MAD MAX FURY ROAD

MAD MAX FURY ROAD, with Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy; Written and directed by George Miller.

Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa

 

I liked Mad Max Fury Road much more than I thought I would.  Critics seemed to focus on only the action of which there were scads- relentless, spectacular, and loud.  Cirque du Soleil gone gritty: Men clinging to the tops of swaying poles attached to souped-up speeding cars while blasting away with automatic weapons.  However, throughout, messages are evident concerning the exploitation of women and children and climate change.  No water, except for that which is controlled by the ruling entity- a warlord- white-haired, masked Immortan Joe (played with menacing evil by Hugh Keays-Byrne who relishes every move).  Joe runs the Citadel and has enslaved the people. He demands worship.  Followers of his ideology believe that when they die for him, they will be martyrs.  One of his minions (not THOSE minions), Nux, played by Nicholas Hoult, is selected as a favorite by being “chromed”, i.e. mouth sprayed with a silver liquid or powder.  He later defects and signs on with Max (Tom Ford) and Imperator Furiosa (a kick-ass Charlize Theron).  Furiosa’s green-blue-eyes appear capable of penetrating an armored truck.  She wears a prosthetic left arm and hand; pants, boots, a tank-top and hair cropped to her skull; her war-paint?  axle grease smeared across her forehead.  Beautiful!

The Citadel consists of mountainous red rock on the very tops of which plant life grows, the only green stuff for hundreds of miles of endless red rock desert.  Max (the same character from the three original films) is seen in an opening shot eating a two-headed lizard he’d stomped on as it scampered across barren ground.  Max, captured for trespassing, is used as a blood bank for Nux (Nicholas Hoult), on of Joe’s dedicated war boys.  Muzzled with an intricate, barred, metal device, he ends up as a bizarre hood-ornament on one of Joe’s wildly tricked out vehicles.  Later on, it’s fun to watch him try to remove it with a chisel.

Tom Ford as Max Rockatansky in Mad Max Fury Road

There’s little if any exposition in this film, yet it is cohesive and linear, and satisfies many levels of expectations both visceral, emotional, and intellectual and comes to a believable conclusion.   One need not see the preceding Mad Max films, though they are worth streaming on your favorite platform especially the first one, simply Mad Max, which made the then unknown Australian actor Mel Gibson a star.  Fury Road stands on its own.  We learn that Imperator Furiosa is rescuing Joe’s breeder slaves, flimsily-dressed women from Joe’s harem (one of whom is pregnant) in the body of an empty oil tanker which she’s hooked up to her heavily armored vehicle.  She’s also hauling water and fuel.  Her destination is a home she hasn’t seen for over a decade, which she recalls as being green, with waterfalls. 
 

There’s an early scene of thousands of ragged, filthy, desiccated men, women and children swarming at the foot of a cliff, holding up all kinds of containers.  Joe appears, high above; he shouts an order to open the sluices.  His slaves (hairless and startlingly white men and children) turn massive wooden gear wheels by literally walking on the circumference. The people trample one another to catch water as it gushes from huge pipes in the cliff face, nearly sweeping them away.  Suddenly, the water stops. That’s it.  People go mad.
  

Aging and dying, Joe wears a suit of armor made of Plexigas you can see through, but you don’t want to- as Lenny Bruce once observed about nylon dresses- and  a metal-framed, grotesque, half-mask over the lower part of his face.  His piercing blue eyes rival Imperator’s gaze.  A bellows is attached to the back of the armor, pumping air so he can breathe.  In one scene which appears to be one of women in a beauty salon getting their hair done is instead a scene of women being milked for Joe, to sustain and prolong his life.  Coincidentally, one morning, I heard a bit on NPR about women selling their milk to facilities that prescribe mother’s milk to patients with digestive disorders caused by bad bacteria.

Cinematographer John Seale shot some gorgeous scenes to relieve the gruesomeness and horror of others, as well as some that are eerily, hauntingly, beautiful: e. g. when Furiosa’s rig approaches a muddy swamp, shadowy, ragged, cloaked figures appear on stilts, slowly crossing the expanse.

As she nears her goal, dirt-bikers- older women (surprise!), the Vuvalinis- leap over and down immense sand dunes and stop her (The film was made in the Namibia desert in Africa).  They turn out to be from Furiosa’s former home and remember her as a child.  Bad news though: Furiosa had been traveling in the wrong direction.  The mad dash back the way they came is even more harrowing with Joe and his Chrome buddies once more on their tail.  Joe’s sex slaves evolve into fighters as well.  Furiosa, near death and having lost her prosthetic arm and hand, but not her grit, prevails, with Max’s help.  The folded length of plastic tubing on his shoulder came in handy after all.   In a blockbuster, summer movie season, rife with costumed, comic book, male superheroes, Imperator Furiosa is a woman warrior not unlike The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen, or Shailene Woodley in Divergent.  There are no heroes here, only liberators. Mad Max Fury Road is, as New Yorker’s A. O Scott wrote, “about revolution.” 
.Read an adapted version of this  review on Socialist Action News. www.socialistactionnews.org