Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Directed by George Miller
An apocalyptic story set in the furthest reaches of our planet, in a stark desert landscape where humanity is broken, and most everyone is crazed fighting for the necessities of life. Within this world exist two rebels on the run who just might be able to restore order.
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98 films that influenced Mad Max: Fury Road
What critics say influenced Mad Max: Fury Road
But at its best it also plays like an inspired mashup of movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Fred Niblo's Ben-Hur— silent epics that captivate audiences with their imagination, power, and panache.
Miller's most vivid imagery is always shot through with organic touches, including a warlord whose breathing machine bares real teeth and a slave labor system with elaborate gears and a sheer scale out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
The opening scenes of Miller's world of red sand and redder blood in a place called "the Citadel" play out like a primitive version of Fritz Lang's 1927 futuristic "Metropolis" with white-powdered workers running like hamsters in a treadmill to power up a steam-punked system of pulleys and ropes for the benefit of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, from the original "Mad Max"), a dictator resembling a mashup of Batman's Bane, Darth Vader and King Henry VIII.
Later, as the action segues into desert canyons and surrealist rock formations, "Fury Road" astonishes us with landscapes in the same way the magnificent, breathtaking settings of Monument Valley wowed audiences in John Ford's 1939 western "Stagecoach."
As the trailers accurately promise, “Fury Road” doesn’t look like any film you’ve ever seen — though the story is roughly like a 21st-century feminist take on John Ford’s classic “Stagecoach,” set in a post-apocalyptic world as it might be grotesquely imagined by the 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
It’s a nice twist that the real hero of the movie is Theron’s Furiosa, whose shaven head and raw determination bring to mind Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from the Alien series.
It’s no hyperbole to say she’s right up there with Sigourney Weaver in the “Alien” franchise and Linda Hamilton in the “Terminator” films.
The best female action hero since Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Theron is riveting as the clever and determined, shaved-headed Furiosa.
Just compare this example of onscreen feminism to Sigourney Weaver in Alien (1979).
But while Alien went on without Scott, Mad Max has always been George Miller’s.
Furiosa is, nonetheless, at least as assertive as Ripley in Alien or Sarah Connor in The Terminator.
His wildly successful 1979 debut, Mad Max —to be followed by Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)—created a vision of postapocalyptic punk dystopia that was dustier and more barren than the one Ridley Scott would put forth a few years later in Blade Runner , but just as inspirational.
Catapulting over the previous three installments, Miller’s production crew has fashioned a future as distinctive in its way as “Blade Runner.”
The aforementioned tyrant — Immortan Joe (no, that’s not a spelling error), played by Mad Max veteran cast member Hugh Keays-Byrne — has taken lessons from several familiar villains: he’s like Darth Vader, strapping himself into a bellows-mask that amplifies his breathing; he’s like Batman’s Bane, trying to make himself intelligible through the mask as if to beat Hardy at his own game; and he’s like Baron Harkonnen of David Lynch’s Dune , being so misshapen, corpulent, and generously pimpled that he needs custom-fitted body armor.
Furiosa drives a huge and hilariously phallic “war rig” for Immortan Joe, the fiendish albino baron of a water-starved desert city that suggests Frank Herbert’s Dune as reimagined by Buckethead.
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Immortan Joe represents the elder white male always at the apex of power structures in society; the lawmaker who is always deciding what’s best for women and what they should do with their bodies; a relic whose political greed is responsible for killing the world – Miller takes heavy cues from Nevil Shute’s On The Beach and Stanley Kramer’s film adaptation when it comes to Earth’s poisoning.
Joe is not one to let go easily and keeps on the trail on a chase through a canyon reminiscent of the Gregory Peck/Burl Ives 1958 movie “The Big Country.”
Then, the numerous chases and frantic fights on wheels make for terrific theater the same way the violent, spectacular chariot races did in "Ben-Hur" (either the 1925 silent version or the 1959 remake).
In this regard it recalls another audacious big-budget fantasy, Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967), for which the director constructed elaborate and highly detailed sets of a futuristic Paris.
Instead, throughout the film, the hues in various scenes evoke the feeling of such classics as Sergio Leone’s Westerns and Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.”
Mad Max becomes a kind of mercenary fighting on behalf of the good people defending a small-scale oil refinery against marauders after the fashion of “Seven Samurai” that his talents as a screenwriter and director begin to emerge.
Similarly, the Japanese wastelands in Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Throne of Blood (1957) visualise a dust laden, smoky aesthetic, which is fitting for a film made after the nuclear warfare of the Second World War.
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By contrast, Theron’s one-armed bandit seems to be channelling the spirit of Gibson’s deranged Apocalypto , an oil-smear across her forehead signalling both petrol-head and tribal-warrior, her mechanical hand adding just a touch of The Terminator .
Furiosa is, nonetheless, at least as assertive as Ripley in Alien or Sarah Connor in The Terminator.
Charlize Theron shares a movie-opening title card with Hardy and pulls a Linda Hamilton-in-Terminator 2, elbowing the title character out of the way to become the film's true protagonist.
While the comparison is somewhat apt, I find it more in line with someone like Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” “Furiosa” is Sarah Connor reincarnated into a one-handed death machine, and she’s freaking awesome.
Add Theron's Furiosa to the pantheon of kick-ass female action heroes alongside Alien 's Sigourney Weaver and Terminator 2 's Linda Hamilton.
Her portrayal of the fearless Furiosa — missing half an arm from previous wars waged — is as instantly iconic a depiction of female ferocity as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens.
There have been rumors that this is Charlize Theron’s version of Ripley in “Aliens.”
The first point shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with Miller’s astounding Happy Feet, a blockbuster whose environmentalist credentials were broadcast at about the same volume as James Cameron’s Avatar.
Miller is said to have brought Eve Ensler , author of The Vagina Monologues, in as a consultant on his script.
And one shouldn’t undervalue the empowerment message at the heart of this film—Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues” consulted with Miller on the script—which suggests that women, as the creators of new life, will, inherently, always be the gender that holds hardest onto hope for the future.
Since Eve Ensler, the author of “The Vagina Monologues”, served as a consultant on the film, we are led to believe that it was a statement about gender equality.