Mad Max – What a movie! What a lovely movie!

Quickie Review:

The world as we know it no longer exists, turned into an endless scorching desert where every drop of water and fuel is precious enough to kill for. Furiosa (Charlize Theron) rebels against the oppression of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) by aiding in the escape of his wives. She comes across Max (Tom Hardy), a mystery man who needs Furiosa just as much as she needs him in their quest for survival. Mad Max Fury Road is one of the most mind-blowing, insane action movies in recent years. By relying on mostly practical stunts there is a real sense of danger, tension, excitement, and awe with every explosion, flip, and wreck of the cars. More surprisingly there is heart behind the action, thanks to the well-developed characters. Mad Max’s beautiful chaos is a sight to behold and must be experienced on the big screen.

Full Review:

I have never seen the original Mad Max movies, I just never got around to watching them. Since this was a reboot of sorts there is no need to watch them, and I wanted to go into the movie fresh. So this review comes from someone with no prior knowledge of the franchise. Short of it, I loved it!

The thing that people will be talking about after the movie ends is the action. This is action like you have never seen before. CGI is only used when it is absolutely needed and the other 90% of the time it is real cars crashing and flipping in every way they can. The chase scenes are breath taking and heart pounding, and I mean that literally. After the first action sequence ended I had to remind myself to exhale because I felt like I was holding my breath in awe for the entire scene. When another sequence ended I checked my pulse, I don’t know the exact beats per minute but it felt like I just came off the treadmill after 15mins of running. Like I said Mad Max is beautiful chaos but because of the great shot composition there is sense in the chaos. I never felt lost, I always knew what was going on despite the frantic nature of the scenes. That is why you will fully appreciate all the effort put into filming this movie.

One of the things I was most nervous about from the trailers was the world of Mad Max. I feared that everything would be so crazy, like the flame-thrower guitarist on a truck, that it’d be too distracting. However, the world is so well-conceived and well realised by director George Miller that even the most insane things make sense in that context. Yes, that includes the flame-thrower guitarist, he was awesome! Additionally the cinematography and soundtrack brought a much grander scale to an otherwise simple story.

Behind all the visuals though there is a level of depth to the movie that I did not anticipate. The best character of the movie by far is Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Even with her disability she is incredibly strong willed and determined to finish her mission. After all, she carries a lot of the emotional consequences if she were to fail and so I was really invested in her story. In a genre dominated by male actors it is refreshing to see a compelling female character such as Furiosa, and we need more of them in Hollywood. Then there is also Nicholas Hoult as Nux who had a great story arc. I was surprised how much I empathised with his character. You might be wondering why I haven’t talked about Max yet in a movie called Mad Max, well that’s simply because he is not really the central character. Don’t get me wrong, he has a major role in the movie and Tom Hardy plays a convincing hardened hero. Nevertheless, this is mostly a Furiosa centric story. That may be a complaint for some that Max should’ve been the focus, and I can see their reasoning. The way I understood it was that this film is one of many stories or legends in this world, where a mystery man (Max) plays an important part in helping our heroes succeed. In that sense the way Max’s character was handled was fitting.

We are only half way through this decade and already I’ll call it: Mad Max is the best action movie of this decade, the very least top 5. I have a strong feeling that Mad Max Fury Road will be a classic decades from now. I cannot stress this enough, you absolutely have to watch this on the big screen, IMAX if possible. You are robbing yourself of a truly unique visceral experience if you miss this one. The only person I wouldn’t recommend this movie to is someone with a heart condition, because it might get too intense.