Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max:  Fury Road, director George Miller's reboot of his Mad Max franchise, is essentially a hyper-kinetic remake of his earlier film, The Road Warrior.  That movie established the standard for action pictures when it was released in 1982..  And it seems likely that Fury Road will similarly set the bar for future movies of this kind.  Indeed, I think it is unlikely that anyone will surpass this movie for sheer mayhem and imaginative carnage at least in the near future.  This is the picture against which other movies of the genre will be judged.  No doubt exists that Miller and his set decorators have an unique vision and that their facility for morbid invention is unsurpassed -- there is too much to see in this picture; the eye is not as agile as the camera and, even, an attentive viewer will walk out of the movie visually exhausted and, even, frustrated by the haunting sense that there was more to be seen in the movie's crowded frames, details that went unnoticed, nuances of massacre and chaos that occurred so swiftly that the viewer had no time to luxuriate in them.  Miller's technique is to stage his violence in a format that seems slightly accelerated -- there is a herky-jerky silent movie aspect to the hundreds of duels on moving vehicles and crashes that he stages.  (I hasten to note that actual silent films properly projected don't have this speeded-up quality -- this is an artifact of projecting a film meant to be projected at 18 frames per second at the sound speed of 24 fps.  Miller's action sequences, however, feel "fast-cranked" -- everything moves at a faster speed than seems exactly plausible, although the director also sometimes effortlessly slows the action to better savor a body hurled hundreds of feet in the air or a particularly gaudy explosion or, of course, two huge vehicles studded with tank-armor crashing into one another.)    The effect of Miller's use of slightly speeded up action is to provide the eye with more footage than can comfortably be seen -- we feel as if we are always struggling to keep up with the violent action.  A ten minute action sequence filmed in this fashion isn't reduced to seven minutes -- the sequence remains the same length it would be if conventionally filmed, but because the characters and vehicles move with more celerity, we have the sense that we are being shown more.  And, of course, Miller is the great poet of parallel motion -- that is, vehicles roaring across wastelands parallel to one another, converging, crashing, and engaging in noisy, explosive combat.  The camera is almost always moving, mounted on one or another of the converging vehicles.  The swarms of attack dune buggies whirling around the big "War rigs" -- that is, huge super-powered semi-tractor-trailers -- are envisioned by the director as so many moving camera platforms:  the lens of the camera is always either veering dangerous close to another moving vehicle, in hot pursuit, or spinning around in front on an oncoming semi to confront the roaring vehicle head-on.  The mise-en-scene exemplifies the purest relativity -- for, at least, half of the movie we are immersed in the action from the perspective of vehicles hurtling across the desert terrain:  all motion is relative -- we are either gaining on another vehicle or falling behind or converging with that vehicle's path.  In part, Miller uses the fast motion effect because many of his stunts are "practical" -- that is not CGI.  These are real vehicles and they are actually interacting with one another and I presume that Miller's carefully choreographed chase and pursuit scenes were filmed at slower speeds so that the many potentially lethal effects could be actually performed.  This is a strength of Miller's Mad Max films -- you always have a sense for the tangible bulk of the moving vehicles, a feeling for their weight and speeds, and, although the spectacular combat sequences are fantastically complex and intricate you never have the sense that the laws of physics are being willfully violated.  When someone jumps from one truck to another and slams through a windshield, the audience has a palpable sense that this would be possible.  One's suspension of disbelief relates to whether the human body could take the kind of impacts, and sustain the sorts of woundswhich the movie lovingly depicts without the hero (and heroine) being killed or, at least, seriously crippled.  I saw the movie in 3D and those effects were perfectly achieved -- the images were crystal clear and the use of the third dimension was not particularly intrusive.  In other words, I watched the movie and was not distracted by gratuitous three dimensional effects -- the only exceptions were shots intended to be witty, including a scene in which a flame-throwing guitar played by a hideous mutant mounted atop a platform on the front of a Mack truck is flung into the audience's space, hovering battered and broken mid-air over our heads as an emblem of the death of the murderous freak-musician.

