Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
What made George Miller’s fourth Mad Max entry–decades after the third one was released–so impressive is that no one was quite expecting the new movie to be what it was in terms of theme, characters, landscape, and especially visual style.
Mad Max was a cult sci-fi character, who hadn’t been in a movie since 1985, and it seemed Miller had moved on from the character.
There was certainly no expectation for Mel Gibson to reprise the role.
At the time, Miller was better known to audiences for the Happy Feet and Babe movies, and among the geek crowd for his canceled Justice League film.
When photos for the new entry of Mad Max were released, they showed a stark, dull landscape, a far cry from the bright, sun-soaked palette of the final film.
Even the initial trailers didn’t give a strong sense of what this film was going to be.
And yet, Mad Max: Fury Road displayed grand feat of filmmaking and stunt work, and a narrative driven by and working in conjunction with the action, with generations meeting between Chaplin films and the modern, subversive action film.
Furiosa (Charlize Theron) escapes from tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) along with his wife, and her journey becomes entangled with the fabled drifter Max (Tom Hardy), a survivor of the Wasteland.
Fury Road was such a departure from the previous Mad Max films that it felt fresh, almost entirely separate, which goes to show a director is never too old to have a stylistic evolution.
The franchise’s shift away from Max to center on Furiosa was clever (and necessary). So is Miller’s world-building, which is established in a state of motion.
Miller, now 79, projected the image of a man just getting started– Fury Road felt like the work of a younger filmmaker.
Miller has remained motivated, interested in topping himself, which suggests that his proposed sequel, Mad Max: The Wasteland may push his–and ours–boundaries.
