In a world that's gone insane, only chaos can reign

Rating: 10/10 (24 May 2015)

That's the world of Mad Max Fury Road. Our world. Earth. As it is in the forthcoming future. A desert planet where once was green vegetation is now only sand and salt (dried out ocean beds). And hostile tribes of different peoples, some possibly mutants, war with each other for scarce resources, one of most scarce being water.
The plot is simplicity itself. A powerful warlord and cult-leader, the ugly and evil Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who wears a hideous mouth mask, holds power supreme over an impoverished people. From his balcony at the Citadel, his stronghold, like a beneficent god he opens three floodgates, allowing gushing water to fall to the waiting masses below.
He also has a private harem, and a wandering woman, Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has stolen five of them, all beauties, because she must rescue them (she alludes to being abducted as a child from her native land and perhaps serviced such a warlord herself). She drives off into the desert with a truck holding a tank-load of gasoline and with the women safely stowed away in the passenger compartment.
Unknown to her Max (Tom Hardy), an itinerant wanderer overwhelmed with guilt by the death of his wife and daughter that he could not prevent, captured and tortured by the warlord's warriors, escapes and hitches a ride on Furiosa's truck. Wary of each other at first, they come to terms and are soon cooperating. Which is a good thing.
Because the warlord learns that five of his beautiful sex slaves, one prominently pregnant, have been abducted. Brimming with rage he storms out after her with his army of goons into the barren desert in full pursuit to capture his women and carry them back and in the process destroy Furiosa. And so the battle begins.
The goon army armed to the teeth and plowing through the desert in their makeshift but deadly vehicles with their banners flapping in the breeze and their massive oversized tires and their strange music filling the air and pursuing with full and deadly fury Furiosas'a truck and savoring the sweet revenge that they will unleash on her when they catch up with her looks for all purposes like some malevolent caravan of motley beasts guided by miscreant creatures straight out of the Wizard of Oz. Or the gates of Hell.
Furiosa sees her deed as a way of finding redemption, partly because she herself must have served some warlord. Max tells her: If you can't fix what's broken, you will go insane. She must face the fact that the land she left, her green land, is forever gone. Max tells her in order to find the green land again, she must return to the Citadel. Furiosa with Max's help, and also with the help of the young women whom she's rescued, must battle the warlord's warriors all the way back. And what a fight. Total mayhem like so many wars. Vicious and merciless. And fought to the bitter end.
Normally I don't much care for blow-'em-ups/shoot-'em-ups and this movie has it in spades, far enough to satisfy the most hard-bitten action junkie. But from a review, I read that Charlize Theron was in the movie, and playing the main character to boot. It's as much her movie as it is Hardy's. Possibly even more so. Normally I don't see a movie because a particular actor's in it, but I've seen her in several movies and she's very good.
The cinematography is outstanding. Most of the movie was filmed in the Namib desert in Namibia, an African republic to the northwest of South Africa. The red desert with its large, forbidding rock formations is stunning. And the formidable sandstorm that rushes down on them like an enormous tsunami is incredible. I have a scene like that in a book I wrote. But words must be chosen very carefully and even then it remains challenging to capture the moving action of such a titanic thing. The music convincingly supports the militant and life-or-death hand-to-hand fighting taking place. Brutality begets the beast. It's my understanding that very few of the scenes were CGI-generated (the great sandstorm must have been though). If that is so, then I must say they are all splendidly done. Kudos to Miller for his directing.
I give it 10 out of 10. I'd like to say a bit about my ratings. I read one reviewer who said he doesn't like to give any movie a 10 out of 10 because it can always be made better. If one looks at a movie like any other work of art, this is true. No work of art exists, or will ever exist, that somehow couldn't stand a bit of improvement. I'm a writer and know that myself. An artist must do the very best job they can with the skills they possess. But that being said, the work must end so the artist can reach their audience. Otherwise, the work of art is a perpetual ongoing project. So, if the directing, script, acting, score, and cinematography are of very high quality, then I give it 10 out of 10. Yes, it could probably have been worked on more. But then, there would never be a movie that could actually be seen by viewers like me.
I vaguely remember the original Mad Max series from the 1980s and they struck me as tongue-in-cheek (notwithstanding Miller wrote and directed these too). As far as I was concerned, they could have taken place in a galaxy far, far away. But not so this Mad Max. If you get beyond the action, there's a hard look at where the future of this planet may be heading in the not so distant future. And it's not a pretty future.