Justine Smith: “Why can’t all films be like Mad Max: Fury Road? Watching the trailers for Mad Max before it premiered, my blood pressure rose and my breath quickened. I didn’t want this to happen - experience had taught me the movie never lived up to the trailer: I was setting myself up for disappointment. But I was wrong. Mad Max delivered, and in doing so revealed that the blockbusters that I had given a pass to were not living up to their expectations, they were not delivering on their promises: we had been fooled for far too long to accept that our popular cinema was going to be mediocre at best. The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema. When was the last time a big budget movie wasn’t a bloated mess of fan service and convoluted story? I had forgotten it was possible for Hollywood cinema could be this good, this simple.
“Mad Max: Fury Road represents a strong vision of a dark future. Without resorting to cheap cynicism, it offers a troubling vision of a not-so-distant dystopia where environmental abuses have stripped the earth of life. Humanity has hung on by a thread, embracing water and mechanics as their new God. In an epic chase for freedom, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tries to set free the wives of a terrifying warlord, chasing towards a remembered greenland where women reign. With a constant forward momentum, the movie drifts left to right on screen with the epicness of a classical painting. The richness of detail and strength of desperation adding levels of nuance to the deceptively simple narrative trajectory.
“Without question, Mad Max is a rare blockbuster that will pass the test of time removed from nostalgia. It is a great film that inspires tremendous emotion and doesn’t undervalue the power of great ideas.”
Andrew Bemis: ‘The straightforward way Mad Max tackles narrative and character, stripping it down to bare essentials and offering dynamic symbology was a distant memory in popular cinema.’ I want to pass this on to everyone who dismisses Fury Road as a fun action movie with no real substance, when it's actually as much a triumph of sophisticated, economical storytelling as it is on a technical level. But George Miller's approach to advancing the narrative, the characters' arcs and the story's subtext (well, text, really) is so purely visual that it doesn't always register to viewers who are used to being told, rather than shown, what a movie is about. Not that there aren't plenty of wonderful dialogue-driven movies, but Miller's approach has more in common with silent cinema than other contemporary blockbusters. A simple image like a character who realizes that she's about to die protectively clutching a bag of seeds is more powerful than a lengthy monologue about the plight of our environment could have been. The movie works as brilliantly as it does because of Miller's extraordinary trust in images and gestures (big and small) to tell a story (it helps, of course, that he has impeccable taste).
“Fury Road also makes most other blockbusters look puny on a purely aesthetic level. In a movie filled with exhilarating images, one of my favorites is towards the beginning, when Max is trying to escape his captors. It's a dark, chaotic sequence that suddenly gives way to blinding light and silence as we get our first look at Immortal Joe's Citadel. It's a moment that has the same kind of power as Dorothy opening her front door and stepping into Oz. Mad Max has many moments like this, reminding that, though blockbusters offer plenty of loud spectacle, few even bother with trying to manipulate scale, perspective, light, sound or any of the other basic tools at their disposal to create a genuine sense of awe. For a movie that uses every state-of-the-art filmmaking tool at its disposal, Fury Road is surprisingly classical in its approach to visual storytelling.”
Justine: “One of the blessings of people appreciating Fury Road is that it has really cast George Miller’s entire filmography into light, and the fact is, he has always been an economic and dynamic filmmaker. From Mad Max to Happy Feet, dialogue is sparse and used with a lot of intention. I agree, there is a lot of trust in how he treats the image. This shows not only a confidence in his own abilities, but a confidence in the audience’s abilities to understand what he’s trying to do. One of the problems with modern blockbusters is that they aim for such wide universality that they lose their personality and nuance. Films like The Avengers need to be understood in equal measure by a New Yorker and someone over in China. As a result the importance of following story and focusing on subtext gets left aside, it’s too much of a risk that the audience doesn’t understand.
“I like your comparison to The Wizard of Oz, a personal favourite of mine. As a child I’d watch it almost daily, getting lost in that world. While Mad Max may not be a ‘children’s film,’ the way it uses images and sounds to guide forward the story has a purity that could be easily understood by a child. This is why the oversimplification of Blockbusters is so frustrating, there is an easier route that doesn’t compromise story or character - Miller has proved that. Popular cinema has a way of bringing the audience on a journey. Movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Mad Max have a way of inspiring the imagination and transporting us to a new and fantastic world. Mad Max has a darker bent, hidden beneath the thunderous music and fantastic universe is a dark story about oppression and personal responsibility. Mad Max was always a film about humanity’s ability to cast aside responsibility and watch the world fade to desert rather than try to fix it.
Andrew: I’m glad you brought up Happy Feet – those movies were in constant rotation on our TV when my kids were younger, and I thought I’d never want to see or think about them again. But about halfway through seeing Mad Max, I realized that it’d actually make a perfect double feature with Happy Feet Two. I don’t expect many of our readers to remember Happy Feet Two or have a strong opinion about it, but they’re basically the same movie. Also, I’m hoping Miller’s renewed popularity might inspire people to give The Witches of Eastwick, one of the first ‘grown up’ movies I loved as a kid, another look. It’s not as personal as the rest of Miller’s movies, but its ridicule of toxic masculinity points the way towards Mad Max’s full-blown assault on the patriarchy.
“As I write that, I can anticipate some readers rolling their eyes – after all, Mad Max is a car picture, not a nuanced dissection of gender roles. Its message is an all-caps cry that is literally written on a wall in the movie: ‘WHO KILLED THE WORLD?’ Men have poisoned the earth and doomed humanity, and the promise of women taking over is our only hope. It’s definitely not subtle, but it shouldn’t be. As a person who, in his most anxious moments, Googles phrases like ‘global warming worst case scenario’ late at night, Mad Max speaks to me and, oddly enough, it’s ultimately reassuring. As dark as it gets, it’s the rare post-apocalyptic movie that isn’t nihilistic. Though Miller’s vision of the future is one where much of what has been broken can’t be fixed, as long as there are people willing to work together, there’s still hope.” ~ Justine Smith and Andrew Bemis (originally posted March 6, 2016)
Note: Mad Max: Fury Road ranked #1 in the 2015 Muriel Awards.
Muriel’s Top 25 films of the 2010s
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller) [250/16]
2. The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick) [202/12]
3. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho) [176/13]
4. The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson) [162/11]
5. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) [158/11]
6. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel and Ethan Coen) [155/13]
7. Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins) [143/10]
8. Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer) [133/11]
9. Carol (2015, Todd Haynes) [130/9]
10. Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan) [125/9]
11. Holy Motors (2012, Léos Carax) [124/8]
12. Phantom Thread (2017, Paul Thomas Anderson) [119/8]
13. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, Martin Scorsese) [116/10]
14. Certified Copy (2010, Abbas Kiarostami) [116/8]
15. Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele) [110/9]
16. The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer & Cynthia Cynn and [anonymous]) [110/16]
17. Meek’s Cutoff (2010, Kelly Reichardt) [94/7]
18. Inherent Vice (2014, Paul Thomas Anderson) [87/6]
19. Roma (2018, Alfonso Cuaron) [81/6]
20 (tie). A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) [77/6]
20 (tie). Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater) [77/6]
22 (tie). Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater) [76/5]
22 (tie). The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson) [76/5]
24. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, Quentin Tarantino) [74/6]
25. Paterson (2016, Jim Jarmusch) [71/5]
Italics denote winners of the Golden Muriel for Best Picture.
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