Popcorn Kernels: That'll Do, Pig

In which we review the movies in the Babe duology, which the blogger was forced to watch by the maniac he's dating, but found to be quite a treat.

Babe

Year: 1995

Director: Chris Noonan

Cast: James Cromwell, Magda Szubanski, Christine Cavanaugh

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

A young pig is taken to a bucolic farm, where he longs to be a sheepdog instead of just a fancy dinner.

I don't usually respond to movies with animal protagonists, but I do respond to movies with effects brought to life by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, so I guess I was as neutral as Switzerland coming into Babe, which I'm certain I saw as a young child but remembered literally nothing about. And let me tell you what, I loved it. 

Babe is not only an adaptation of a children's novel, it is a storybook come to blissful, bucolic life. The farm set feels stagebound in a way that doesn't limit belief but rather creates a homey, insulated fairy tale atmosphere, and yet the world of the film spins an unlimited amount of potential from its glorious creature designs. This might just be the best work the Henson company has ever done, delicately switching between excellent trained animal actors and lifelike animatronics to create the impression of talking animals in a way that still holds up even two decades later.

The only effects liability is the sheep (which, incidentally, were the only creatures designed by a different company), who have a rather stiff range of expression and dead glassy eyes when it comes down to it, but other than that Babe is quite frankly a technical masterwork. There's something to be said about the fact that in the 23 years separating then and now, no Racing Stripes or Beverly Hills Chihuahua or Marmaduke has come even close to achieving the look and feel of these lifelike animals. To create something like this requires a great deal of craftsmanship, skill, and love, and that's something that the incredibly patient producer George Miller has proven himself to have in spades.

But a technically perfect children's film is nothing without heart, and Babe has enough of that for a whole pod of blue whales. Pure, blissful, painful heart bursts from every pore of this film, starting and ending with its two core performances. Christine Cavanaugh is irresistibly tender and innocent as Babe, a pig who doesn't know enough about the world not to believe he can do anything. And James Cromwell has a brilliant interiority to his outwardly hardened farmer character, letting the pig crack his gruff, masculine exterior in a variety of brilliantly small, subtle ways.

The screenplay is also tight as all get out, letting Babe wander through a variety of domestic, picaresque adventures that establish the world of the farm and the personalities of the animals within it, before slowly introducing the naïve pig to the harsh risks and realities of what it means to be a farm animal. Terror, death, and isolation form a constant presence over the film, but it doesn't shy away from darkness, allowing the sweetness to seem even more pure and scrumptious. It never gets pushed into saccharine, cheesy territory exactly because of that dash of reality taking the edge off.

In short, Babe is one of the best kids' films ever made. It's a beautiful combination of everything that makes it both a perfect motion picture (technical prowess and storytelling spirit) and a perfect storybook tale (heart with a dash of edgy reality). It's impossible not to be invested in Babe's journey, however big or small the plot developments are. If you have a child, this should be the only movie they watch until they're old enough to start seeing Scream movies.

Rating: 10/10

Babe: Pig in the City

Year: 1998

Director: George Miller

Cast: Magda Szubanski, Elizabeth Daily, Mickey Rooney 

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: G

Babe leaves the farm in an attempt to raise money to save it, and ends up getting stuck in The City with a gaggle of assorted outcast animals.

When I told my mother I was going to watch Babe: Pig in the City, she said, "oh, the bad one?" Mind you, she'd never seen the film, but let's just say that that it doesn't enjoy the most sterling reputation in the world at large. And it's not hard to imagine why. It takes the sweet, gentle bliss of the original Babe and runs it through a meat grinder. While it's pretty interesting and unique on its own merits, those merits are not that of a Babe movie, or really that of a movie intended for minors to any degree.

It's not fair to say that this tonal shift is George Miller's fault, considering that he shepherded the original film into the world as producer, but this one is very George Miller. His Mad Max sensibilities burst through every pore of Pig in the City, and while those instincts are as sharp as ever, they're just not... cute. Take, for instance, one of the most disgusting characters to ever grace the silver screen: Mickey Rooney's mute clown Uncle Fugly, who is the scariest character the man has ever played, and this is a guy who starred in Silent Night, Deadly Night 5.

