There are many valid reasons “Mad Max: Fury Road” may not be the movie for you.
In-world continuity is very important to you. You’ll need to get over that. This is a sequel to the “Mad Max” movies of yesteryear in the same way that any given Wile E. Coyote cartoon might be a sequel to any other Wile E. Coyote cartoon. This is storytelling. This is legend-making. George Miller, writer/director of all three earlier chapters, returns to his familiar scrap-yard, bringing a career’s worth of new tools with him. This new movie is clearly built from the same parts as the old ones, but reconfigured and modified, tuned up, souped up, and unleashed as its own self-contained war machine. If you’re confused by the fact that Max’s Interceptor was blown up at the end of “The Road Warrior,” here’s a little spoiler: That very same car gets destroyed twice in this movie. Miller gleefully leaves continuity in the dust, laughing as he drives away.
You don’t like “strong silent type” heroes. Tom Hardy’s Max (played in earlier episodes by Mel Gibson) is just about as strong and silent as could possibly be. As the quintessential lone drifter, he really comes across as a guy who’s spent some tough long years living in a vast desert with nothing but lizards and the ghosts of his own failures to keep him company. The guy’s an animal. He says as little as he has to, if that, often communicating in simian gestures and grunts. The few times he does actually string more than three words together, it’s almost shocking he can do it — and even more so that everything he says makes perfect sense.
Loud noises frighten you. Sound-wise, this movie is pretty much a sustained two-hour thunderclap. A veritable concert of carbureted destruction, it’s a booming, roaring, unrelenting rock-n-rollercoaster that spits out survivors vibrating in their boots as they try to unlock their Prius with shaking hands. Don’t bring the baby. Don’t bring your dog. They won’t like it either.
Mechanical madness of this quality deserves its own word. Let’s call it “enginuity.”
You think the word “absurd” is synonymous with “stupid,” and/or the word “Cadilladillac” inspires no wonder or curiosity. Seriously. They’ve got the body of a Cadillac welded to the roof of another Cadillac, and that’s not even remotely the sickest design rolling in this roadshow. Monster-truck rodeos should be ridiculous by design, and this one is cranked up to levels that no movie has ever even attempted before. Mechanical madness of this quality deserves its own word. Let’s call it “enginuity.” These vehicles were all actually built. They really drove. They really exploded.
You’re a big fan of computer-generated imagery. “Fury Road” takes pains to let you down. In addition to all those cars being made of good old-fashioned steel and rubber, crawling in and under and on top of them are genuine humans in very real danger. Dire, bone-crunching peril bleeds from every frame. With very few exceptions, the only CGI used in the production of these jaw-dropping stunts was to remove the safety wires that kept the crew from getting themselves killed, and their terror is absolutely contagious.
You have personally crashed 500 cars and watching 500 cars crash might bore you. OK then, here’s a promise: You will be bored.
You don’t like motorheads, don’t know what a motorhead is, or don’t like the band Motörhead. The whole goony universe of “Mad Max” was born out of very real wars for oil fought in the ’70s and early ’80s. Flaunting vehicles that guzzled enormous amounts of fuel was, then as now, a brash, downright irresponsible way to display status, extravagance, and arrogance. The value placed on owning a functionally badass vehicle and the subsequent fear of losing it informed almost every aspect of the earlier films. This movie worships its cars like Old Gods, even as it demonstrates how insane and unsustainable that religion is.
Charlize Theron is in complete command and tough as bullets without ever being masculinized.
You’re so entrenched in oppressive patriarchal traditions that the idea of a woman being in charge causes you distress. Just as Miller shows the folly of trying to reflexively hold on to appetites for mechanical power that have proven to be corrosive and ill-considered, he allows a more biological parallel to dominate “Fury Road.” This story is literally driven by female assertion, fighting back against the men who “broke the world.” Charlize Theron, as the renegade Imperator Furiosa, is in complete command and tough as bullets without ever being masculinized in the slightest. The five women she spirits to safety — the captive “wives” of despotic warlord Immortan Joe — are willful, smart, and resourceful. They encounter an entirely female tribe on the edge of the world, the Many Mothers, who have survived on their own for decades, protecting a trove of seeds in the improbable event they come across a patch of un-poisoned earth to plant them in. They are all crack shots and could knock your eye through the back of your head from 400 yards. Max is swept up like a leaf behind their war-rig, trying to keep up. If the first sentence of this paragraph describes you, you are perfectly correct to be terrified of this film.
You enjoy being spoon-fed. One of Miller’s greatest gifts to this movie is a near total withholding of backstory. The intricate details of the production design — elaborate machines, the distinctive minutiae of individual costumes right down to tattoos scarred into the very flesh of the players — describe rich cultures with definitive caste systems and reflect deep and specific histories without ever taking a moment to explain them. It’s a powerful lot of show and very little tell. The tension of the questions “Why is this happening?” and “How the hell did we get here?” runs under the entire film and places the viewer directly behind the eyes of everyone on screen — who are all struggling with exactly these same questions.
People throw around the word masterpiece quite a bit without pausing to think what the word means. Miller has spent most of his 70 years learning his craft, perfecting his art, growing his skills, and refining his techniques. He’s taken all that experience, all those years and everything he’s learned and given himself the mission of re-capturing the vision of his much younger self with the wisdom and means no 30-year-old could ever have mustered. The result is a raw, lean, powerful, celebratory experience that is inarguably masterful in every sense. It’s an action film about redemption that actually succeeds in redeeming action films. Maybe you don’t like action films. This one might change your mind.