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In the post-apocalyptic cult of Immortan Joe, while men who can fight are useful, far more precious are Joe’s wives, who are pampered and locked away in a vault. When Furiosa, one of Joe’s trusted lieutenants, smuggles the wives out of his citadel in her armoured truck, Joe and his army of fanatics give chase in their customised vehicles. Mayhem ensues.
First up, this is a film in which bizarre cars and trucks ram into one another, and people leap from machine to machine in order to fight. There are guns, harpoons, battering rams, a massive circular saw, a customised JCB and even acrobats on bendy poles in this demolition derby and the director, George Miller, handles the chase/fight scenes excellently. Some recent films have a tendency to make action scenes look like ingredients spinning round in a food blender: very slick and fast, but hard to make out and going nowhere. Miller’s film has no such problem. Even in the most ridiculous scene – a literal spitting contest to “nudge” the competing engines – there’s a hands-on, visceral feel to the action, a sense that the things hitting one another are heavy, fast and real.
Secondly, I’ve not mentioned Max yet. That’s because he is a secondary, if deadly, figure – literally, a passenger. He has taken the opposite tough-guy route to Joe: instead of becoming a tyrant, he lives alone, to the point of having almost forgotten how to speak. It’s only because he is enslaved by Joe’s War Boys that he gets involved at all. The film’s primary motivator – its engine! – is Furiosa, powerfully acted by Charlize Theron. That said, Max isn’t disposable by any means, and Tom Hardy does a good job of making him sympathetic, even while his head is half-hidden by a garden fork and half his dialogue is grunts.
The film is full of little touches that establish its world: casual worldbuilding. The ritual whereby the War Boys spray their mouths silver when they take on a divine mission reflects the metal of the cars that they venerate. The number of people missing limbs in the wilderness demonstrates its lethality. And, in a sad and creepy touch, the slave-women who Joe milks like cows carry dolls, presumably to keep their maternal instincts high in order to maximise the milk production.
Much has been made of the feminism of Mad Max, and perhaps a little too much has been interpreted from it. However, this film is more or less a textbook example of how to bring ideas into a film without lecturing the viewer. Everyone who appears in this film’s world seems appropriate, however crazed they may be: they are either products of or reactions against Joe’s theocracy. In this way, you could say that the film is about his hyper-masculine, semi-fascist cult, which divides people into slaves, soldiers or breeding machines, and how and why people (mainly women) rebel against it. In such a world, a good man is a loyal killer, and a good woman breeds more loyal killers. Miller uses not just Furiosa and the wives to oppose this view, but a group of nomadic women bikers and Nux, a crazed War Boy who is like a confused child once his god has fallen. (Is it perhaps reading too much into this to note that Joe’s allies from the Bullet Farm and Gas Town are the setting’s equivalent of a military-industrial complex?)
Of course, it’s mainly a film about cars smashing into each other, and that brings me to another point: its subtlety. That may seem strange, but look at the dialogue (such as it is). There is no point where anyone delivers the obligatory “Girls can’t do that” speech and is later proved righteously wrong, no “empowering” but conveniently vague lecture about acceptance, or diversity, or freedom. There’s only survival and escape to somewhere less horrible. I find this hugely cheering. Why? Because Fury Road has reached a point, like Aliens, where these things just happen without the need for explanation or the need to win the viewer over. The characters don’t argue their points of view so much as live them. Here is a one-armed woman driving a juggernaut while shooting a bandit in the face. That is the sort of thing that happens here. Take it or leave it.
I am exactly the sort of person who will agree with a film’s intentions and then dislike it when it starts to lecture me (especially if it insinuates that I myself am a villain waiting to happen). Fury Road neatly avoids this problem by having no lecturing at all. It doesn’t need it. Other stories could take note of this, and I’m not just referring to ones with “issues of diversity”. Whenever I learn that an SFF novel has been written to argue some point or explore some philosophical view, I am put off, because that way lies authorial intervention and crude Mary Sues.
Flaws? Not many. Some of the dialogue is just silly. Characters have an unconvincing tendency to hiss and snarl (even the sane ones). Some of the acting from the wives was a bit wooden: whether they actually are, they did feel like fashion models on a shoot and, while important to the story, they are the closest thing to plot tokens whose function is to be saved (like the cat in Alien or the child in Aliens). The plot is actually very thin. But these are small quibbles. This film’s action should be the benchmark for any film of its sort, and its treatment of its characters should be the starting point for any film at all. 8.5/10.
