It’s funny you lamented Theron’s lack of recognition.
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Thirty-three years later, “Fury Road” puts Tom Hardy’s near-mute Max in the title, but the movie belongs to Theron’s Furiosa. In “The Road Warrior,” Max’s dog probably owns the second-strongest character arc. Women didn’t get a ton of screen time in these movies.
“The Road Warrior” (as it was called in the States it was released as “Mad Max 2" in Miller’s native Australia) featured Mel Gibson playing a loner not all that different from the reluctant heroes I watched Clint Eastwood play in countless KCOP-TV movie marathons. How the hell did George Miller pull it off?Īnd not just pull it off, but superbly execute a kick to the groin of the patriarchy ruling the movie’s post-apocalyptic world as well as the Hollywood hierarchy that rarely puts women at the center of a movie like this. Spielberg couldn’t do it with Indiana Jones.
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And that same sensation of giddy exhilaration, only this time, 33 years later, coursing through veins caked with cholesterol and a brain filled with a certain amount of skepticism that an entry in any movie franchise could deliver something so shockingly full of imagination and poetry. What makes this film singular in my moviegoing life is that it left me feeling the same way I felt as a teenager when I staggered into the lobby after seeing “The Road Warrior” in 1982. GLENN WHIPP: “Fury Road” beating “Empire” surprised me too, Justin, and, like you, I think our voters did themselves proud. Cinema this breathtakingly pure, not so much. Noisy, frenetic blockbusters are a dime a dozen, especially in summer. Let’s hear it for blockbuster auteurism and for Miller, who stages the most dynamic, sustained and deliriously inventive action sequences around - and also, not incidentally, the cleanest, due in no small part to Margaret Sixel’s supremely disciplined editing. More so than Miller’s great earlier “Mad Max” movies, it was rightly recognized at first glance as a masterpiece of action filmmaking and dystopian world-building - not bad for a movie that easily could have gone the way of countless disastrously over-budget Hollywood follies. I say all this to emphasize that, despite not having gotten its full due, “Fury Road” wasn’t exactly underappreciated in its time. (I’m still not over the fact Charlize Theron wasn’t nominated for her brilliant, heartrending performance as the movie’s true if not top-billed protagonist, Imperator Furiosa.) It won six of the 10 Oscars for which it was nominated, but it didn’t win best picture or for George Miller’s wizardly direction, as it should have. that have stalled the franchise until recently. The movie opened to glowing reviews and made a lot of money, though not enough to turn a huge profit or offset the legal disputes with Warner Bros. It wasn’t a huge theater, but it was fortunately equipped with Dolby Atmos sound, all the better to hear the roar of the engines, the screaming guitar riffs of Junkie XL’s propulsive score and the words - yes, the powerful, incantatory words (“I am awaited in Valhalla!”) - of the movie’s brilliantly spare and perpetually underestimated screenplay.Ī week after that screening, “Fury Road” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in an out-of-competition slot, never mind that it put most of that year’s Palme d’Or contenders to shame. I still recall the excitement - no, not strong enough - the pure, unleaded exhilaration surging through the audience when I saw it in a Burbank screening room in May 2015. I haven’t seen many movies over the last five years that felt like classics on first viewing, but “Mad Max: Fury Road” is undoubtedly one of them.
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