Mad Max Fury Road

Okay so this review might seem a little outdated, but as someone who hasn’t seen any Mad Max movies I thought that ahead of seeing the newest film I should watch what most consider to be the best one. Now I normally hate action movies, I find most of them have no real plot and I am not as enthralled with the sight of explosions as most people seem to be. On top of that, action movies tend to portray women quite poorly and I will never overlook that. All that said, this film comes highly endorsed by my husband so we finally watched Mad Max Fury Road. So here we go….

Firstly I love films that rely on action and the actual acting more than dialogue. It not only allows the actors to actually do their jobs but it also forces the director to be a brilliant choreographer. A lack of dialogue means that they must plan out an organized sequence of visual cues. And these action sequences do an incredible job of managing all of their moving parts. The other thing it does is give everyone in them a specific role. This allows the audience to connect with each character and their motivation even without the use of words.

The other thing I loved was how wonderful all of the female characters were handled. We mentioned that I normally don’t like action films because of the way women are depicted, but Fury Road makes sure that each woman is their own character. Not a single one of them is oversexualized, or objectified. And all of them have a different purpose and play a different role in the group. I would also like to note that though Mad Max is in the film and is the title character, he is most certainly not the main character. Furiosa is the one driving the story. It is her motivation that we see and it is her choices that drive the story. Mad Max could essentially be replaced by anyone with his skills, he’s not actually necessary for the actual narrative.

The other thing that this film does really well is maintain the stakes. We see this core group of characters and we see their motivations but we also get a really clear picture of how this world works. It's desolate, it's hopeless and therefore watching some of these core characters die is necessary in order for the audience to understand how dire the circumstances are. This film does such an incredible job of conveying plot through and in between the action. We find out why Furiosa is on the run as the action is happening, Max joins the girls through action, Nox joins the team through action. There is no dead time where there is an exposition dump.

Action movies are never crafted this well, which is why they are never really recognized at the awards shows. But Mad Max Fury Road was nominated for 10 Oscars and it won 6 of them. That is an incredible showing for an action film. The casting was incredible and the writing allowed the actors to really do some of their best work. I am now very excited for Furiosa and we can go ahead and add this to a very very short list of action films that I actually like. I was very emotionally invested in every character and there was so much character development conveyed in a very tight and action packed two hours. I give the overall film a 9/10 only because I don’t give movies a 10/10 unless I think they are perfect, and though the movie was incredible but not quite perfect.