Mad Max: Fury Road finishes with a quote. It reads, "Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves? - The First History of Man." Coming at the tail end of what has just transpired, and in light of the rhetoric of the Mad Max franchise in general, it certainly has an immediate tonal resonance, but when I searched for the source at home, I found that there wasn't one. It was made up for the film. I was surprised at first, until I gave it some thought, and came to the clarifying realisation of one of my favourite things about this film: it has a thoroughly rich, well-developed backstory and overarching universe, and it's offering up none of it. The movie is a two-hour car chase (genuinely), and as such, there's no time for wheel-spin, no time for overwrought expository dialogue. You are placed into a moment of time in this universe, in which everyone already knows everything, and it leaves the blank filling up to you. But you do fill in the blanks, because the work has been done to ensure that none of it seems improvised. Everything makes sense, even if you're not sure why. Which makes it all the more disappointing to me that George Miller is offering up this backstory freely when asked. I don't want to know where the Doof Warrior (Iota, the aforementioned pyro-guitarist) came from. I don't want to know what a single shred of Immortan Joe's (motherfucking Hugh Keays-Byrne) appearance represents. The film gives you enough to go with, because everything that happens, happens because the characters understand their place in the world to advance the plot, not to show a fish out of water how the world works. When Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tells Max Rockatanksy (Tom Hardy) that what they share is a need for redemption, I don't find myself pining for a comic series to tell me what she meant by that. I want to fill in the blanks for myself. I may sound redundant at this point, my stressing on the importance of practicality over digital wizardry again and again, but cars actually crashing into other cars makes the world feel real, and when a world feels real, you feel like you're in it; a part of it. And I stress this a bunch, too, but semiotics isn't just some pseudo-psychoanalytical bullshit word every uni student seems to know. Our ability to assign meaning and resonance to otherwise foreign imagery is the real deal, and it's what makes something like Mad Max: Fury Road work so effectively while effectively telling us nothing. Immortan Joe's Warboys shoot spray paint into their mouths before a fight, and we get it. Huffing paint gets you high, ergo, in a world slavishly devoted to chrome, it gets you good and ready for a fight. Or maybe that's nothing more than my interpretation. That's what's so wonderful about fully developing a universe and offering up none of it: it's entirely coherent, and entirely up for debate. Ask David Lynch. I still don't know what the fuck Ben's deal is in Blue Velvet; every time I watch it, I come away with a new understanding. But that's what's so wonderful about revisiting it; with my attention on one new cryptic detail, everything old is new again.
Speaking of old and new, I want to talk about how Max Rockatansky is like the heroes of old, in that in Mad Max: Fury Road, he isn't a hero. In fact, he kind of sucks. He spends the entirety of the film's first act strapped to the front of a car, with a needle in his neck feeding blood into a dying, hopped-up Warboy. He spends a good chunk of the film's second act in chains, trying to remove a metal brace strapped around his mouth. Even in the film's final act, when he's good and ready for a fight, the dispatch of the film's villain doesn't even happen at his hands; the duty to chillingly shout, "Remember me?" and tear off the mask connected to Joe's flesh left to Furiosa. In fact, his one moment of heroic glory, in which he appears to effectively destroy an entire vehicle of murderers who have a lot of guns, happens off-screen. The reason this is so wonderful is summed up just before it happens. The car is approaching, and Furiosa is trying to work out what to do, while also trying to get their truck unstuck from the mud. Max says he'll take care of the approaching vehicle. Furiosa looks at Max like he's insane. "What if you're not back before we get the engines running?" Max looks back at her with the same face. "...you keep moving," he mumbles, and walks into the fog. Max exists in a world distilled to such wanton cruelty, cruelty that the demons haunting him remind him of, literally, that he has adapted to a single instinct: survival. When he joins Furiosa's cause, it's not because he sees it as the right thing to do, but because he sees it as his best chance to not die. If that means saving the lives of a few people in the process, then so be it. Except he's not really there to save anybody's life, he's just along for the ride, trying to stay alive like them. Going back to the aforementioned scene, when the car first approaches, Max attempts to snipe its searchlight with only two rounds in the chamber. He doesn't even come close to a hit with the first one, and gives the gun to Furiosa to do the job for him with their last chance. Even in the bridge between the film's second and third acts, when the trademark "hero stays behind while the group presses on" story beat arrives, a five-second visit from his ghosts leads him to say, "Nah, fuck this" and deliver an idea to Furiosa and her crew. Not a plan, mind you, an idea. The reason this is so great is because it understands the lesson modern action films have forgotten: a hero is not someone who acts heroically. A hero is someone we can recognise, someone who is like us, someone who would be terrified and selfish and every bad quality we would all possess in a situation like this, so that when the hero has their moment of redemption, it allows us to feel like we can, too. In Man of Steel, Superman spends the whole film talking about how conflicted he feels, whilst never once demonstrating that conflict. A hero shouldn't have to say that they're conflicted, a hero should emanate that from the moment they're on screen. Max does. Every dick move, every animalistic grunt, every weak allowance of amicability he allows his companions to see, the aforementioned moment when he sees a caravan of people advancing to certain death, and tells them that there may be another way, his willingness to give blood so that Furiosa won't die as he finally tells her, "My name is Max", right down to disappearing into the crowd after he knows the job is done, contributes to his, and our, journey to becoming a real hero.
