Occasionally, we get a summer movie that has a chance to change things, to change the conversation, movies like 28 Days Later or The Raid. Despite its big-budget trappings and wide release, there's a real sense of independence and auteurship on display, an energy, ferocity and fearlessness that this kind of film so rarely sees.

Fury Road is a shark, constantly moving, stripped down to the most basic, powerful elements needed to achieve its goals. Max's violence feels unhinged, like a force of nature, but Furiosa is the only character in the film that ever really finds catharsis. Even as Max and Furiosa work together, there's a clear sense of purpose to Theron's performance that's missing in Hardy's PTSD-plagued portrayal. While Max gets the voice-over to begin the film, and his perspective establishes Miller's demented vision of the carpocalypse, it's Furiosa who finds a character arc and a kind of hero's journey. This is all the more impressive because of the subtly subversive heart of the film - that it frequently doesn't feel like Max's movie at all. It's a remarkable display of economy, and despite some occasionally wooden dialogue that scratches at the edges of disbelief, the story is a model of efficiency. Miller and co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris have whittled it down to the barest essentials. That sense of economy extends to Fury Road's script as well. It's an intense, violent movie, but Fury Road never feels gratuitous with the gore, instead trading blood and dismemberment for a wrenching sense of impact as bodies are thrown against or from the vehicles that dominate the proceedings. Max and Furiosa's paths collide, and the two must work together to survive and escape Joe's nightmarish, gasoline-fueled army.ĭespite the near-total display of fire and rage on screen, there's a perceptible sense of restraint at work in Fury Road. Meanwhile, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), Immortan Joe's most accomplished field commander, has betrayed him, stealing away his 'wives' and fleeing with a massive war rig. The titular Max (Tom Hardy) is a nomad survivor living in the wasteland, but the film doesn't mince words or script pages before he's captured and made a human blood bag for the minions of warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Food is scarce, water is scarcer, and gasoline and the jury-rigged vehicles that require it rule everything.

You don't need to have seen any of them to grok the premise of this new film - that human nature, along with a helping of post-peak oil and weapons of mass destruction, has poisoned the world, leaving an archetypal post-apocalypse in its wake. Mad Max: Fury Road is ostensibly a sequel to the original 1979 film and its two follow-ups, but it appears free of much in the way of obligations to fiction or canon.

Mad max fury road rating