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Mad Max: Fury Road Review: Furiosa and Max Just Ruined Jurassic World

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NOTE: This article is a contribution and do not necessarily represent the views of Player One.
Mad Max: Fury Road pits tribe against tribe in a whirlwind of fanatical violence.
Mad Max: Fury Road pits tribe against tribe in a whirlwind of fanatical violence. Warner Bros. Pictures

Avengers: Age of Ultron was quite good, but Mad Max: Fury Road crystallizes exactly how much we’ve been settling for in recent years. Mad Max: Fury Road will make you want to take up arms in old and exhausted fights with all the ecstatic fervor of a War Boy hopped up on feral blood.

We don’t have to accept more and more CGI! You can have themes that aren’t explicit, and even deliver them at the same time as the explosions. Adult viewers don’t have to just get over on-the-nose lines that lay out the themes at a sixth grade reading level. We’re not wrong to be pissed when a movie spends five minutes of its running time on a commercial for its own sequel! Mad Max: Fury Road will make you angry at everything else for not being better and angry at yourself for permitting them to dupe us for so long as to the best we can expect from our mainstream movies. I have a bad feeling Mad Max: Fury Road has already ruined Jurassic World for me.

Mad Max: Fury Road - Practical vs. CGI

Seeing real cars get real blown up matters. Mad Max: Fury Road pits multiple armies of spiked buggies, monster tire flagships, motorcycle grenadiers and suicide lancers against each other. And while there’s no mistaking Mad Max: Fury Road for anything but fantasy, the concrete reality of the explosions and vehicles are simply impossible to duplicate in a machine. The rare CG in Mad Max: Fury Road sticks out like an irradiated lymph node. Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t alone in pushing for more practical effects. But the twisted metal and seeming life-endangering stunts of Mad Max puts the real car work in Furious 7 to shame.

Much has been made of the feminist bent to Mad Max: Fury Road, thanks in part to mocking coverage of a deluge of manosphere fury at the idea of women being well-portrayed. As it turns out, the anti-feminist brigades are right to worry, Mad Max: Fury Road does indeed feature multiple women characters--many warriors--with a handful who blame the fall of mankind on men (this is partially refuted when a sheltered concubine discovers that women will also kill to survive the wastelands). It’s impossible not to read Mad Max: Fury Road as about feminine agency, as the brides of post-apocalyptic pope Immortan Joe deny their status as property. The child-soldier War Boys and sickly Citadel upper crust even feed off harvested breast milk.
But the scope of Mad Max: Fury Road never contracts to just one focus. There is no “this is what this is about” speech. The economy of the script (which delivers some clunker lines, but is smart enough to mostly stay out of the way), combined with the expansive mythology of the world means that Mad Max: Fury Road rewards many readings. Mad Max: Fury Road is about capitalist inequality, as the leaders of the three city-states (The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm) live in luxury, literally trickling down water to the peasant classes below. Mad Max: Fury Road is also about religious fanaticism, as War Boy Nux goes from chrome-lipped kamikaze to disillusioned revolutionary. There is so much to Mad Max: Fury Road that it does it a disservice to imagine it as little more than a single issue movie with great action.

Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t perfect. There are visual gimmicks that annoy, too many post-processed colors, and moments where the action choreography can get visually confused. But there’s simply nothing like Mad Max: Fury Road. It is one of the most exciting action movies ever made, set in an unforgettable science-fiction world. Max (Tom Hardy) and Furiosa (Charlize Theron) are perfect. Mad Max: Fury Road is adult and vibrant and uncompromising. “It’s such a lovely day!” may be a bad line, but the enthusiasm behind it infects all of Mad Max: Fury Road. If you let it, it will infect you too. Mad Max: Fury Road will make you a fanatic.

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