First up, this is a film in which bizarre cars and trucks ram into one another, and people leap from machine to machine in order to fight. There are guns, harpoons, battering rams, a massive circular saw, a customised JCB and even acrobats on bendy poles in this demolition derby and the director, George Miller, handles the chase/fight scenes excellently. Some recent films have a tendency to make action scenes look like ingredients spinning round in a food blender: very slick and fast, but hard to make out and going nowhere. Miller’s film has no such problem. Even in the most ridiculous scene – a literal spitting contest to “nudge” the competing engines – there’s a hands-on, visceral feel to the action, a sense that the things hitting one another are heavy, fast and real.
Secondly, I’ve not mentioned Max yet. That’s because he is a secondary, if deadly, figure – literally, a passenger. He has taken the opposite tough-guy route to Joe: instead of becoming a tyrant, he lives alone, to the point of having almost forgotten how to speak. It’s only because he is enslaved by Joe’s War Boys that he gets involved at all. The film’s primary motivator – its engine! – is Furiosa, powerfully acted by Charlize Theron. That said, Max isn’t disposable by any means, and Tom Hardy does a good job of making him sympathetic, even while his head is half-hidden by a garden fork and half his dialogue is grunts.
The film is full of little touches that establish its world: casual worldbuilding. The ritual whereby the War Boys spray their mouths silver when they take on a divine mission reflects the metal of the cars that they venerate. The number of people missing limbs in the wilderness demonstrates its lethality. And, in a sad and creepy touch, the slave-women who Joe milks like cows carry dolls, presumably to keep their maternal instincts high in order to maximise the milk production.
Much has been made of the feminism of Mad Max, and perhaps a little too much has been interpreted from it. However, this film is more or less a textbook example of how to bring ideas into a film without lecturing the viewer. Everyone who appears in this film’s world seems appropriate, however crazed they may be: they are either products of or reactions against Joe’s theocracy. In this way, you could say that the film is about his hyper-masculine, semi-fascist cult, which divides people into slaves, soldiers or breeding machines, and how and why people (mainly women) rebel against it. In such a world, a good man is a loyal killer, and a good woman breeds more loyal killers. Miller uses not just Furiosa and the wives to oppose this view, but a group of nomadic women bikers and Nux, a crazed War Boy who is like a confused child once his god has fallen. (Is it perhaps reading too much into this to note that Joe’s allies from the Bullet Farm and Gas Town are the setting’s equivalent of a military-industrial complex?)
Of course, it’s mainly a film about cars smashing into each other, and that brings me to another point: its subtlety. That may seem strange, but look at the dialogue (such as it is). There is no point where anyone delivers the obligatory “Girls can’t do that” speech and is later proved righteously wrong, no “empowering” but conveniently vague lecture about acceptance, or diversity, or freedom. There’s only survival and escape to somewhere less horrible. I find this hugely cheering. Why? Because Fury Road has reached a point, like Aliens, where these things just happen without the need for explanation or the need to win the viewer over. The characters don’t argue their points of view so much as live them. Here is a one-armed woman driving a juggernaut while shooting a bandit in the face. That is the sort of thing that happens here. Take it or leave it.
I am exactly the sort of person who will agree with a film’s intentions and then dislike it when it starts to lecture me (especially if it insinuates that I myself am a villain waiting to happen). Fury Road neatly avoids this problem by having no lecturing at all. It doesn’t need it. Other stories could take note of this, and I’m not just referring to ones with “issues of diversity”. Whenever I learn that an SFF novel has been written to argue some point or explore some philosophical view, I am put off, because that way lies authorial intervention and crude Mary Sues.
Flaws? Not many. Some of the dialogue is just silly. Characters have an unconvincing tendency to hiss and snarl (even the sane ones). Some of the acting from the wives was a bit wooden: whether they actually are, they did feel like fashion models on a shoot and, while important to the story, they are the closest thing to plot tokens whose function is to be saved (like the cat in Alien or the child in Aliens). The plot is actually very thin. But these are small quibbles. This film’s action should be the benchmark for any film of its sort, and its treatment of its characters should be the starting point for any film at all. 8.5/10.
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