All in all, the movie is a fun ride, a tense one, and it delivers.

Rating: 10/10 (19 May 2015)

I couldn't help but think of St. John Paul II's description of the culture of death, and how it kills a civilization either slowly or very quickly. Peter Kreeft, following on this line, said the the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years but only held for over a decade simply because it chose to build itself through killing its own. A similar note rings throughout Mad Max: Fury Road as we are presented with a story of humanity at a crossroads in figuring out how to rebuild itself after a profound era of destruction.
The movie tells the story of a group of women who escape a Viking-like primitive civilization in search for freedom from slavery as prizes for a select group of men in her culture. Civilization as we know it now has dramatically fallen and gangs of primitive tribes form around a culture of gasoline and cars, manipulating them and extracting all their worth as their dependence on it will eventually fade. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) leads a group of harem-like women out of their desert city as Max (Tom Hardy) gets reluctantly drug into their escape, merging goals of finding a way out to freedom.
The relationship of men and women, one that's crucial to the survival of a civilization, is at the core of "Mad Max: Fury Road." What the movie presents are two extremes of the sexes in relation to each other, one given a very bad depiction in its harsh expression (and rightfully so), and the other in a more subtle though inevitable retreat into nothingness. The city Furiosa and Max escape from is nothing more than a slave state with a despot that controls his people through water distribution. He chooses a group of women to be his harem and that's that. Later in the film we're presented with a rival tribe composed of only women and hostile to all men that come their way (they're even laying bait and hunting them). This too, will not sustain a civilization. The obvious necessity for any civilization to thrive is a way to produce stable homes for children, and a culture that threatens that (and there are plenty of ways that that can be threatened) will destroy itself, especially if it rejects this necessity.
The two main characters, Max and Furiosa, are a microcosm of this tension between the sexes, grappling for power but working together toward the same goal, freedom from a destructive society, both struggling with the negative tendencies of their sex.
There are few movies that I've felt such anxiety over the pursuit of an evil and terrible gang of villains, seeing what they do to those who oppose them. The terror they're threatening throughout the movie is almost debilitating, and thankfully there are a few moments where we have respite from it. A parallel exists today in ISIS, which I couldn't help but think of throughout the movie. It's a terrorist society built on religious extremism and is notorious for brutality toward women and their enemies, and unapologetically so. The depiction of these gangs roaming and destroying what they wish is likely similar to what's being done by ISIS in our time, which puts a weight on other societies to act on it in some way.
Religion itself in the movie is given a lot of screen time, and in very interesting ways. The religion of Furiosa's society mimics the pagan religion of the Germanic tribes of ancient northern Europe with references to Valhalla, and their warrior emphasis. Men are brought up from birth as soldiers, and the society is built around war and plundering. Characters in the movie routinely pray (some to an unknown god) and reference the afterlife, which in a sense is a welcome addition to the film, giving characters in the movie a more interesting arc and drive. Some will interpret this as a vestige of primitive societies that more "advanced" ones will grow out of (and there is certainly the existence of childish religions), however it's not clear that the filmmakers are saying that.
For the first half of the movie, Max is portrayed as a selfish and very distant renegade, all the while carrying hallucinations from a past trauma. In this, I welcome an actual "madness" to Mad Max, something I was always wondering about the older movies. Max just seemed like a tough guy, nothing really mad (meaning crazy) about him in the older films. This movie takes it more literally in the sense that he's suffering from a psychological ailment throughout the movie, and it comes up repeatedly. This adds an interesting handicap to Max, and a more visible struggle he's working through as he escapes the tribe trying to kill him.
All in all, the movie is a fun ride, a tense one, and it delivers. Other reviewers have called it a much-needed shift for action movies in our time, especially as the Fast and Furious style films run their course. This movie carries with it a feel of mythology and universality, something any Jason Statham movie probably couldn't convey as well. As I write this, news of more Mad Max movies are on the way, and I hope they hold this theme of civilization building, stripping it down to its chrome shell and seeing how long it will run on a certain frame.
This movie does not contain any explicit nudity or foul language, though the violence is intense and gory.