Sunday, May 17, 2015

Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller – 2015 – Australia

Returning after 30 years to the franchise that made his name, 70-year-old George Miller has seemingly effortlessly done everything right at which his American counterparts Lucas and Spielberg spectacularly failed in their respective Star Wars and Indiana Jones revivals.  Not only did Miller carefully protect Mad Max from being spoiled and exploited by others all these years, but he declined to make a succession of easy cash grabs when there must surely have been no shortage of opportunities; not making a new film until he was brimming with new ideas and had something new to say.  Nor did he feel compelled to beg a grizzled Mel Gibson to return and reprise his iconic role, or pump the new film with endless forced references to the original trilogy.  Those are the things he would do if he knew his film was weak; they would be his fallback to encourage audience members to forgive a new film’s failings by associating it with the love they have for the older movies.  These noteworthy accomplishments would be impressive enough, but Miller also has a thing or two to teach Hollywood makers of assembly-line popcorn movies; which are so formulaic, schmaltzy and toothless that they turn the stomach of anyone raised on the visceral, ass-kicking brutality of 70s and 80s action films.  The most striking of these lessons, in my opinion, is the virtually complete pruning of exposition and what we are conditioned to think of as “arcs” and “character development.”  Save for a few eye-of-the-storm moments of reflection, we are spared the speeches and lectures that broadcast themes in mainstream American films, and we learn almost nothing about the characters’ pasts and motivations.  They simply are who they are, from beginning to end; their actions in the here-and-now tell us everything we need to know about their backstories.  Instead of recycling Gibson or replacing him with a bland, flavor-of-the-month star like Chris Hemsworth, Miller gets one of the finest actors of his generation, Tom Hardy, to resurrect Max Rockatansky; a wandering nomad in a post-apocalyptic wasteland; not a messianic hero with a quest or a destiny to fulfill but a laconic, broken man suffering from a pretty severe mental illness, doubtless caused by years of trauma and solitude.  Captured by a band of marauders, Max is taken to a savage village run by a dictator/cult-leader with an iron fist and called Immortan Joe, (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, known to fans as Toad in the biker cult-classic Stone, 1974, and more importantly as Toecutter in the first Mad Max of 1979).  When one of Joe’s warriors rebels and helps his harem of “breeders” to escape, the chase is on, and lasts the entire film.  Miller wisely uses CGI when it makes sense to, not as an all-purpose time-saver for lazy crew and penny-pinching executives.  Instead, the film is filled with the things that made the original cycle so memorable and beloved; clunky, rusted, sputtering, lived-in vehicles of all shape and size, burning gas and grease, rumbling over dunes and desert roads.  In a tamed world where critics and professors have convinced young people that plausibility and the plugging of plot holes are the most important aspects of filmmaking, George Miller shoves his way into the scene again to remind us that those things don’t matter at all; what matters is the singularity of a powerful vision that’s strong enough to erase anything from the audience’s mind except the reality of what’s on the screen.  Any film that does that successfully is a great film.  It’s significant that after so many years of suffering through shameless Mad Max/Road Warrior rip-off’s – from 80s cheapies like Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) to later big-budget “homages” like Waterworld (1995) and Doomsday (2008) – we find that the missing ingredient all along has simply been Miller himself; who is channeling new energy and ideas, not just imitating.  With the film’s inventive, three-dimensional costumes, vehicles and production design, and its glorious sense of lunacy, Mad Max: Fury Road restores an element to visionary sci-fi/action films that is missing in most genre fare; a feeling of unleashed creativity that inflames the imagination. 

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