I don't normally post photos in mini-reviews, but look at this sh*t.

And that's not the only place where the man indulges in his more bizarre, manic instincts. I'm talking exuberant slapstick involving elaborate pulley systems, multiple disgusting side characters with pig noses, and a general daredevil attitude with the fragile psyches of the children that are supposedly in the  film's core audience. I think it says a lot that you could read this film as a prequel to either Hotel for Dogs or The Godfather.

That's not to say this is a bad thing. It's just not what people were asking for, and that's fair. But approaching this film as an adult, there's a lot to appreciate here. First of all, there's a wide variety of subtextual material to plumb. I won't go into great detail, but Pig in the City offers perspectives on gentrification, homelessness, and class disparity all sprinkled with ample Holocaust and slavery imagery. I've never seen a kids' movie with so much grim reality on its mind, even as it tells a simplistic fable within that framework.

Unfortunately, none of this carries the emotional heft of the original Babe, which faces the reality of being an animal on a farm in a simple, clear, and thus brutally precise way. It flings its ideas this way and that, and they only coalesce into something satisfyingly probing in the character of the orangutan Thelonius, a great ape whose only wish is to maintain his dignity in an increasingly cruel, unforgiving world.

But one thing that's unequivocally great is the design of the titular city itself and its inhabitants. Although Babe spends most of his time in a single hotel, every time he visits the broader environment of The City, it's a breathtaking amalgam of the greatest urban landscapes this wide world has to offer. It quite blatantly refuses to take place in any single city, lumping together landmarks and visual signifiers from a dozen different famous metropolises.

There we go with another picture, and if the fact that I can't resist including these doesn't prove Pig in the City has something stunning and visual to offer, I don't know what will.

This production design is perhaps the only thing that consistently maintains the dreamy storybook quality of the original film, and it's glorious, from the Venice canals that border Babe's hotel to the angular roads that drift across its downtown area to the Day-Glo muscle beach at its outskirts. And the costuming of the characters that inhabit this world is glorious, ranging from Medieval powdered faces with Cindy Lou Who hair to leather punks on roller blades to this angular work of art who runs the hotel.

She's like an Ellen Greene character made her way into the Capital from The Hunger Games, and oh boy there I go with the pictures again.

It's a boisterous good time visually speaking, and the animal actors are just as top notch this time around. Unfortunately, it's still just not as good as Babe, but really there aren't many things that are. Changing the actress playing Babe robs the character of some of its all-important heart, and the movie is a little too obsessed with effects setpieces and big, broad humor to focus on well-rounded characters. It's still fun, but it feels like a well-made trifle rather than a work of genius. But if that's the biggest complaint I can make about it, we're still in pretty good hands.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1470

Driving Me Mad

Year: 1985

Director: George Miller & George Ogilvie

Cast: Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Bruce Spence

Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Several things happened during the four year gap between the release of Mad Max 2: Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, things which had an immense impact on its production:

1) George Miller was trying to get an original film off the ground, but the studio encouraged him to sauter that plot (of an adult discovering a Lord of the Flies-type group of children in the wild) onto a Mad Max storyline.

2) George Miller's producing partner Byron Kennedy passed away in a helicopter accident while scouting locations for the film.

3) The early 80's.

These first two resulted in a shattered, distracted auteur splitting his time on the film with co-director George Ogilvie, deigning only to direct the action sequences and leaving the character stuff to the man behind The Feds: Deception. The third resulted in...

Tinadome.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome opens with a shot straight out of Lawrence of Arabia - a bleak, irradiated wasteland of sand and dust being cut through by a camel-driven wagon. The wagon is attacked by a pilot (Bruce Spence of The Road Warrior, playing a different aeronautically-inclined character) and out tumbles out Max (Mel Gibson), an ex-cop and desert wanderer with a truly unfortunate case of Braveheart hair.

Every man dies. Not every man really dyes.

