Mad Max: Fury Road

Review:

A cracking double bill here, with the chance to see the dusty origins and fiery future of one of cinema’s strangest franchises.

Despite taking a break for weighty fare like Babe 2 and Happy Feet, George Miller (also director of Week 2’s Three Thousand Years of Longing) returned to his roots in 2015. The original Mad Max films had been schlocky Australian B-movies, starring Mel Gibson. Focussing on wild extravagances of action, they had amassed a weight of fan love, but it took decades for Miller to realise his vision of a fourth instalment. Light on story, the 1979 version found ‘Mad’ Max Rockatansky battling revenging goons in the sun-baked outback - Miller himself is Australian, which only adds to their strange mythic power.

However, he returned all guns blazing for Fury Road in 2015, and was highly lauded for it, with many Oscar nominations (and wins) for an even madder prospect. This time, the franchise carved out a new origin myth: a post-apocalyptic hellscape overseen by cultish leader Immortan Joe, who enslaves women as mothers and rations water, from which Max’s madness springs.

Our titular hero is played by Tom Hardy, in another great physical performance of frowns and grunts - and equally heroic is Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, blazing into the desert to evade the warlord with five of his ‘wives’ in tow. Each new landscape and vehicle is more thrillingly realised and ear-splittingly impressive than the last, with pure adrenaline-pumping choreography; there’s no need for dialogue with action this exciting. As an exercise in action stakes and spectacle, it explodes off the screen.

Max King

Mad Max: Fury Road is a thrilling, ferocious and visually spectacular film that seizes the audience in a choke-hold from start to finish. Whilst the assumption from the trailer may be that this is a typical, violence-driven, almost plotless action movie, the actors give their characters a power and integrity that adds depth and emotion to the film, which in turn gives the constant, unrelenting action meaning and purpose. The cinematics are truly stunning throughout, with immense dust storms and guitars that belch fire, coming together in an explosion of sound and colour that makes it a film worth watching purely for the incredible visuals. Charlize Theron is fantastic in her starring role as Furiosa alongside Tom Hardy as the eponymous Max, and her determination and hope leads the audience to root for her in her quest to save the wives of Immortan Joe from his dictatorial rule. The pitiful existence of Nicholas Holt as Nux, with his neck tumours named Larry and Barry, provokes even more empathy for the characters trapped in the desolate wasteland. Mad Max: Fury Road is an extraordinary post-apocalyptic sensation of a movie, and one that anyone who loves intensity and drama, especially fans of the original franchise, should see.

Ellen Whyte