Here's the thing, though, the really dirty secret: Max isn't the hero of this movie, Furiosa is. Now, at this point, I could talk about a whole bunch of things. I could talk about the Bechdel Test, and about how Mad Max: Fury Road passes it, proving how ridiculously fucking easy it is to do so without harming any preconceived notions of what constitutes entertainment for gender. I could talk about this dopey bullshit, and the other edge of the sword I have to fall on when I so vehemently stress the need for every opinion to have the right to be heard. Instead, I want to talk about feminism, and about how this movie is feminist not in the way the word has been twisted, but as it actually is: equal. I mentioned earlier that Max is often useless in this movie, and that Furiosa often does the job for him. When a conflict arises, she has an answer, and as I've also mentioned earlier, the villain has a direct emotional relationship to her, and he is hers to kill. But here's the actual dirty secret: Furiosa isn't the hero of this movie, no-one is. The goal of our protagonists is to get a truck carrying a group of women that Immortan Joe had enslaved to bear his children to the place that Furiosa grew up. Every man and woman on board is capable, and not one of them needs another to survive. What they need is each other's help to stay together. And it's here that George Miller really nails it. Feminism isn't about reversing or abolishing the rights or privileges of men, it's simply about leveling the fucking playing field, and Mad Max: Fury Road understands that no better than in its willingness to kill old ladies. This is a cold, hostile wasteland that has no time to set aside ground rules for what's culturally acceptable or not. There is only the fight for survival, and if you're in it, that means you have as much chance of dying as you do surviving. Nobody is incapable of fighting. With the honed skills that anyone with the perseverance and discipline to do so can achieve, everyone on the truck fights and dies for their cause, including the men, including the women. Max's uselessness in a fight isn't there to communicate him as somewhat lesser than his female counterparts, because as the movie comes to communicate, he's no more or less capable than anyone around him. Max needs Furiosa to shoot the car's light, and Furiosa needs Max to give her his blood when she's dying. Even the motive of the film's antagonist isn't saying anything particularly condemning of gender politics. Immortan Joe has picked these women, whom he sees as the most aesthetically perfect, to bear his children and continue his legacy. He sees them as objects, but only in the exact same way he sees the city of people he holds at ransom with his hand on the water supply as objects. In this world, there's no time for something as inane and stupid as the idea that different chromosomes equals different rights. There is only alive and dead, the fight and who wins it. That's feminism.
There's a moment in Mad Max: Fury Road that made me make a noise I can't even begin to describe. Warboys sway back and forth on long poles attached to the back of cars, to pick up and pass anyone they need to. One of them grabs Max, and on the back swing, comes so close to the ground that Max's hair brushes against the rocky surface of the road. A groan lurched from me, out of a pure, visceral, gut reaction to what I was seeing. I can't remember the last time an action movie elicited that sort of reaction from me. Actually, you know what? For the first time, I'm going to admit hyperbole (whilst still committing hyperbole). I can remember the last time a movie elicited that sort of reaction from me. It was any movie that had real people doing real stunts. I can preach, and have preached (even in this review), about how practical will forever beat digital, but there's no greater argument than a film like Mad Max: Fury Road. Visual effects are at their best when you can't separate the real from the fake, and it brought me such joy to find out that CGI, for the most part, was only used to enhance that which was real. And make no mistake, real isn't synonymous with boring, or safe. The shit that goes down in this flick, and all of Miller's masterpieces before it, is unbelievable. Hell, Guy Norris, Miller's long-time go-to stunt coordinator, retired after one particular coordinated crash because nothing from then on could possibly be as amazing, or as purely fucking dangerous, as that one. Mad Max: Fury Road stands, and exists, on its own, as it well should, but in a lot of ways, it seems to be looking back and commenting on all of the action films of the last ten years. While its series has a history, and a lineage, it bears no requirement that you are aware of any of it. It's not a sequel, or a prequel, or a reboot. It is simply another chapter in this character's life. There are no references to what came before it, what will come after it, what's behind or on the horizon; it exists in the now for this very moment. I think a lot of people are confusing quality with consistency when it comes to Marvel. Human beings are inherent problem solvers, so being given the opportunity to connect two dots will always elicit a positive reaction. But, as I've covered already, losing sight of the now to focus on the upcoming will result in a disappointing retrospective, unless something changes that, and soon. I sincerely hope everyone's paying attention to Mad Max: Fury Road. It's fast, and frenetic, and really, really, fucking exciting, but it has something to say, and it knows exactly when it needs to be said. A lot of people die, but it doesn't revel or glorify the violence, choosing to direct its focus to the colliding chunks of metal rather than the people within them. It gives you bizarre characters in a cruel world and allows you to feel like you could be them. It looks back on the action movies of old, and steadfastly steers them into the new. Jurassic World doesn't need to get hit with another potshot, but fuck you, Jurassic World. Dinosaurs are still amazing, and so are car crashes. You will be forgotten, Mad Max: Fury Road will not.
