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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