Why The Dust-Covered Thrills Of 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Are A Breath Of Fresh Air

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

Great art shouldn’t have to be appreciated in opposition to something else, but, then again, I’m not sure ‘great art’ really describes Mad Max: Fury Road. But great entertainment it sure is. George Miller’s fourth film in his back-from-the-dead franchise — arriving three decades after Tina Turner and Angry Anderson crashed Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — is legitimately fast and furious, a fucked-up fun-ride that feels utterly auteurist. Luridly stylised, wholly aware of its own ridiculousness, and kept hammering along at a pedal-to-the-metal pace, Fury Road is a whole lot of fucking fun, an amphetamine-addled action movie that makes 120 minutes feel all too brisk.

It may not have been made in opposition to the endless corporate products of the Comic Book Movie Industrial Complex, nor should we go overboard praising the film for what it isn’t, as opposed to what it is. But for anyone who’s recently stared super-hero-film tedium in the face, Fury Road is a joy to behold: a singular picture singlehandedly stemming the tide of endless blockbuster bloat.

All the worst tendencies of modern-day Marvel-ism — the weightlessness of empty CGI, the self-appointed importance, the self-seriousness, the reliance on generic formula, the familiar set-piece/comedown/comic-relief/build-up/set-piece rhythms, the overinflated stakes, the placation of insufferable fanboy-ism — are either wholly absent or tonally skewered.

You know how the worst bit in any cape-wearin’ movie is when the meaningless MacGuffins of the narrative have to be explained in tedious, jargon-filled exposition, be it by hero, villain, or egghead holding a clipboard? Fury Road features no such leaden scenes of stock storytelling: its apocalyptic back-story barked out in about four-lines of voice-over in the middle of a breathless chase-sequence in which Tom Hardy barrels along like a speedhead bike-messenger; its bare-bones plot-devices (humans used for breeding and farming, a treasonous escape-plan pulled off by Charlize Theron 10 minutes in) hollered over the din of groaning mufflers in the middle of a car chase.

Pretty much everything happens in the middle of a car chase, because the entire film is essentially one long one. The original Mad Max grew out of the Ozploitation era, courting an audience of revheads by filling its post-apocalyptic outback dystopia with Frankensteinian muscle-cars. And Fury Road hasn’t forgotten its roots. The Fast & Furious films have recently — weirdly — been praised for making cars fly; for conveying the feeling that their gleaming, shiny-new, product-placed vehicles can go anywhere, do anything. There’s nothing, here, that defies gravity with such idiocy: the film parading a procession of machines that, instead, feel heavy; like tons of churning metal that can collapse in an instant, that groan more than they hum, that crash headfirst into the dirt and don’t come up.

Anyone who hates that modern blockbuster weightlessness — be it in CGI set-pieces or flying cars — can rest assured: there’s nothing in Fury Road that just feels like pixels being moved around in front of a generated background. It seems weird that a film featuring dirt bike riders (who look like evil Ewoks!) actually riding motorbikes on actual dirt should feel so revolutionary, but that’s where we are. Modern tentpole pictures are products of terrified committee-thinking, the cinema of the Caution: Coffee Hot era. To the spooked suits who’ve turned cinema-release schedules into synergistic marketing spreadsheets, Miller taking a troupe of 150 stunt actors to Namibia to shoot actual stunts is the 2015 blockbuster equivalent of Werner Herzog hauling a boat up a Peruvian mountain: an act of cinematic chutzpah and production hubris.

Amidst the car-chasing and stuntwork, there’s somewhat of a story: treasonous Theron has liberated the matching set of blonde/redhead/brunette/black beer-commercial-babe-esque ‘breeders’ betrothed to deified King Warlord (Hugh Keays-Byrne, returning as Mad Max villain 36 years on, though essentially unrecognisable in his Eddie-from-Iron-Maiden-covers cosplay), and brought heroic human scum Hardy (following Bane/Locke with another great voice, and, oh PS, consigning Mel Gibson to the cinematic scrapheap) and chroming enthusiast-cum-turncoat Nicholas Hoult along for the ride. They’re heading towards a mythical Eden of green land and free women, and, yes, feminist readings of Fury Road are entirely apt.

In pursuit, an armada of grotesque, hilarious villains come wielding pitchforks, suped-up cars, fire-breathing monster-trucks, and abundant testosterone. Mad Max isn’t a comic-book franchise, but with cult comic artist Brendan McCarthy as co-writer/storyboard-drawer, it has the lurid quality of pulp; a sense of sublime idiocy in which, say, it makes perfect sense that one vehicle will play host to a phalanx of kettle drums and a hair-metal guitarist, so they can live-score the chase as it happens.

Its post-apocalyptic dystopia has parable potential; not merely in its wars for resources (oil, water, human cells), but in the great lingering line where Zoë Kravitz dryly murmurs, with wonder — when watching a satellite streak across the sky — that back before the fall, “everyone in the old world had a show”. Its portrait of a near-future in which humanity has descended into bestial savagery and opportunism is commentary on both our ape nature and the rapaciousness of contemporary society.

But though there’s much to recommend about the pleasures of experiencing Mad Max: Fury Road as contemporaneous artwork — from its trenchant themes to its glorious rebuke of the dire climate of MCU movie-making — selling it as a Film O’ The Times is both overstating the case, and essentially misrepresenting it. There’s nothing wrong with savouring it as a delightful tonic for every boring blockbuster you’ve recently slumbered through, but Fury Road hardly exists only as artistic correction. There’s so little plot and so much kinetic energy — its accelerating/decelerating frame-rates, its maniacal editing, its sense of constant motion — that it could be experienced in any time or culture, a primal thrill-ride as in need of context as a roller-coaster.