Release Year: 2015
Director: George Miller
Runtime: 120 minutes
Opening with the mad world introduced 36 years prior, Mad Max: Fury Road immediately provides an updated look for the landscape of director George Miller’s directorial brainchild: new threats and details inhabit, even plague the old destruction and barren nightmare surrounding the haunting Fury Road. These words (“fury” and “road”) do an impeccable job of summarizing much of the movie in fact, even though the opening is filled to the radioactive brim with promising establishing shots, chaotic world building, and voice-over pondering from iconic protagonist Max Brockatansky. What starts out as a potential continuation of exploring this character… turns into exhaustingly grand fury on an exhaustingly long road.
While not greatly familiar with or appreciative of the Mad Max movies, I still understand the artistic direction in which Miller goes in making this movie more about other characters rather than Max. I understand the title is a return to a world, not the promise of a character study, so this was not my issue with the movie. Rather, the shortcomings begin with the frankly uninspired and uninspiring words of the voiceover. The concept of madness in this fictional world is so oversaturated, there’s not really any necessary force behind Max’s pondering over it. His two options in his apparently big question (whether the whole world is mad or he is) are both beyond the truth, not mutually exclusive, and not interesting enough to kickstart a movie that is more focused on his indisputably good team-up with Charlize Theron’s Furiosa against indisputably bad warlords. Not every movie has to have questions of moral ambiguity, especially a full-fledged action movie, but the easily aligned, depthless sides the movie creates genuinely nullifies the opening philosophy, and already makes the whole flick rather scattered in this respect.
With other respects, it is unexpectedly orderly despite the madness of the scenery. Characters act the same way at the end of the movie as they do at the beginning, with one… not necessarily predictable, but still uninspiring… exception. A plot point establishes exactly one task, with no further implications, and not even an entire reroute of the characters’ journey really changes how the audience feels about what they are doing. The problem with creating such an already chaotic world is that the audience can too easily become numb to the danger, and with the stakes so terribly high, they can neither rise nor impact individual characters in unique ways.
What a world that is created, though. Gruelingly realistic set design matches with expertly conceived costumes to bring this world to dangerous life*. Fury Road is absolutely deserving of its Oscars for production, hair/makeup, and costume design, and this is where its flaws go from being a grievance to being a wistful disappointment. The nightmarescape is imagined with such talent, and this is by far the best takeaway from seeing the movie. This includes all the stunt work that made everything seem so real (regardless of how needed it was) and actually kept me engaged and willing to view the rest of the movie.
This will was debatable, however, as an unsatisfying story was infused in all the action sequences (the extremely long, repetitive action sequences). Elements like redemption, sacrifice, and self-improvement, which I love seeing in cinema, felt forced into this objectively simple narrative. None of the scenes or lines of dialogue established much of any humanity that would put strength into these themes, and they instead feel like abstract concepts with nowhere to significantly land. If the movie was trying to express solely the characters’ loss of humanity (which it does among other busy things), it would have fared better to let the viewers watch fleshed out characters and view their trek to redemption, deducing just how inhumane their mad world is for themselves. Instead, this concept is bluntly handed to the viewer, like nearly everything else. This movie has not an ounce of subtlety.** Besides these characters’ motivations’ being flatly stated instead of meaningfully expressed, another example would include when the main villain’s goon ~minor spoiler alert~ is blinded, and chases the heroes while plainly bellowing, “I am the scale of justice” or something to that effect, to refer to Lady Justice. What could be interesting motifs for the audience to digest turn into flat elements that further the plot and not any of the viewers’ thinking. The movie would have been an excellent turn-your-brain-off action flick, since it certainly has the adrenaline of one, but it is filled with too many inflated moments like this to be so. It balances between a deep journey and a mindless thrill ride and this ambivalence is, in my opinion, the movie’s downfall. Trying to have the best of both worlds does not guarantee either.
Similarly, groundbreaking editing is generally celebrated when it takes new risks, but not every new risk guarantees itself to be groundbreaking. This is my most subjective gripe with the movie, so it can be dismissed, but I was not a fan of the varied frame rate at all. I thought it made crucial scenes look jarring and childish, and it took me out of the aforementioned absorbing realism of the world building. This is just my personal preference which I am sure is unpopular, so this is not my basis for disliking the movie, but it did not help.
I applaud George Miller for returning to his classic franchise with an ambitious new entry, but I do not think this ambition alone makes the movie of any quality. The style is fantastically presented and I definitely appreciate all of these aspects of the film, but with shallow characters, plentiful clichés, mediocre performances, and an unimpressive plot that gets lost in well-choreographed but oversaturated action, Mad Max: Fury Road is an unfortunately inadequate use of two hours.
*I especially enjoyed the scenes that took place at night: the use of blue was astonishing.
**Of course the maximalism (no pun intended) is the point of the world the movie creates: that is not what I mean by subtlety. I mean subtlety from a creative standpoint: the sense of artistry that is lost when a warlord thug makes a blatant reference to Roman art, or when an initially clever moment of a character’s unfamiliarity with what a tree is gets dragged out for a couple lines.
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