replaced by the younger and less blackballed Tom Hardy. Our story sees Max stumbling into a situation where he’s forced to help a one-armed warrior named Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) rescue a harem of kept women from the clutches of an evil warlord by the name of Immortan Joe (the original Mad Max’s Hugh Keays-Byrne). Joe, of course, doesn’t want to give the women up, so he leads his army of “War Boys” in a chase after Furiosa, Max, and their “War Rig.” Basically this movie is just one giant chase scene where people fight on top of the vehicles.
In a movie that was less good at creating exhilarating chase sequences, that could be a very bad thing, but for Fury Road, the focus on what it does best ends up being a major positive. Not only is this movie an absolute wonder of costuming and prop and set design, it’s also so large scale in its action scenarios that it constantly exists as a piece of visual art that’s magnificent even just to look at. The chase scenes that come together to make up the one long chase sequence that is this story involve so many vehicles, so many open landscapes, so many flashy camera gymnastics, so many actors and stunt people, and so many special effects that it’s impossible to wrap your mind around the planning and logistics that had to have come together to pull them off. But pull them off Miller did. None of the disconnect that comes from modern actions movies’ over reliance on fake-looking CG and too-fast editing are on display here, making Fury Road’s high stakes car battles a pleasure to watch.
More needs to be said about the design of this movie too. While Miller never slows down enough to really explain the particulars of the world he’s created and how it came to be, the intricacy of design evident in the locations, the automobiles, and the costuming ends up telling you everything that you actually need to know in order to feel immersed. There aren’t just one or two iconic new characters in this movie, there are a half dozen of them, and a large part of what makes them so memorable is just how cool they look. The design of everything is ramshackle and do-it-yourself, but it’s also intricate and flashy while working in that aesthetic. Visually, Miller has created something that everyone will remember for a very long time. This is one of the slickest, coolest action movies that’s come out in recent memory.
Those are the things about the movie that are great. Despite what you might have heard, however, there are also some things about the film that aren’t so great. Normally it’s kind of weird and dumb to acknowledge and address other people’s opinions of a work when you’re first sussing out your own response to it, but reactions to Fury Road have been so positive and so loud on the internet that it’s probably necessary to say something here about expectations. The hype surrounding this movie is that it’s not just a great action movie, but a great movie, period (the word “masterpiece” keeps getting thrown around), and that point of view is just not accurate. While Miller has made an action movie that’s full of epic, beautiful carnage, what he’s made is also essentially a really simple story that doesn’t seem to be concerned with anything headier than looking cool and being fun. It really is just one long chase.
What comes from that approach are characters who are paper thin archetypes and not really interesting human beings who you can relate to on any deep level. Most of the vocalizing in this movie is just the actors screaming into the wind. When there is dialogue it’s basic and full of clichés. Max isn’t even really a character so much as he is a blank slate pair of eyes for us to experience Furiosa’s adventure through. Hardy doesn’t need to act so much as he needs to fight and shoot and drive. Theron gets a little bit more acting to do, but nothing that goes beyond projecting pain and anger while also fighting and shooting and driving. These are the sort of characters who get defined by little more than their fabulous outfits and their status as good guys or bad guys. Furiosa is good and angry. Max is good and haunted. Joe is evil and greedy. The girls in need of rescue are pretty and victimized. Nicholas Hoult’s War Boy, Nux, is a wildcard loon. Using that sort of shorthand for character works well to keep the breakneck momentum of the movie moving forward, but it doesn’t do any favors to people approaching it while expecting something more than just a disposable diversion.
The subject of feminism is the other big talking point that’s popped up in regards to this movie. The opinion seems to be that the story is quite the interesting and refreshing subversion of the way that Hollywood usually handles action movies, because it allows Furiosa—and a couple of the other girls a time or two as well—to fight toe-to-toe with the male characters in order to decide their own fates. The feminist messages here are so simple and well-tread that treating the movie like it’s doing anything complex or illuminating is crazy though. The extent of the thought that this movie puts into women’s issues is declaring that women aren’t objects, and that they shouldn’t be kept as sex slaves. Well, yeah. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone non-psychotic who doesn’t already hold that belief, wouldn’t you?
There’s just nothing feminist about portraying women as being as good at violence and murder as men. For too long now we’ve been portraying women in TV and movies as being as physically strong as men and calling that progressive. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was 18 years ago, and what might have seemed new then is old hat now. One of these days a movie is going to come along that doesn’t just give women agency over their own fates and doesn’t just rail against things like domestic abuse and sexual violence, but that’s also able to glorify how great women are because of what makes them unique from men, and without indulging in the sort of violent, macho fantasies that are probably the sort of thing the increasing voice we’ve given to women in media should be curtailing. I’m not saying that this movie should have been about Furiosa and the women she bands together with overthrowing a male-dominated society and raising their stations through savvy, non-violent means, I’m just saying that, if we’re going to talk about it as being some sort of progressive piece of feminist art, then that’s the movie it should have been. As is, Fury Road is just an action movie about a bunch of girls trying to escape from an evil warlord and getting chased. It’s a pretty fun action movie about a bunch of girls trying to escape from an evil warlord and getting chased, but to pretend that it’s more than that does a disservice to the things that it actually does accomplish.
