Mad max fury road netflix
Logically, a film this dedicated to action should have skimped on characterization instead, Fury Road uses its lack of development for each character as an advantage rather than a hindrance. (And in fact, on the Mad Max Sydney website, each of the cars received their own character posters.)Īnd considering how surprisingly strong our connection is to these characters, that’s saying a lot. By the time the “war rig” finally gets destroyed on the last leg of the journey down Fury Road, it feels as though we’ve lost one of the film’s actual characters. From a purely aesthetic perspective, though, it’s brilliant, because it not only gives us what we came for-opulent explosions in a fully realized, gritty Dieselpunk setting-but makes us feel increasingly unmoored.
Miller then systematically demolishes that landscape in an obvious metaphor, one of many metaphors in the film for the destructive nature of capitalist oil dependency. The chase ultimately extends off the ground and becomes the equivalent of the kind of three-dimensional battle you’d expect from Star Wars.Īnd instead of a standard “fight-on-top-of-a-train” scene, Miller deconstructs and uses every part of a moving semi, while the camera moves in, around, and under high-speed vehicles with a fluidity that makes the cars themselves feel as though they’ve become a physical landscape.
Instead of having a single threat from overhead in the form of an aircraft, Miller engineers a jawdropping sequence involving tall, swaying rigs on moving cars to create the harrowing, chaotic effect of innumerable villains dropping out of the sky. Instead of being a linear trajectory, the standard high-speed chase becomes a complete cat-and-mouse at one point, when the pursuer abruptly becomes the pursued. Miller has taken the physical tropes of action films and re-imagined each one of them. Much has been made of the brilliance of director George Miller’s decision to create such a high-concept action film, but the mechanics of how he’s done that are even more breathtaking than the fact he dared to do it at all.