Following his stolen equipment, Max comes upon Bartertown, a desert shantytown ruled by the flashy and emphatic Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). Their primitive government is literally run on crap - their energy is provided by the excrement of pigs in the subterranean methane dungeon known as the Underworld. This area is led by MasterBlaster (Angelo Rossitto & Paul Larsson), a smart, tiny man who combines his powers with a huge, brute warrior with an iron mask by riding on his back.

Aunty hires Max to assassinate Blaster by brawling with him in the Thunderdome, Bartertown's cage match dispute system. Then a whole new story starts, whereupon Max stumbles across the aforementioned Lord of the Flies kidlets, a tribe who have taken residence in a nearby gorge and the only ample water source in the wasteland. Upon his arrival, they take him for the missing leader, Captain Walker, and beg him to take them to Tomorrow-Morrow Land, which is one of their many irritating slang words, this one referring to the gleaming cities of the past, which they still believe to exist.

Max reluctantly tags along to help them find a better home, though, honestly, their camp seems like a McFreaking paradise compared to the barren dystopia surrounding them. Thus begins the most conflicting sequence in the film as it shifts between Goonies-style slapstick antics and the requisite nailbiting car chase sequences.

It's like a cross between Fast & Furious and The Magic School Bus.

It's terrifically uneven, spasmodically twitching between both modes and reducing the high stakes of the previous films to useless tinder. The frustrating thing is that, when the film is good, it's genuinely superb. The closing chase is an exciting, natural extension of the tanker chase from Road Warrior, pitting a herd of cars against a runaway train, and the bungee-jumping acrobatic fight in the Thunderdome is an unforgettable mixture of camp and overzealous intensity.

But it takes ages for the film to return to the series' characteristic automotive splendor (in fact, I don't believe we even see a car in use until well past the hour mark), and the adventure sequences with the tribe of children are achingly over-the-top. When they're busying themselves with wacky antics like hitting people with frying pans and cheerily misunderstanding simple things, I half expect Robin Williams to come bursting in on a skateboard.

This inanity permeates the rest of the film, spurred on by the spirit of 1985. Quips and awful puns overpopulate the film like a scourge of locusts, not too deep to truly disable the films capacity to be great, but enough to dampen its potency somewhat.

They should leave the puns to me, where I can handle them safely and responsibly, with a mane-imum of casualties.

But despite its lumpen tonality, Beyond Thunderdome is still a Mad Max picture, and as such it revels in its weirdness. The film throws itself into its aesthetic, which contains a couple more dreadful matte paintings than I daresay we're used to, but is still as electric and iconic as ever. There might be a couple dozen more monkeys than usual, and some of the characters would be more at home in a Western from 2 of the 3 writers of Scary Movie, but it occupies exactly the same maniacal space that makes the Mad Max films so special.

The costume designer works with the delirious ferocity of a heroin-addicted crack rock, tossing several be-mohawked leather daddies, a dwarf with a Noh mask backpack, a mechanic in a leather speedo, and just about everything that was available on short notice from the costume department of the damned.

Now Appearing in: Your Nightmares.

The most interesting thing about Beyond Thunderdome is that, perhaps because it is already doing so much, it also has the most to say out of the Mad Max trilogy. Behind its juvenile nonsense and crackling action sequences, the film is an allegory about the future and how we shape it. The future of yesterday (ie. glittering skyscrapers and a metropolitan utopia) is gone, and it is up to the children to find out what's next for humanity. 

Bartertown has its own rough-and-tumble semblance of society, but those irradiated adults are the product of the same culture that destroyed itself in the first place. Their moral decay is no surprise to anyone, but The Lost Boys/Girls are wholly new. They know nothing other than the wasteland, and they alone hold the last spark of hope for humanity.

Mad Max might be their savior for the time being, but they're the ones who - if anyone can manage to do it - can heal the world. He's just a visitor. They don't need another hero, because there's nothing left to save. And that's beautiful.

Also, I bet you didn't think I could work that lyric into a thoughtful analysis.

Peace.

