Babes and bonnets

Rating: 3/10 (16 May 2017)

I was told that Mad Max: Fury Road has had excellent reviews although an early one that I saw gave it only two stars. I can see why. Its a vast empty road with a desert at its heart. When the end credits rolled the wacky names of characters hinted at a more enjoyable movie but, like The 300 and other heavily stylized action movies, I was just left with a headache. And the frenetic editing makes 'Crank II' look like The Bridges of Madison County.
There's plenty to watch on screen and some sly nods to Star Wars, Dark Crystal (of all things) and The Cars That Ate Paris. But Mad Max barely emerges as a character (in this version he really does have mental health problems) and is hardly heroic. As for the rest of the cast, their appearance has to do much of the work of characterization as this is a film where punches, hackings and gun fire serve instead of dialogue. Explosions are the new social network.
An early shot lines up pursuing cars as if they were entrants in that old cartoon series Wacky Races but there's nothing as fun as that here. The post apocalyptic desert world is well realized but even in the future Aborigines have been marginalized. I got the impression that White Australian audiences just don't want to have to look at them, or perhaps hope nuclear war will resolve any lingering problems from colonialism.
Unbelievably (actually all too believably) a blogger has ranted that Mad Max: Fury Road is a leftist feminist plot on behalf of Hollywood. The blogger burbles "This is the Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insist on the trope women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic. And this is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, further ruining women for men, and men for women."
I can barely understand the reasoning here: women and men only exist for each other? Equality ruins men and women? But the fact is that Fury Road's depiction of women conforms to number of established types and rarely strays from soft porn imagery of virginal hotties, gun toting babes and nurturing mothers. The audience laughed at an amusing scene where Max looks up from the dusty desert floor to see a group of young scantly clad women hosing themselves down. It is all very knowing, but is knowing sexism any different from actual sexism? Anyway, the women are needed here because, like the female gladiators in Gladiator, they stop the whole film becoming madly homoerotic.
The film is excellently designed drawing on top Brit pop cartoonist Brendan McCarthy who produced a brilliant run of covers for Shade: The Changing Man and the fably mad Rogan Ghosh a dimension spanning Hindu deity cum Jerry Cornelius figure who exuberantly captured sci- fi's new wave for the Nineties in a way the current craze for Steam Punk doesn't.
The trouble is Fury Road is so highly stylized, so frenetic, it just left me cold .Frankly two stars seems just about right, but I'll give it three just to be generous.