Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road (15)

Australia/USA 2015 120 mins Dir: George Miller Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whitely

In the demented, blitzkrieg landscape of Mad Max: Fury Road, no object is more sacred than the steering wheel, and no sound more divine than the ear-splitting roar of a souped-up V8 engine. 30 years after the end of his cult Mad Max movie franchise, director George Miller has returned to the series and launched into top gear with an unstoppable juggernaut, careering ahead with a breathless sense of energy that would embarrass many directors half his age (amazingly, the filmmaker is now 70). It’s noisy, relentless and excessive but it’s also one hell of a ride.

The original movies, which began in 1979 and ended with 1985’s Tina Turner oddity Beyond Thunderdome, famously launched Mel Gibson to stardom although the real star of the show was Miller himself, orchestrating jaw-dropping vehicular mayhem on a miniscule budget. And although you could probably make a hundred of the original films with the vastly increased cost of Fury Road, pleasingly Miller has stayed true to the original aesthetic, emphasising practical effects, stunts and a genuine sense of chaos.

As before, it’s set in a barren, futuristic desert wasteland, the remnants of an undisclosed apocalyptic disaster, although this time Africa’s Namib Desert stands in for the Australian outback. As a result of the film’s tumultuous production delays (it’s taken the best part of 15 years to make it to the big screen), Gibson has been usurped by Tom Hardy as road warrior Max Rocakatansky, a former cop turned vigilante dedicated to one thing only: survival.

This instinct stands him in good stead when he’s kidnapped by the ‘war boys,’ victims of radiation poisoning in the thrall of despotic Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a masked tyrant whose control over water has helped him establish a brutal citadel complete with breeding farms and milk farms. (It’s best not to spoil how he achieves the latter.)  When Joe’s ‘wives’ are smuggled away by one of his commanders, Imperator Furiosa (a shaven-headed, metal-armed Charlize Theron) in an attempt to reach the fabled ‘green land,’ Joe and his forces set off in hot pursuit, with Hardy’s Max acting as a mobile blood bank attached to a vehicle operated by war boy Nux (Nicholas Hoult).

On some level, it’s 1981’s The Road Warrior (arguably the best of the original Mad Max movies) on amphetamines, particularly in the roving shots of Furiosa’s imposing war rig besieged by souped up vehicles adorned with spikes and flame throwers. The action is truly astonishing, Miller throwing caution (and his actors) to the wind by deploying as little CGI as possible. When a car pirouettes into the air and explodes into a fireball within Hardy’s vicinity, viewers can rest assured that the danger on set was real. It’s this physicality that galvanizes the movie, although visual effects are understandably used during a visually stunning sandstorm sequence that resembles nothing more than God’s disco.

It’s also, perversely, a movie about solidarity and, to some extent, family, from the war boys’ fleeting references to Joe as ‘dad’ to the feminist angle that develops between Furiosa and the captured wives. In fact, the film’s title character is more a passive observer in his own story (when he’s not cracking heads and blowing things up that is); the real heft belongs with Theron, whose interactions with co-stars Zoe Kravitz and Rosie Huntington-Whitely add surprisingly poignant themes of sisterhood and motherhood to an exhaustively explosive movie. Analysts have already read plenty into this but refreshingly, Miller never labours the point. The director’s matter-of-fact approach simply expects us to accept a sci-fi movie where women are the driving force. What better way to honour a genre that’s given birth to female icons Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor?

In fact, one of the greatest things about the movie is its old-fashioned approach. It’s pitched as a plunge into an amoral world without rules but, ultimately, we know who the good guys and bad guys are, creating a sense of storytelling purity without the need for cumbersome, Christopher Nolan-style exposition. Actions speak louder than words, and there’s a vivid sense of Miller having greased the wheels and built a richly resplendent, detailed and visceral universe from the ground up. Just look at the skull heads adorning the gear levers of the film’s fearsome-looking vehicles – just one of the many little details lying in wait. There’s no green screen here; the only green resides in the aforementioned promised land. In the case of Fury Road, it turns out that the old ways are indeed the best.