Ridin’ Dirty: “Mad Max: Fury Road”

Photograph by Jasin Boland / Warner Bros. Pictures / Everett

I read and heard about the eyeball-scorching, cornea-melting, socket-shattering intensity of “Mad Max: Fury Road” and thought, “Bring it on.” After seeing the movie, my optics remain intact, but they didn't remain immune to the virtues of George Miller’s fabulous creation, which are found in an entirely different direction from the spectacular visuals that have been widely vaunted—and marketed.

Miller is, above all, a rational filmmaker—a supremely rational one, whose mighty set pieces have the intricately interlocked construction of a Rube Goldberg contraption set to the speed of a Road Runner cartoon. Regardless of how much (or how little) of the action is accomplished with real vehicles and real actors hurtling through real space (and Miller’s cinematographer, John Seale, is forthcoming about effects as well as stunts), Miller parses these conjured fragments of space with a luminous coherence. One could plot maps of the movie’s battlefields by following the shots’ succession of angles and perspectives.

The battle scenes are long and the outcome of each lands a long narrative far from the starting point. The movie’s excitement isn’t in the images themselves (though it’s artificially stoked by the rapidity of the editing and the painfully bombastic music). Rather, it’s in the construction of the fight scenes and the suspense that’s built into them. It becomes clear from the very first chase—when the Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) diverts her war rig from its assigned course to her own chosen road of escape—that each decision, each maneuver, each chance taken or missed will play a distinguishable role in the outcome of the scene.

There’s nothing cartoonish about the long and complex conflagrations, which offer something beside the binary abstractions of life and death, and display an unusually clinical effect: impacts hurt, bullets draw blood, falls and blows break bones, wounds incapacitate characters and leave them in need of medical care and fighting to survive. (The very fact that Furiosa has a prosthetic arm—and, when she loses it, fights with the stump visible—points to the vulnerable flesh that renders violence as dramatic as it is horrific.)

Other elements of the production are cartoonish, and calculatedly so—particularly, the vehicles themselves, welded junk-yard behemoths that play like the toluene hallucinations of a kid gluing plastic race-car models too long in a closed basement. For the most part, their delights exhaust their inventive excesses in a snapshot glance. Yet even here Miller’s logical bent prevails, as in the contrivance I found the most thrilling—extra-long rods like those used for pole vaults, attached vertically to trucks, at the top of which warriors cling and sway as they await the moment to drop from them onto Furiosa’s rig and attack it. The pendular swing as they time their leaps is a visual music unto itself, a brief but dazzling phase-game that reminded me of early work by Steve Reich.

Even so, the gratifications of “Mad Max: Fury Road” are largely intellectual, not visceral or sensual. For eyebrow-singing, it can’t hold a candle (or, rather, a blowtorch) to the ultra-low-budget “Bellflower” (why hasn’t its director, Evan Glodell, made another movie yet?). For giddy action, Michael Bay has and gives more fun. For choreographic violence, John Hyams leaves Miller in the dust. Though Miller has made a nominal action film, the images themselves offer very few compositional delights. I saw the film in 3-D, and found that Miller relied on several recurring shock-tropes, such as vehicles and warriors darting into the frame as if from the foreground, taking a viewer by surprise with its proximity and the shift from the long view to the near one. But those minor jolts aren’t the same as the ecstatic rush of a complex, oblique, or revelatory composition.

The severe logic of Miller’s scene construction seems to constrain his visual sense, and the development of the drama seems to impose a moral inhibition on images for their own sake. For a movie that appears to run on spectacle, it’s nearly iconoclastic in its dressed-up austerity. By far the best thing about “Mad Max: Fury Road” is the story, and Max (Tom Hardy) isn’t even its protagonist. He’s a captive of the Citadel, where he’s masked, suspended upside-down in a sepulchral hold, and tapped for his blood, which keeps the warrior Nux (Nicholas Hoult) in fighting form. In voice-over, Max (who is haunted by the vision of a girl he couldn’t save in the post-apocalyptic chaos) says that he’s driven solely by the blind instinct to survive.

The drama is sparked by Furiosa’s choice: taken in childhood from a distant “green place” at a time when water has become scarce, she enjoys a trusted place high in the hierarchy of the cruelly repressive, physically rapacious, and economically predatory regime of the Citadel. (Warning: spoilers ahead.) When she’s entrusted with transporting water in a “war rig,” she also sneaks out five pregnant and chastity-belted young women belonging to the tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), driving the rig off course and heading for the green land of her birth.

Nux is one of the fighters charged by Immortan Joe with bringing Furiosa and the five women back—but he can’t fight without the aid of Max’s blood, so he drives his own war rig with Max—a needle in his neck, a tube connected to Nux’s body—lashed to the front of it. Yet when Nux’s rig crashes, Max wanders the desert, finds Furiosa and her rig, attempts to commandeer it, but quickly learns that his only chance for survival is to make common cause with her as she flees fast convoys of more imposing weaponry dispatched from the Citadel—and he doesn’t at all mind sticking it to his former captors.

Furiosa states her motive explicitly: she seeks “redemption.” She has been a beneficiary of a regime that is cruel to all—and especially to women—and she gives up her position and risks her life both because she herself wants out and because she wants to give another chance (“hope,” she says) to at least this small group of her indirect victims. She repents of her unjust privilege, bought through the suffering of others. And when she finds the “green place” as brown, dry, and despoiled as the surrounding desert, she—with Max’s help—realizes that there’s no place to go but the Citadel, and nothing to do but overthrow its regime.

Miller and his co-writers, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris, lend the story a quasi-Biblical starkness as well as a visionary mythology involving a band of older biker women, the Vuvalini, who are refugees from the “green place” as well as the last bearers of witness to those bygone green times. The revolutionary fervor that rises toward the end of the film is rousing and gratifying. But it’s precisely in these satisfactions that Miller’s vision turns from stark to thin. Furiosa’s place in the Citadel’s regime is left unexplored; what she knew and when she knew it—the use of women as breeders and men as blood tanks—is never made clear. Her place in the hierarchy, the place of other women of similar martial talent, the means by which Immortan Joe holds sway over the Citadel’s insiders and dominion over the huddled masses below, the passions that rise up—bloodlessly and cheerfully—when Furiosa and Max make their assault (such as it is) on the Citadel, all of these matters, which would render the world-making thicker and the characters more substantial, are left aside.

Furiosa is never excessively compromised; the residents of the Citadel as well as its oppressed victims are simple, uniform, undivided, without faction or conflict. Miller makes sure to deliver a setup that’s unequivocal, a resolution that’s untroubled. Within its furious action, it delivers surprisingly simplistic gratifications that are no less enervating for the positive feelings that they generate. The political underpinnings of “The Avengers,” “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” even Zack Snyder’s Superman film, “Man of Steel,” are more ambiguous and more complex.