TL;DR: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is tonally uneven but nevertheless thematically and aesthetically valuable.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1064
Reviews In This Series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller & Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

Fast And Furious

Year: 1981

Director: George Miller

Cast: Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Michael Preston

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

True legends are born, not made.

I'm holding on to that. Because otherwise I might beat my head against the wall in envy at George Miller, an Australian medical doctor who, with no formal film schooling, managed to create an iconic film franchise of astonishingly increasing returns, make a star out of Mel Gibson, and continue to make revelatory action pictures well beyond retirement age, along with a series of inexplicably successful children's films.

How can I possibly believe that this career just came from working hard? He must have been born with it.

Or maybe it's Maybelline.

The source of today's undue rage is Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, which is not only a terrific action film, but a terrific sequel, vastly improving upon the innovative low-budget cult gem Mad Max, released a scant two years earlier. 

Following the titular Max (Mel Gibson) after the death of his wife and son at the hands of a murderous motorcycle gang catalyzed his transition from Calm Max, The Road Warrior launches us headfirst into the apocalypse. Max is a lonely nomad. With only his dog, Dog, for company, he wanders the barren wasteland of Australia in search of precious gasoline for his car, the last of the V8 Interceptors, which is totally a big deal because cars (Herbie: Fully Loaded, anyone?).

During his quest for Black Fuel, he stumbles upon The Gyro Captain (Bruce Spence), a whirligig pilot whom he takes captive and reluctantly befriends. After attempting to steal some oil from a car he watched get attacked by Marauders, he ends up taking the victim back to his camp back at an oil refinery in exchange for some of his company's supply. In the process, he becomes accidentally embroiled in a war between the refinery colony and the gang of leather-clad Marauders, led by the villainous Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) and his be-mohawked cronie Wez (Vernon Wells).

Wez (right) with his living motorcycle figurehead/leatherslave boyfriend. Gas might be in low supply, but evidently there is no shortage of hair dye in the apocalypse.

As you will discover, the common theme in this review will be "this awesome part of Mad Max is now bigger and better," but the most percussive and (literally) explosive of these elements are the newly ramped-up action sequences and the perilously strip-mined world they take place in. We first rendezvous with Max in the middle of a chase, the fiery denouement of which sees him sopping up precious gasoline from a bloody puddle.

This scene is but the first of many such moments that underscore the desperation, violence, and meager resources of the new world. In such an environment of loss and pain with many people attempting to cling to the last vestiges of old society (perhaps most notably in a shot where the Gyro Captain dabs his lips with a handkerchief after devouring the last morsels of a can of dog food), it is all too easy to slip into the mindframe of Max as his need to survive clashes with his instinct to help others.

This utterly real, utterly terrible world is fully realized with only a choice few setpieces scattered among the Outback, implying a vast and unforgiving world beyond. The grimy reality of The Road Warrior provides a dazzling venue for what are some of the most spectacular and kinetic car stunt sequences ever committed to film, and certainly the best to ever be seen by that point in 1981.

Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

The slower sections of Road Warrior also serve meaningful purpose, etching in the particulars of the new world and elevating Max and his exploits to suitably lofty mythic proportions, and allowing the supremely talented actors to maneuver between the gritty and campy tones seamlessly but the real heart of the film is on the open road, where it works its unutterable magic. 

The climactic closing sequence is a high-density burst of nitro that puts pedal to the metal and slams the viewer into their seat, but it is nearly matched by every single such sequence in the film. Cars ram and lunge and claw and bite into one another in endlessly creative, unendingly appetizing ways that would make even the most accomplished mechanics' hearts quail in their breasts.

All of the masterpiece-level work that would be found 34 years later in Mad Max: Fury Road is present here in spades: the pulse-pounding music, the seemingly endless deluge of screeching metal, and the epically insane proportions of its own ambition. In fact, The Road Warrior is perhaps an even more impressive feat, proving that George Miller has always had creative genius flowing through him, and that he was capable of achieving it at any level of budget, anywhere in the world, with any technology available. The man is an automotive movie god, and there is a seat waiting for him in Valhalla.

