MAD MAX: Fury Road [Movie Review]

So its been almost 30 years since the last Mad Max movie was in theaters... that is a very long time. I say almost because Beyond Thunderdome came out in July of 1985... Almost 30 years. It is impressive to see a franchise rebooted after all this time. 

This is really more the story of Imperator Furiosa
(played by Charlize Theron) than Mad Max.

1973: the First Oil Shock - oil jumped from $4 per barrel to $12.
1979: The Second Oil Crisis - oil jumped up to $39.50 a barrel.
2008: The Energy Crisis - oil has rapidly shot up to $147.30 a barrel. Fears over peak oil being reached abound. Oddly the economic recession is the one thing that may have brought prices back down to $60 a barrel by 2009.

4 out of 5 stars

I just wanted to give a background for the reality of a post oil world. The time before oil runs out will not be fun... unless the world changes.

Now for my rating, the first thing you have to remember is that this is not a normal Bad movie to Good movie scale... this is my enjoyment index. It is tempered by a few things like my likelihood of repeated viewings, and how often did my mind wander... and more.

Cars. Cars. More Cars. Some Trucks. Orks have less 'go fasta.'

Silent Survivor and the Five Wives.

So, yes. This movie is solid. It is very fun, and really rumbles along. However, there are some weird little issues. First off... this is less a movie about Mad Max and more a film about Imperator Furiosa. This is her movie. She is actually the main character... it is her journey, her goals. She has the most depth of character out of all the characters. Max is actually cast in the role of the Mentor or the Sage, you know like Obi-wan in A New Hope. Only Max is crankier, more insane, younger, more violent, more spastic, and more dirt encrusted. Now technically this is not a negative in anyways shape or form, but much like my issue with Frozen, this was not the main character I was expecting. 

Immortan Joe played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, Toe Cutter
in 1979's Mad Max. Cool.

Chastiy Belts of the Dystopian Future... thankfully
they have bolt cutters of the modern ages past.

Second issue: unceasing combat. There may be a total of 5 times when the combat pauses in the movie, and those are brief. Combat, be it fisticuffs with chains, gun play, or vehicular combat, is all encompassing. Even when you think we're going to get a pause, there is some violence occurring. Now while I have no real objection to this level of cinematic fun violence, it does make my mind wander at times. I ended up analyzing a few scientifically and mathematically strange things that came up in the film... which leads me to my third mitigating factor.

Max doing double work as both a blood bank and a
hood ornament. What a lovely day he is having.

I know movies do not have to be scientifically accurate... but sometimes they say things that just boggle the mind. Prometheus (admittedly not the top movie to reference) has the star ship covering about 39 light years in a little over 2 years ship time. Now, if humans had that level of tech... you probably wouldn't need sleeper pods for one thing. It would also really change the entire idea of exploring space. But anyways. We never really learn how the ship travels at nearly 20 times the speed of light... Now, in Fury Road there is a line about having enough supplies to ride for 160 days. The line is spoken at the edge of a great salt flat (what I assume is actually a dried ocean bed). Now, lets assume that travel is really rough and they can only travel 200km (120mi) a day, a laughably short distance. The Earth is 40,057km in circumference. They could start out and in 160 days of straight driving, almost reach their start point. Of course there is no possible way that they had enough gas to cover 32,000km. If they could make 1000km (621mi) a day, they could circle the earth 4 times, but again... not enough gas. I'll not even go into the bit about water. Actually I will. Water is both so scarce people are told not to get addicted to it (they already are... they are alive after all), and so plentiful that they can just hose people off in the desert because... well we actually have no idea as to why, other than to plaster five women in clingy wet white cloth. Because the most important thing to do with water while traveling across a desert is to hose yourself down with it... 

My last issue is one of film editing. I saw no reason for a good chunk of the fade to blacks. A normal cross fade, a normal wipe... something. The fade to blacks make sense when a character passes out, is knocked out, etc. But they were used quite often, and they were rather long, noticeably long. It ran against a lot of my film training. It broke the nonstop action in a strange way. It was bad enough that I noticed them, and when you notice something like that it breaks your suspension of disbelief, the most important thing for any movie to have. They might have contributed to me over thinking things like the water and the distances. I would pop out of my movie mode, that suspension of disbelief, and that was not good. 

I am being so critical because the movie is actually good. There are times when something approaches greatness but falls just short because of some glaring details. The biggest sin for me was the breaks in my suspension of disbelief, that is something that should not have happened. It did not happen in my two viewings of Age of Ultron. Those alone may have cost this movie half a star. I can get past the rest of it pretty well, but not those. When you make me think about the process of creating a film, you've begun to lose me.

It was fun. Heck yeah it was fun. It was crazy. It felt like a proper Mad Max movie. Crazy cars, violence, it was fun. I would certainly recommend it. I saw it it normal digital, I see no reason to actually spring for 3D, despite the obvious fact that this movie is being marketed as 3D. (I just hate 3D, both the cost and the headaches it can cause). Go and see it, it is the first Mad Max movie in almost 30years.

So go an see it. Drive the Fury Road at least once!

No one is more bad-ass in a red onesie than this hard rocker with a double axe flame thrower.