Utterly thoughtful, action-crazy, brilliant feministic film

Rating: 9/10 (23 August 2015)

Just as "The Thin Red Line" lured loads of boys into cinemas, thinking they'd see something resembling "Platoon" or a mindless Schwarzenegger flick, "Mad Max: Fury Road" takes another route.
There's enough action here to shake a stick at, mainly where CGI doesn't really stand a chance to the real-live graphical action and the special effects are concerned, but the real difference is in the human, here. Both in the contrasts between good and bad, including all of the grey areas, of which there are, humanly speaking, many.
This film manages to inject feminism into your everyday man-packed genre, it's almost maddening to think that this film has come into existence. At the same time, even a broken clock strikes the right time twice a day.
Not that THIS is a broken clock. No, no. This is a world where civilisation is not as us rich westerners know it. It's a world where our poorest live, in cities of dust, with the richest at the top, degrading the ones down the hierarchical line, just along the lines of capitalism, making the ones at the bottom think that's where they belong, all cogs serving the greater good, which in the film is named "Valhalla", to where you gladly sacrifice your life to go, whenever your master feels like it, or you are programmed to.
There is no mercy here. No preconceptions like we are used to. People are people. The film starts off brutal, in the wolf's cave, as it where, before Theron's character decides to go off the decided path together with the tyrannical ruler's "wives" and gets hunted for it.
In an early scene, when the escaping party makes a run for it, one of the enslaved "wives" kicks the chastity belt she's been made to wear, and quickly jumps into a rig.
Theron's communication with Hardy is nearly breathtaking. I mean, enough said, right? I loved the nomenclature. The mixture of language. Words such as "smeg" (possibly culled from TV-series "Red Dwarf"?), "kamakrazee" and "guzzoline" were well-used. Lines like "Is that just the wind or a furious vexation?" and "We will McFeast in Valhalla" actually made sense, rather than seeming like something extremely uncomfortable from, say, True Detective (season two).
"How long has it been?" - "Seven thousand days. And then the ones I can't remember." The film's anti-xenophobic. Just see the interplay where War Boy and Hardy's character is. At first, the hatred is inherent, almost inherited; the more they get to know the situation, themselves and each other, respect and like is gained, as with Hardy's and Theron's characters. It's as though naivitÃ© and innocence are shown as-is: good things, really, in comparison with prejudice.
The fights, the action, is nearly without comparison. I was slightly reminded of the introductory scene in "Saving Private Ryan" when seeing the first battle, but this is beyond that, with a magnificent display made throughout the film. It's really a feministic film, a world based on no bars hold, or rather, on men, women and beings trying to break out of their gender-based cage and away from bad preconceptions.
I can't even begin to say how much I loved the action scenes, the cinematography and the quick editing. The soundtrack is just manic, Wagneresque, and it actually works (where that method is usually, 99 times out of 100, trite beyond words), while you have attackers lurking, coming out of every crevice... It's almost like watching Gilliam's "Brazil", it's so far from this world, that it's almost like watching an action-film apotheosis happening before our eyes, in bright, sparkling colours. Killing never looked this good.
This film really stimulates growth in thinking areas, while being ham-fisted in a really good way. THIS is the way to go, for all action films.
Just a thing pulled from the IMDb trivia department that says a lot about this film: "The film editor, Margaret Sixel, is director George Miller's wife. When she asked her husband why he thought she should do it as she had never edited an action film before, Miller replied, 'Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.'" I love this film.