The Way to Fury Road: On the Road Again

In the week that we’ve been running articles up to the release of Mad Max: Fury Road, here’s the main event – our review of the film itself…

Mad Max: Fury Road

• director: George Miller
• Stars: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult
• Warner Bros.

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

Thirty years is a hell of a long time between films and Mad Max: Fury Road has had such a checkered history, losing its shooting budget, its star and at one point it was uncertain whether it would get made.

Fast-forward to May 2015 and it’s finally out. The modern action blockbuster is a soulless, empty thing: most of them feel like nothing more than just a showcase for a new line of toys. Mad Max: Fury Road is a very different beast indeed. I admit that when Tom Hardy was cast as Max, to replace Mel Gibson, I was fairly skeptical. However within a few minutes of the film, you realise that actually he was inspired casting.

And it’s not just the choice of Hardy that is inspired here. Visually, Mad Max: Fury Road packs a real visual punch with wonderfully inventive visuals and staggeringly colourful action set pieces. But unlike something like The Avengers: Age of Ultron, fights and chases here are beautifully orchestrated, shot and directed, giving you the sense you are watching a real immersive cinematic film rather than a bloated monster created by a corporate committee. Mad Max: Fury Road, even more than its predecessors, is like a John Ford western populated by zombie mutant bikers and twisted, perverted tyrants.

It also owes quite a lot to the biker culture of the 1950s and 1960s albeit through a very twisted prism. Max begins the film as a bearded wanderer who gets driven off the road and taken as a living human blood bank for Immortan Joe’s gang of vicious road hooligans, the pale-faced War Boys. But Max manages to escape and falls in with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), the liberator of Joe’s harem of wives – and someone who is determined to disrupt the plans of their monstrous husband.

At first Max, Furiosa and the collective of Joe’s wives don’t get on but a bond begins to form between them – one of the war boys, Nux (Nicholas Hoult from X-Men) is also thrown into the mix. Although Hardy has few lines here, he looks fantastic on screen and all credit to Theron, who is a very sympathetic female protagonist. Miller has not lost his touch with unique and dynamic visuals. Scenes move from desert to stripped-out wastelands and the palette used by him and cinematographer John Seale is truly magnificent.

Some of it even manages a nod to Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, despite the desolation that the inhabitants are forced to live in. George Miller has proven that he is still a real filmmaker and Mad Max: Fury Road is a visceral, exciting, cinematic experience which shows that Miller’s vision of a dystopian future dominated by crazy gangs is just as captivating as it was back in 1979. Hopefully it will reenergise the series and we’ll get to see at least two more films starring Hardy as the new Road Warrior. The best action film of 2015 so far…