Mad Max: Fury Road (15)

Posted by ruthmedia on May 12, 2015 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Mad Max: Fury Road (15)

Running Time: 120 minutes

Director: George Miller

Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Rosie Huntington

Synopsis: In a stark and parched post-apocalyptic landscape, taciturn anti-hero Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) meets his shaven-headed female counterpart Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) who needs to cross the desert to get home.

Writer/director George Miller revives the Mad Max series after thirty years with this hyper-kinetic chase movie. Charismatic actor Tom Hardy is the maddest, baddest, intense Max who shows with his all-action, heart stopping antics that we don’t need another hero.  Charlize Theron co-stars as a badass female counterpart, Furiosa, who is trying to survive by making it back to her childhood home

Mad Max: Fury Road is a worthy sequel to one of the all-time great action franchises – Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

In a pre-title sequence we learn that Max –“My name is Max. My world is fire…and blood” – is tormented by flashbacks, attempting to find redemption and survive in the arid desert far reaches of a post-apocalyptic world, which has been through a massive global catastrophe.  Now water, oil and bullets are scarce.  Captured by the cruel overlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keys-Byrne, who has been in all three Mad Max films) Max is taken to the Citadel – a bizarre Terry Gilliam-type structure where the pallid masses are oppressed and water-deprived.

When Furiosa highjacks a fuel truck and makes an escape with a group of Immortan Joe’s women or ‘breeders’ , Max is soon in use as a blood supply to loyal follower Nux (Nicholas Hoult), who is strapped to the front of his vehicle as the bonkers, frantic road chase commences.

Boasting amazing visuals – the majority of which are real practical effects, stunts, make-up and sets – sometimes the desert-scape looks like a painting from visionary, eccentric, epic Victorian painter, John Martin and sometimes like surrealist images such as Caravan and The Persistence of Memory from Salvador Dali.  The war-rigs in the convoy pursuing the rebels seem to have taken their inspiration from assemblage sculpture and junk art.

The soundtrack by Junkie XL is loud and discordant, with drum beats which echo the frantic drummers strapped to the front of the massive, mad pursuit war-rigs.

With eye-popping cinematography from John Seale, this new addition to the Mad Max genre/franchise is Wagnerian in scale, with a large helping of Hieronymus Bosch.

Images courtesy of Warner Bros