What Keith's Watching: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

I was really skeptical of Mad Max: Fury Road going into it. Mainly because I'm skeptical anytime people rave about a movie and tell me it's the Movie of the Year. Especially when it's an action or sci-fi movie. I had similar issues going into John Wick which was proven very wrong. Which brings me back to Fury Road. It was great. I wouldn't call it the Movie of the Year, but it's pretty damn close. It's a film that is fun and entertaining, extreme in every sense, but masterfully done.

Fury Road perfectly captures the craziness of the original Mad Max universe and it's style without taking it too far because of the special effects now available. The stunts and action pieces fit into the story rather than the story trying to string together all these stunt sequences. (i.e. It doesn't feel like a Fast and Furious movie.) It would've been easy to take the eccentric characters to new levels in this day and age thanks to CGI, but that's avoided. Instead today's special effects are meant to take the world itself to a new level and make it on a grander scale so that the characters seem to fit. The movie itself is on an epic scale the likes of which haven't really been seen in a long time.

Now even though it's epic in scope and scale, the theme is quite narrow and spot on: Survival. How to survive in a barren wasteland with you back against a wall. Or in this case, with your back against hordes of people coming to kill you in ridiculous war machines. It feels very much like a Western on steroids and nitro.

The movie was praised for it's feminism. Which again, was kind of a turnoff for me. I was surprised because the trailers didn't seem like a feminist film. But I'm not a fan of movies that try to push agendas down the throat of the audience. Fury Road doesn't do this though. It's a feminist movie because it handles it's female characters right. It doesn't make them one-dimension or treat them as women in distress that need saving. There's the sense that Furiosa and the wives she is traveling with are strong characters. They have this plan, they are escaping from Immorten Joe, the evil dictator of this little corner of the wasteland. There's the feeling that they might be okay on their own. But when Man comes along, it might be mutually beneficial for them to team up. Max needs their help as much as they need him.

The only reason to not watch this movie would be if you didn't like action movies. Fury is the epitome of action movies. There's maybe twenty minutes of set up and then an hour and forty minutes of action with a few nice breaks to the help the story along and let the audience breath.

There's one excellent break in here that really adds to the Mad Max mythos. Max goes off and clearly kills a lot of people, but the audience doesn't see it. It adds to the idea that this is a legend being told and because no one lived through experience, there's no one but Max to tell the tale. Also, it presents the idea that there are things Max is capable of that are too violent to see. What we see is just a fraction of what he's able to do when he needs to. At first, I thought this was a strange choice, but it's really quite brilliant.

Like I said, the movie is straight action. It almost borders on my issue with Man of Steel, which was too much action at the end and not enough beats to let the audience process what's going on. For me, too much action can become boring and hard to stay interested in. Fury Road does a decent job of building those beats in and not crossing that line. It's absolutely worth seeing. Maybe not Film of the Year worthy, but it's pretty damn close. Which is big praise for a movie that's a franchise's fourth installment.