The beauty and the destruction, and the beauty in destruction...

Rating: 10/10 (15 May 2015)

I saw the original Mad Max on VHS around 1983, I was 12 and it affected me profoundly. The portrayal of familiar civilization in slow decline, humans already descended into chaos, and of course, the last of the V8 interceptors.
The Road Warrior took me further, to a world where surviving each day was the best you could hope for, but for what, to spend another day hunted and haunted by a world forever lost. But still there was speed, the pulse of the V8, the tarmac winding on into nothing.
I didn't love Thunderdome, no car, no pavement, and perhaps a too uncomfortable insight into where humanity might be headed.
And then I waited 30 years, for this film, "Fury Road".
It's hard to not get caught up in the hype when you've waited so long for more of a story that captured your imagination as a child. George Miller leaves Max, alone and lost, at the end of each of the three earlier movies, and so you wait, hoping there will be some peace for him, or that at the very least he will continue to survive.
Fury Road is not truly a continuation, it is more of a distillation of the elements that defined the earlier movies, spiked with the magic available to the modern movie maker. Miller seems to be a fan of his own earlier work, such is his understanding of the essential appeal of Max's ordeal.
This movie then is not a redux, nor is it a hybrid of previous pictures. More it is an evolution, an elegant simplification and a beautiful, terrible translation of simple desire, horror and hope into moving pictures.
Don't wait for downtime in your two hours on Fury Road, there is no respite from the constant raw inundation of incredible imagery. The viewer is thrown, as though a passenger in one of the film's insane, wonderful, vehicles, from scenes of brutal mechanical destruction, to vistas of such grandeur, menace and beauty that you find yourself wishing a longer moment to absorb before the next overdose of visual stimuli presents itself.
There is dialogue, but I suspect you could watch the movie with the volume turned down and cranked speed metal in its place and not find yourself missing the point. And the point in question is this: We are creatures that are wired to survive, and hope is an emotional manifestation of some vital genetic imperative that brought humanity down from the trees and into speeding metal vehicles. But we also have an element of our nature that makes less sense, a fascination with chaos, with smashing, burning, bleeding destruction. Fury Road will trick you into having hope, and then reward you with chaos, and chaos, and chaos.
Why 10 out of 10? I nearly dropped it to a 9 because of a few seconds of Jaws 3D-esque visual buffoonery (you'll know the moment when you reach it), but everything else was so good, such unbridled, spectacular, colourful, murderous fun. Fans must love it, newcomers will perhaps recoil at first, but will surely be seduced.
I suspect it will reward frequent re-watching, I aim to find out...