You'll forgive me if I prefer Fury Road more, but the bounty of the past is unfit to scoff at. That film would not exist without this one, nor is this one deficient in any way, save a slightly more stately pace.

But cut him some slack, the dog needs to keep up with him.

It's a great shame upon my ancestors that I have come this far without extolling the virtues of the costuming, provided with gusto by Norma Moriceau. Piecemeal and strange though the costumes of Mad Max may have been, they could hardly hold a birthday candle to the roaring bonfire of Road Warrior.

George Miller's aesthetic blossoms into its fullest form here, dominating the screen with its unhinged fervor. With the film's profusion of wipes, staccato-framed action, and abundance of fetish leather, it's rather like Buster Keaton paying a visit to a Pride Parade, all jolting motion and exposed flesh.

Though each member of the Marauders and the refinery colony has their own uniquely compelling design (notable examples include the Feral Boy with his Niagara mullet, a blonde citizen with a ponytail reminiscent of Cindy Lou Who, and the pink-bearded bloke in his hot pink sports car), perhaps no single character in the history of cinema is more memorably costumed than Humungus himself.

All towering muscle and imposing bulk, Humungus' burned skull is hidden by a molded hockey mask that reduces him to a Michael Myers-type figure of blank-faced evil. And that's just about the only part of his body that isn't exposed. He... Well, take a look for yourself.

Please remember that this film was made by a straight man. Praise be to Australia.

Really, The Road Warrior is a very special, balls-to-the-wall, off-kilter masterpiece of homoerotic, ultra exotic, automatic, hydromatic, exhaustively creative, high-octane fun. Don't let it pass you by.

TL;DR: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is revelatory action cinema, an inspiring, electrifying entry in the genre.
Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 1164
Reviews In This Series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller & Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

Drive Angry

Year: 1979

Director: George Miller

Cast: Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In the grand scheme of things, going from Mad Max: Fury Road directly to the original Mad Max is probably inadvisable. They are both utterly remarkable, but in very different ways. Though both bear the DNA of series auteur George Miller on their sleeve, the 2015 film is a showstopping spectacle of Hollywood filmmaking gone right whereas the 1979 original is a little miracle of low budget indie resources being stretched to the max.

Pun 100% intended.

Mad Max isn't keen on spelling out the logistics of its plot or universe, but here's what's going on, gleaned from franchise knowledge and details around the edges: Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) is an Australian policeman in the not too distant future. The Earth's resources are dwindling and his force are the lone defenders of Justice among the marauding anarchists that roam the streets. 

When a motorcycle gang led by the murderous Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) exacts revenge on another cop, Goose (Steve Bisley), he decides to exit the force for fear of becoming too embroiled in the terminal craziness of the pre-apocalyptic bedlam. However, his mind begins to change when the gang targets his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and their young son Sprog (Brendan Heath).

Perhaps they've decided that he's an unfit parent, based on the evidence of that name.

Mad Max is a remarkable achievement, if not a truly great film. With a budget far south of $1,000,000, George Miller constructs an intimate, unknowably strange variation on our own world seasoned with some quite wonderful car chase action. 

Persons much more studied in the ways of action cinema than I have declared that the style of Mad Max held heavy influence over the nascent automotive genre, changing the game forever. I have virtually no experience with the history of car movies (Herbie the Love Bug, anyone?), so I will take their word for it. 

The film is full of motion. Clever, rhythmic editing keeps the action sequences humming along at a propulsive pace (and hides the most glaring limitations of the visual effects with great zeal) while the shots of bulging eyeballs that pepper the car crashes stamp the film with Miller's distinctive creative signature. Cars dodge and weave and smash and explode into screaming pieces with alarming frequency. It's pretty dang awesome, if I do say so myself.

I had to lash my fingers together with a belt to avoid typing a "Greased Lightning" joke here.

But apart from the rousing action pulled from the wisps of a budget, Mad Max holds an inimitable aesthetic, clear even in the first stirrings of what would soon become a franchise dominated by a strong visual presence. The heavy use of leather, combined with the arbitrary piecemeal of the set decoration and the biker gang's costumes form a mélange of winking lunacy and high camp. 

