The chase scenes in the movie’s second half find the heroes not just fleeing, but combining their wits in order to outsmart their enemies. After the men and women join forces, however, Miller and his writers expand their focus so that one cares about the survival of the entire group. For most of the movie’s first half, Miller divides one’s attention evenly between Max and Furiosa the chase scenes in this portion are staged so that one worries about the survival of a single character (or in some cases, a single vehicle) being pursued by a murderous horde. Miller and cowriters Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris signal the end of Joe’s reign-and the arrival of a more democratic society-in how they structure the narrative of Fury Road. After Nux and Max get separated from the army, they come to assist Furiosa and the women, gradually recognizing the women as worthy peers. He ends up powering a vehicle that’s driven by Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a dogmatic young man who wants nothing more than to die in battle for Joe. (This detail suggests a comic literalizing of the protest slogan “No blood for oil.”) When we meet Max (Tom Hardy, taking over for Mel Gibson), he’s in the process of getting captured by a band of War Boys, who plan to convert him into a human gas tank. Brainwashed into devoting their entire lives to the army, the War Boys power Joe’s fleet of military vehicles literally with their own blood-in this future hell, bodily fluids are used interchangeably with gasoline. Joe’s soldiers-a race of bald-headed, white-painted grease monkeys known as the War Boys-are one of the movie’s most ingenious innovations. The story kicks into gear when Joe’s lieutenant, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), liberates the women and, fleeing Joe’s soldiers, sets off with them across the desert to a fabled all-female utopia known as the Green Place. In addition to hoarding most of the water for himself and overseeing an army that protects his interests, Joe keeps several wives in captivity to bear his children. A tyrant named Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the wicked Toe Cutter in the original Mad Max) has commandeered Australia’s last remaining source of freshwater and uses this power to rule pharaohlike over the Citadel, a mountain community that’s grown up around the water supply. Like the previous two Mad Max movies, Fury Road takes place in a postapocalyptic world of scarce natural resources. 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. The story of Fury Road is so simple and the details are so engrossing that one can easily lose track of the characters and just get lost in the design. Most of the film takes place over a few days, and much of the action consists of extended chase sequences (indeed Miller originally devised the film as one continuous chase). Miller reportedly instructed his actors to devise a history for every prop they used, and many of those props appear to have been crafted by hand. Miller began planning this fourth installment as far back as 2001 and claims to have generated so much material during the unusually long preproduction phase that he already has a couple more stories ready to go.īecause of this long history (not to mention Miller’s recent experience directing the children’s animation Happy Feet and its sequel), every shot bustles with imaginative detail-the world of the film feels authentically lived in.
The movie builds upon motifs from Miller’s original trilogy with Mel Gibson- Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)-though it’s not a sequel but a complete reimagining of the world in those films. In a sense Fury Road has been gestating since the late 1970s, when Miller first envisioned the character of Mad Max and the nightmarish future Australia he inhabits. George Miller’s action fantasy is astonishingly dense for a big-budget spectacle, not only in its imagery and ideas but in the complex interplay between them ( Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips has aptly likened the movie to a symphony).