pure cinema - about time, but worth the wait

Rating: 10/10 (23 May 2015)

What do I mean by saying that Mad Max: Fury Road, a heavy metal action movie about a group of women led by Imperator Furiosa (and that other guy, Max his name) trying to find safe haven away from the barbarians (especially a Darth Vader-style slave-master) of the post apocalyptic wastelands, by saying 'pure cinema'? It might be unfair to filmmakers who may just love to hear their characters talk. and dialog-driven films can be made cinematic in the right hands. But what I mean to say is that George Miller really would have been perfectly at home working during the silent era, when all you needed to show were images of things happening, frenetically with the occasional dialog, to get your point across. I've seen Fury Road twice in a week and I have to wonder if Miller really wanted to be Buster Keaton or Abel Gance when he was going to the movies. Not to say westerns don't figure plenty in the framework - they have since the original film, and certainly the Road Warrior is nothing without the Cowboys vs Indians aesthetic.
But Miller eschews a ton of exposition at the start and puts the characters right into the thick of the story: Furiosa goes to get the gasoline for Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, formerly Toecutter oddly enough in Mad Max 1) and goes her own path - she wants to get to the Green Place with ladies that are "property" of Joes, and she will stop at nothing to get there. Max is along for the ride, one of those great, wild visual touches has him strapped to the front of a vehicle with a grated mask over his face - and is once again the reluctant hero for this journey.
We find out all of this along the way really, which shows how economical Miller is in his storytelling. He doesn't waste any time, and all that matters is keeping this bad motherf**** of a movie on a roll. The first major action sequence, a chase of the war parties against Furiosa, would be the climax of any other film. For Miller, it's just the start, and even when character try to take a rest (certainly in the first half) there's still tension and suspense going on. And when I mean by pure cinema, take the moment where Max first confronts Furiosa and the women by the truck. He has a gun on them, we know it's loaded from an incident we just saw, but they don't, so there's a level of tension for them but not so much for us. Then the gun gets wrestled away, a fight ensues (a manic fight, but cut beautifully), and yet the chase is still technically underway with the vehicles off in the distance.
Very little of that, and other scenes in the film, need any dialog, though characters do still speak (Max, going back to the Road Warrior, was Miller's Man With No Name, the Ronin, the dude who says little but is a big man of action). When characters do talk, there is humanity given, even some dark humor (Nicholas Hoult's character is a good example of that). But what's so mesmerizing and awesome about Fury Road is Miller pushing the envelope even further and, in a way, correcting some things that he went with in Beyond Thunderdome.
The movie is bleak but not hopeless for the characters, and there's barely a moment where the stakes aren't super high. Even a moment that is relatively calm like, yes, trying to pull the tanker out muddy sand with another vehicle a ways behind firing a machine gun this way and that (the driver's got blood in his eyes, woops), is kinetic and sensational.
And throughout we see two things here that are refreshing: a style of direction and editing where you can always tell what's going on, which vehicle is in relation to the others even/especially during these bug-f*** crazy chases, and this seems to be a welcome thing during an era where action movies are cut too fast and shot too close. Miller has a method of controlled mayhem and fiasco, and so it's a film with about 3,000+ shots and barely a one is wasted. The other one is Charlize Theron. It's really her story - kind of like Eli Wallach in Good/Bad/Ugly, with Max as Clint Eastwood - and her performance is rough, powerful, sometimes stoic but also sometimes incredibly emotional, and she's not afraid in the slightest to show vulnerability just as much as the courage and bad-ass-ery. It's one of those woman action heroes and performances that'll be up there with the greats.
Miller started in Ozsploitation with the first movie, and as the Maxs have gotten bigger in size and budget he hasn't lost the spirit of making things madcap, from the gnarled vehicles and character designs to a man who plays guitar that shoots out flames while on top of a rig (and drummers on the back). Why does this guy keep doing this? Well... he loves it, that's why! If you can dig the idea of seeing that, then you should dig seeing the whole thing: it delivers compelling heroes, nasty villains, an unforgiving landscape, and details that'll make you want to come back to see what you missed.
At 2 hours it almost feels like 'that's it'? And last but not least, Hardy is a fine new Max, making his own of the role that previously got Mel Gibson his career kick-started. He may not have the same level of charisma as Gibson perhaps, but the devilish fun and cunning is still there, the wild gunslinger who will kill you if he has to but would (deep down) rather not, is there in Hardy, and I can't wait to see more of what he does with the role in future films.