The audience attending this show gets exactly what it has paid for.  And the spectacle is so voluptuously detailed and frenzied that it is certainly possible to wax enthusiastic about many of the action scenes.  So it remains for me to explain why I am just a tiny bit disappointed in the film.  In all essential respects, the movie is a remake of The  Road Warrior -- it differs from that picture only in that the choreography of destruction is more advanced and beautiful.  Fury Road's defect is that there is nothing in the form of the movie or its characters or execution that we haven't already seen and can't, more or less, predict.  This criticism must be properly understood.  Miller's visual imagination is Rabelaisian and unflagging -- the movie is full of grotesque images that we have never seen before and that no one could imagine but Miller.  There are obese pregnant women used as milk-producing dairy animals; cascades of water released in from barren cliffs to swarming thousands of mutants; the bad guys use captured victims as "blood bags" transfusing their blood into their own bodies when going into combat; war boys who look like lemurs, bald heads and black raccoon eyes, spray their lips and mouth with silver paint to "chrome" themselves for admission into a motor-head Vahalla -- the effect to make their mouths look like the teeth of skulls; there are grotesque mutations, a dwarf lord who is chunk of flabby flesh in a rickety throne wheelchair, and the five wives of the chief War Lord and villain are filmed like pre-Raphaelite virgins, dressed in diaphanous white that, nonetheless, displays their nipples; at the climax, a motorcycle mob of old crones takes on the bad guys; in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ragged figures wander to and fro among blasted trees on stilts while ravens and crows harry them.  All of these things are extraordinary and worth the price of admission.  And yet... there really isn't much of a plot.  Mad Max is captured by the War Lord with the five brides, a guy who wears a snarling Joker-style jawbone over his mutilated face.  The villainous War Lord pursues a woman-warrior (played by Charlize Theron) who has abducted the five brides and seeks to take them to the "green place" -- that is, the place of the Mothers.  (This seems to be a reference to the post-apocalyptic oasis that features in the last of the previous Mad Max series, Mad Max and the Thunder Dome.  The woman warrior played by Ms Theron is an amplified version of the Valkyrie played by Tina Turner in the Thunder Dome movie.  The bad guys in a horde of dune buggies chase the war-rig driven by Theron's character and there are high-speed duels with arrows, grenade launchers and the like.  Max and one of the war boys ends up in Theron's rig and, after a disappointing exodus through the desert -- the "green place" has been poisoned -- everyone turns around and returns to the mountain citadel from whence they came.  The battles in the first half of the movie are vehicle to vehicle.  As in The Road Warrior, the battles in the second part of the movie up the ante by having swarms of combatants leaping and diving onto the moving truck -- in this movie, the bad guys are perched on forty foot tall pole-vaulting poles; this allows them to flex and bend, swooping down to let the bad guys hop onto the truck or toss grenades or snatch a damsel out of an adversary vehicle, and, then, swinging back, like huge inverted pendulums in the other direction.  One by one the noble good characters dies heroically and, in the end, the most evil of the villains, the snarl-faced Joker war lord is killed.  The movie is essentially silent -- there are less lines of dialogue in the picture than you would find intertitles in most silent movies.  The second half of the film is more affecting because we know the characters and have empathy for them because we have seen them evolve -- but their evolution is completely predictable:  the loner, Max, as in the earlier films, shows himself willing to sacrifice his life to save the embattled women; the loathsome, slug-like war boy falls in love with one of the war lord's wives and dies to protect her.  The old women on motorcyles are mostly picked-off and Charlize Theron's character is so badly wounded that it seems as if she will die.  The formula was old when it was perfected by John Ford in Stagecoach -- the post-apocalyptic hordes are just another version of Apaches on the war path. In broad form and outline, the movie is exactly what the audience expects.  But except for sound and fury, it isn't really an advance on the previous Road Warrior film -- it's just more accomplished, more hectic, maybe, even more exciting but otherwise just a super-charged remake of the earlier film.