MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
This
is without a doubt the greatest drive-in movie of all time, even though
drive-ins are pretty much gone. But someone should find an abandoned drive-in
somewhere and restore it, just so people
can watch this movie. I’d love to be in
a car on a hot summer
night, the smell of exhaust swirling through the air, and watch
this movie glowing on one of those giant screens. I’d crank up the volume and strap myself in
for two hours of amazing movie mayhem.
What this movie does so well is strip
away all the clutter and only focus on the hardcore essentials, because action
fans don’t like anything slowing things down. This is a road trip movie where
the only law is to keep going faster and faster, because a fiery death is charging
through the gloom right behind you. Every
element is riveting and raw, stripped down to its most essential core.
There’s the brooding anti-hero with a
haunted past, a beautiful but disfigured heroine with her own anger issues, and
a messianic bad guy with a rictus grin that’s even worse than the Joker’s, all
of it taking place in a post-apocalyptic landscape that’s a ravaged warning
about what will happen if we don’t take care of our planet in the proper way.
This warning is posed in the same brutal terms. If we screw things up, then the
search for the staples needed to survive – food, water, gas – will be all
that’s left of life itself.
The color palette is stripped away too,
everything is parched and grimy, dirty and decayed, except for the pristine
whiteness of the young women who represent hope for a different kind of
future. This is the plot, stripped down
too, to transport this fertile cargo away from the hell of the monstrous Citadel
to a remembered oasis.
It’s a chase movie, but one that’s a
visual onslaught in the best possible way of over-the-top action and roaring
high speed warfare, a kind of Cirque du Soleil demolition derby. It’s a delirious mash-up of extreme sports
and road kill horror, all of it pumped up by a wild banshee rock star strapped
to the front of a barreling big rig slashing at his flame throwing guitar. The
dialogue has been whittled down to the bone, because there’s nothing to say
that a howling shotgun can’t say a whole lot better.
But there’s also a message that action
fans are always wary of, but this is a good one we haven’t seen as vividly
before. The real kick-ass heroes in the
movie aren’t the usual suspects, but some new recruits. The gruff muscled guy does his part, and the
tough chick too, but it’s the seemingly fragile young waifs, a bad boy kid, and
a gang of old women on motorcycles who step up and deliver the firepower and
courage needed at the end. And I think
this is the message of the movie, to blow up the way action movies have always
been done, and show there’s a little bit of madness in all of us.