The world is populated with characters of all shapes and sizes, including some with numerous physical and mental disabilities that are in no way used as gimmickry, merely an accurate and tender representation of how the less fortunate among us have an equal drive to succeed in the midst of apocalyptic anarchy. Toss in a toddler with a gun and Jessie playing the saxophone on an idle evening, and you've got yourself an unforgettably idiosyncratic mise-en-scène.

I would be remiss if I neglected to mention dat ass.

The performances of the film are all equally skilled at tapping into the heightened reality of Mad Max, but young Mel Gibson is the anchor that holds the film together, providing an utterly believable character that is not only the ambassador of Peace and Justice and Other Good Stuff among the land, but a fallible and realistic human being.

It's harder to achieve this in leather pants than one might think.

Unfortunately the remarkable wealth of material extracted from an unforgivable dearth of resources is still subject to the deficiencies of many an independent film. The music, which is inevitably keyed a little too high in the mix, feels more like Night of the Living Dead catalogue music, too portentous for many of the scenes it accompanies, occasionally veering into loopy Batman-style interstitials. In addition, there are several technical inconsistencies with the lensing of the film, but they are too negligible to truly damage the narrative.

And I hate to say it, but in the beginning of the first act and the middle of the second, the plot gets a little saggy, deflating some of the air from the movie. And the third act culminates in the worst kind of deus ex machina. It's fortunately redeemed by the most stunning chase and subsequent revenge of the film (cementing the transition to Mad from what could only have been previously described as Calm Max), but a little disappointment goes a long way when it comes to dispatching the main villain of a story.

He didn't even get to cut any toes!

All in all, the production Mad Max is about as chaotic and slapdash as its universe, which lends it its driving, aggressively one-of-a-kind tone, but also reduces the film to slightly below a true classic of the form. Nevertheless, it is an inarguably fun movie that shouldn't be neglected when reviewing the franchise, though its best function is admittedly as a bridge to bigger and better things.

TL;DR: Mad Max is beholden to some low budget deficiencies but it more than makes up for that with exhilarating action and a bone-deep sense of fun.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 939
Reviews In This Series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller & Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)

Road Rage

Year: 2015

Director: George Miller

Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult

Run Time: 2 hours

MPAA Rating: R

Action movies aren't really my thing. I can muster up an appreciation for them, as with most films, but when a new action flick comes out in the theater, I usually just leave it to my friend Zach at Better Clear On Out the Back. 

And I'm no Mad Max fanboy, either. In fact, I haven't seen any of the original three films in the franchise (though that will be swiftly rectified this summer).

I'm telling you these things so you can properly understand the gravity of my statement when I tell you that Mad Max: Fury Road is the best damn movie of 2015 so far. Hell, I'm going to go ahead and call it right now as the best movie of the summer. 

Unless San Andreas pulls the rug out from under us all. 

Mad Max: Fury Road has a plot. In fact, it's quite involved, taking place in a lush world that's teeming with detail. But the tricky part is distilling it into a couple paragraphs, because so much of it takes place at the fringes of the main action, informing and instilling life into it, but not necessarily playing an active role in the goings on.

I want to make it clear that this is not a detraction. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The true narrative of Mad Max: Fury Road is buried within every detail of the production design, every line of dialogue, and every line in the sand. It is a film that not only assumes that you - the audience member - are intelligent and demands that you engage with it as an active viewer on every single level, but richly rewards you for doing so.

Anyway, the bare bones of the thing is this: Max (Tom Hardy) is a guilt-ridden wanderer through the post-apocalyptic, irradiated desert of what we can assume through franchise pedigree is Australia. Haunted by the ghosts of the people he couldn't save, his only instinct is to survive the barren terrain. The only ample source of water is the Citadel, which is ruled by the diseased despot Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and his mutated brood.

So, basically it's California in three years.

