Mad Max: Fury Road

It’s been 30 years since Beyond Thunderdome and it seems things haven’t improved a great deal for the characters living in George Miller’s dystopian outback. Life here is as hard as it gets; disease is rampant, dehydration a way of life. Women are no more than childbearing slaves and men are only men after they’ve been dead at least once. Society, such as it is, is governed by warlords who assume power and god-like status by controlling the lands’ only water supply. This isn’t a place where social mobility features highly on any political agenda, but there is an alternative path available to anyone possessing enough firepower and gasoline to take advantage. The path in question is that of the road warrior.

Max (Tom Hardy), as aggressively lonesome as he ever was, surveys the bleak desert landscape as he chews dispassionately on a fresh lizard. His world he muses, is now nothing more than “fire and blood”. He’s not wrong. This brief moment of contemplation serves as the last time Max’s average speed clocks anything less 60mph for the next two hours. Constantly disturbed by flashbacks and grim hallucinations, he is quickly thrown into chaos when captured by the War Boys, the chalk covered minions of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in the 1979 movie). To escape a life of extreme servitude Max must form a cagey alliance with Furiosa (Charlize Theron) as she attempts to emancipate a collection of young ‘breeders’ before their unborn children become property of the state.

What follows is essentially one long and persistently explosive chase sequence, which doesn’t really have time for little details like plot or character development. CGI has been kept surprisingly minimal in Mad Max: Fury Road considering the ambition of the stunts on display, and Miller has clearly spared no expense in the process. The remarkable collection of battle-customised vehicles armed with anything from explosive harpoons and rock bands to kamikaze pole-vaulters are truly the work of a mad and brilliant mind. The cast has been well selected and the performances of Hardy and Nicholas Hoult particularly add an extra measure of twitching insanity to a world tweaked to its limit on nitrous oxide.

The result is the triumphant return of Mad Max: Fury Road to the screen, bringing with it a level of intensity and execution that effectively wheel spins over the top of its competitors, laughing maniacally as it does so.

       

Tom Halbert

Mad Max: Fury Road is released nationwide on 14^th May 2015.

Watch the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road here: