MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

Haunted by his turbulent past, Max Rockatansky believes the best way to survive is to wander alone. Nevertheless, he becomes swept up with a group of women prisoners fleeing across the Wasteland in a War Rig driven by an elite imperator, Furiosa. They are escaping a Citadel tyrannized by the Immortan Joe, from whom something irreplaceable has been taken. Enraged, the Warlord marshals all his gangs and pursues the rebels ruthlessly in the high-octane road war that follows.

FURY ROAD never stops moving, both in its plot and politics. Its obsession with movement, both literally and metaphorically, allows the film to become one of the greatest action pictures in recent memory while possessing a radical edge few Hollywood films ever have. It depicts a despairingly plausible nightmare future, but FURY ROAD suggests that if we keep moving, there may still be room for hope beyond the fire and dust.

“It’s hard to do justice in words to FURY ROAD‘s nonstop, breathtaking action sequences. Miller and team are on record as saying the stunts, for the most part, are real. But there’s still an otherworldliness to these setpieces — colorful flares pop across the skies, the weaponry is ludicrous (one guy’s got a flamethrowing guitar), the explosions are so bright as to seem downright cartoonish. This is not the dusty, grotty world of The Road Warrior, where we could almost taste the dirt. Here, we watch the movie in a weird state of vicarious pain, delirium and ecstasy; it actually takes something out of us. FURY ROAD may be a sequel, a reboot or whatever, but it’s so perverse, florid, mannered and dense that it feels like a wild-eyed castaway in the wasteland of Hollywood blockbusters. It’s a work of almost religious horror and beauty — the Sistine Chapel of action filmmaking.” – Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice