I probably think about these sorts of things more than I should, but when Mad Max: Fury Road was announced, I wondered if it would be a potential disaster.
There doesn’t seem to be a statute of limitations on the length of time for a sequel, but 30 years really appeared to be pushing it. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was released in 1985. Were post-apocalyptic stories as meaningful to viewers as in the 1980s, when the fear of nuclear war was prevalent in our culture? And would fans of the previous Mad Max films be as intrigued with Tom Hardy playing the title role, instead of Mel Gibson?
If you were concerned that you might need to see the previous Mad Max trilogy — including 1979’s Mad Max and 1981’s The Road Warrior — before going to Fury Road, no need to worry. Director George Miller and Warner Brothers weren’t so presumptuous as to believe that new viewers would go back and watch the old films, or that old fans would come back for a reunion. Obviously, that would’ve been a huge mistake. (Even though those previous movies are absolutely worth your viewing time.) This new film stands entirely on its own.
But Miller was more interested in telling a new story with his cop-turned-lone-avenger fighting for survival in the desolate, dystopian, ravaged world populated with freaks, savages and monstrous cars that he created, rather than continuing the narrative with a sequel. That was a smart decision, given the 25 years that had passed since Miller began developing the project.
During that time, the director clearly let his imagination run completely wild — perhaps restricted by working on movies like Babe and Happy Feet — and just unleashed all of that pent-up creativity onto the screen. Fury Road is stuffed full of characters and concepts that might sound ridiculous out of context, but just somehow fit perfectly in this manic, heavy-metal future he’s created.
Consider that there’s a guy (I believe he’s called “The Doof Warrior,” though he’s never referred to directly in the movie), whose job it is to play electric guitar with a flamethrower attached, basically providing a soundtrack to the charging attack and maybe a warning to those about to be ravaged. Explain that one to your parents when they ask what movie you saw this weekend.
But Doof is just one of many things you’ll see during the film which will have you asking what was going on in Miller’s mind to even think of such an idea? A villain, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the bad guy in the original Mad Max) whose body is riddled with sores and lesions, wearing a skull mask respirator. His second-in-command, a dwarf with a body so feeble that it’s confined to a wheelchair, yet he presumably has power over thousands of lives. Joe also has a harem of fattened-up women whose sole job is to constantly pump mother’s milk for the warlord to sustain himself.
Actually, Joe has two harems. The more important one for the purposes of the story is the collection of beautiful wives he’s been keeping — whom he charmingly refers to as “breeders” — to sire a future generation of warlords and generally terrible people who will presumably continue to rule the fiefdom Joe rules over in the middle of a desert wasteland.
Their escape — initiated and executed by Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa — is the driving force behind the narrative. Besides checking out the post-apocalyptic circus freak show, it’s the reason we have a movie. The women want no part of the slavery they’ve been forced to serve scrawling “Our babies will not grow up to be warlords” and “We are not things” on the walls of the pen Joe has kept them in. Furiosa doesn’t want them to live a life of chastity-belt servitude and perhaps grow up to become something dark, twisted and mutilated (if for no other reason than these five women appear to be the only ones who have ever been washed and cleaned), and organizes their getaway under the pretenses of making her usual run for fuel and supplies.
Theron is the true star of Mad Max: Fury Road, providing dramatic weight and credibility to everything happening on screen. If you were scratching your head as to why an Academy Award-winning actor like Theron would agree to join a sci-fi project in which she risked getting lost within an ensemble of characters and underneath make-up and special effects, her role in the story makes that explanation clear. (Never mind that she’s always made interesting choices as an actor, not going for the easy payday and mainstream acceptance that would come with romantic comedies, women-in-jeopardy thrillers or Oscar-bait dramas.)
Fury Road needs Theron as a foundation that supports the rest of the movie. Miller needed someone as Furiosa whom you believe can take or leave Max as an ally. She’s going ahead with her objective with his help or without it. And she also needs to be someone who can believably stand up and fight against all of the barbarians and chaos — including what is probably the best, most menacing sandstorm ever put on film — and possibly triumph through sheer force of will. You never once think Furiosa can’t pull this off because she’s a ferocious, feral fighter and tough, take-no-shit driver. Yet there’s also some room for vulnerability, when doubt sets in. It’s not at all a compromising development for the character, making her womanly or whatever; it makes her a richer, more human character among the backdrop of inhumanity.
Without Theron and Furiosa, I doubt Mad Max: Fury Road would have been that good of a movie. Oh, it still would’ve been fun. We’re still talking about a film in which one of the climactic set pieces has V-8 muscle cars, demonic semi-trucks and porcupine-spiked jalopies waging battle and charging forward across the desert with pole vaulters bouncing between vehicles chucking fiery spears at their prey. This is the real fast and furious. (Fast and Furiosa!) You will see absolutely nothing else like it this year.
Yet the title character is somewhat incidental here. Hardy is a great actor who seems like he’s one showcase role away from superstardom. Maybe this was supposed to be the part that put him on that pedestal. (Though when Miller tabbed him for Max Rockatansky back in 2009, Hardy was mostly known for a supporting role in RocknRolla and lead in Bronson.) But whether it was his choice, the script’s or Miller’s direction, Hardy grunts his way through much of this movie, letting Theron and the movie’s flamboyant characters take center stage. Perhaps that shows his intelligence as an actor; he knows he’s not really the star in this one. But it would be nice to see Hardy get more to do as Mad Max in the future.
Those who have seen the previous films may feel some reward for knowing more of Max’s backstory as a police officer whose wife and child were killed by an anarchic motorcycle gang. But brief flashbacks provide all we really need to know. Max is haunted by the person he couldn’t save and he essentially wants to make sure that never happens again, either by saving those in outright jeopardy or avoiding everyone so he never again gets emotionally attached.
Besides, Miller didn’t exactly create character studies with these movies. Mad Max is basically an Australian, B-movie cult version of Death Wish, taking place in a slightly futuristic world to detach his story from reality. Yet there was no indication where Miller would go next, putting his lead character in a world laid to waste by nuclear war, where water and gasoline are vital, scare commodities, fiercely seized and defended by those who survived. The Road Warrior doesn’t necessarily have a story, so much as an overlying narrative: People are trying to get to a place where agriculture and civil society supposedly exist, fueled by the hope that those concepts have somehow endured.
But a key aspect to The Road Warrior‘s success was that its world was populated by muscle cars, dune buggies and monstrous trucks that had virtually undergone a metamorphosis during the apocalypse. These vehicles weren’t just a means of carrying people along their journey. They were weapons on wheels, outfitted with beastly engines, armor plating and aggressive, intimidating exteriors with skulls, spikes and rust that basically sent the message, “Leave me alone and don’t fuck with me.”
That testosterone and frenzied urgency was missing from Beyond Thunderdome, which takes place 15 years after The Road Warrior. I mean, Max drives a wagon, for Christ’s sake. The freakish characters, warped and distorted by the environment in which they live, are still there, along with a society that has created its own rules, such as settling disputes with a battle to the death inside “Thunderdome.” (If a movie can be judged on something which has prevailed in cultural lexicon for decades, Miller created a winner here with the Thunderdome concept and its “two men enter, one man leaves” mantra that have stuck with us.) But the same juice — the feeling of a hell-bent, punk-rock thrill ride — weren’t there.
Thankfully for us, Miller apparently learned that lesson and wanted to get back to that whenever circumstances (budgetary or otherwise) allowed him to make another Mad Max movie. The thrill is back. The futuristic freak show and ode to the V-8 engine that comes with it are again open to the public. And oh my God, it is glorious.
