Mad Max: Fury Road flings its characters into perpetual motion, into a two-hour long car chase across the lifeless sands of a nuclear ravaged dystopia. They are propelled — shot, tossed, rocketed — through the same world we remember from the first three Mad Max movies. It’s been a 20 plus year wait for director George Miller to return to this arid, uncharitable landscape, and it was well worth it. This is an action movie of great clarity and singular purpose — to get seriously crazy. And the whole thing is exhilarating.
It begins in furious fashion with Max, now played by British actor Tom Hardy, running from and pursued by slobbering, writhing hordes of a society that sees everything, including fellow human beings, as an assortment of parts for potential use. They drag him into their city where the overlord Immortan Joe holds tight the lives of his sickly, near-starving minions. It seems that Max’s story has nowhere to go as his universal donor status means that his blood becomes a prized resource for the anemic war boys.
But within the walls of the city, Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, the trusted driver of the overlord’s main war rig, has secretly turned rogue. In the belly of her thundering vehicle are the brood wives of the overlord, escaping their enslavement with her steely, level-eyed help. They are running to the mythical “Green Place” where they will no longer be treated as objects — no longer farmed for their wombs by megalomaniacs of an utterly deranged society. Furiosa leads these women through the desert pursued by Immortan Joe’s brainwashed warriors.
Max somehow finds his way into this band of refugees and, at first, aids them based solely on his own survival. But, as he witnesses their fortitude, he begins to help based on empathy for their cause. Haunted by past failures, Max finds something like new meaning in the women’s fevered desire for self-determination.
Cries of misandry by some have been heard all around the opening and showing of this particular film narrative. There are a particular few who, even before seeing the film, railed against an action movie that placed women in roles on equal level with men. Instead of damsels in distress, we see these women executing their own escape from and revenge on Immortan Joe. They never needed a man to rescue their efforts or their persons. It’s purely by chance that Max begins to help them at all. In many ways, he benefits more from their assistance than they ever will from his. But this does nothing to emasculate Max, as the critics have wailed that it does. Instead, it humanizes him, makes him more realistic as a character in a world that has gone mad. And it makes the entire narrative infinitely more engaging and thrilling for a wider audience — contains the potential to enthrall a much more diverse array of viewers — than simply bros thirsting for explosions and some T. & A.
It’s something for me to say that an action movie actually moved me, but I’m saying it now. Sure, the dialogue falls flat but there’s not too much of it to worry about. And it’s quickly forgotten as the kinetic, propulsive gears of this story are ignited and take off, never slowing, never pausing for breath, until that final frame. Then it’s just pure satisfaction.