When the town champion Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) diverts her war machine on what was supposed to be a routine supply run, Immortan Joe realizes that she has absconded with his wives, the enslaved healthy women which he uses for breeding. Max has been captured and used as a human blood bag for Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a member of the sickened, brainwashed slave race known as the Half-Lives. As the nobles of the Citadel pursue Furiosa along with their Half-Life army, Max escapes and reluctantly joins forces with her. She wants to take the girls to the Green Place, a safe zone across the continent, and he just wants to survive, but for the time being they find it mutually beneficial to work together.

I mean, she needs someone to help make sure her super awesome makeup isn't smudged. The ass-kicking she can handle herself.

The most definitive aspect of Fury Road is its outrageous sense of style. Its dominating aesthetic is downright lunacy, pushing so far over the top that it's visible from space. From the bulbous, fleshy creatures inhabiting the Citadel to the wraithlike Half-Lives who run staccato like they're in a Keystone Cops short, the film constantly prods and challenges the traditions and tenets of film costuming and design.

And they ain't afraid to be disgusting.

These delightfully insane characters populate a world of ramshackle glories: souped-up cars with porcupine spikes, massive green towers with waterfalls that flow over the unwashed masses, men dangling on pikes, and just about everything you can imagine. With a healthy sprinkling of things that you can't, which is what separates the geniuses from you or I. And this world is lit with bold, saturated colors that assault the frame with unnatural beauty.

Da ba dee, da ba die.

It's bloody gorgeous, is what it is, and this ludicrous, beautiful, terrible world is the perfect setting for the most unflagging, high octane action flick I've ever seen. Fury Road hits the ground sprinting and only picks up the pace from there, hardly even stopping to introduce its narrative universe, asking you to pick it up from the flecks of shrapnel that fly through the haze of battle.

As Max, Furiosa, and the Breeders storm their way through one massive action setpiece after another, the excitement never dwindles. Some all-action films can get dull and repetitive, but Fury Road knows the game and plays it with admirable skill. Packing handfuls of story, emotion, sacrifice, and distorted dystopian imagery in between every frame, there is more than enough to chew on aside from the truly astounding, ever-escalating practical effects work that dominates the landscape.

Honestly I'm surprised that director George Miller (of the three Mad Max films and most recently - and bafflingly - Happy Feet and its sequel) received the budget that he did to put this film together at such an unrelenting, raucus level, but the fact the Mad Max: Fury Road exists means that somebody is doing something right in Hollywood.

Also whoever designed the flamethrower guitar has an automatic pass to marry me.

As if we needed anything more to like about the film, the acting is across the board superb. Charlize Theron shows no cracks as a dauntless warrior, the villains are uniformly and unequivocally menacing, and Nicholas Hoult utterly inhabits a role as screamingly high octane as the film itself, but the unbeatable standout is Tom Hardy. 

With nothing but a few choice words and a series of animalistic grunts, he paints a detailed and nuanced portrait of a man broken beyond his own humanity. His impressively physical accomplishment completely transforms the actor, ripping him out of any sense of reality and throwing himself directly into the heart of the Mad Max universe. If any performance were to permanently break the barrier between summer blockbusters and Oscar nominations, it's Tom Hardy right here, right now.

The cherry on top of the towering ice cream sundae that is Mad Max: Fury Road is that it's a remarkably feminist and progressive action piece. The large amount of women in the film leave a safe, but enslaved life for the dangers of independence and claim their personhood. One of the Breeders says "We are not things,"and she is absolutely right. The women of Fury Road are an unstoppable force of good, fighting against a world that devalues them.

Also, ableism be damned.

It's a fascinating, energetic, wonderfully realized action film that never loses fuel, and it's spectacularly unlike anything you've ever seen before. Fans of more sit-down, low key dramas are best advised to sit this one out, but I think its unrelenting, explosive charm should appeal to just about anyone with a pulse that needs racing. 

TL;DR: Mad Max: Fury Road is outrageous, high octane, nonstop fun.
Rating: 10/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, unless you really hate exciting movies.
Word Count: 1195
Reviews In This Series
Mad Max (Miller, 1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Miller, 1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (Miller & Ogilvie, 1985)
Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)