It’s a great action movie, but it’s also a solid bit of SF film making. It’s a post-apocalypse story, but it deals with a period generally skipped over in the sub-genre. Most post-apocalypse stories either take place in the immediate aftermath amid the ruins or are set a few generations later when new societies have arisen. Fury Road is set one generation into the post-apocalypse world; some of the characters are old enough to remember the apocalypse and even the pre-apocalypse world, but most of them were born after and this world is all they have ever known. As such, the film deals with the transmission of knowledge and culture and the way that the new generation takes what it has inherited and adapts that to its own needs.
You can see this in the design of the film. All the props in the film are made from repurposed bits and pieces of the old world: Max’s face-mask/bridle is an old gardening fork and some metal straps, the skulls/heads on Rictus Erectus’ costume are all dolls’ heads, steering wheels are made from old radio parts and rotary phone dials, and so on. This is a society that has gone from scavenging old technology to just using what they find as a resource for making something new; so much so that you have to look closely to recognise what the components of an item originally were.
It’s also reflected in the language of the film. The dialogue is full of words and phrases that are close enough to current usage that we can understand what is being said, but which suggest slang and a society that has taken old words and ideas and adapted them to their current needs: “We are Fucacima kamakrazee war boys!”, “You traitored him!”, “Die historic on the Fury Road”, and so on.
All this, of course, picks up on elements Miller introduced in the previous entries in the Mad Max series: Mad Max: the Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), suggesting that Miller is slowly constructing an entire future history, with each installment moving a bit further on from the apocalypse and into this strange new world.
All this is done quietly and unobtrusively. A film version of Heinlein's famous example of “the door dilated” — no big bits of exposition or explanation; the world exists and is presented as it exists with the viewer expected to pay attention and pick up the details as the story unfolds, building their own picture of how things work. That’s how good SF works — or, at least, that’s one of the things I look for in SF.
All this in an action movie that never stops being an action movie. Every frame is used to advance the plot. The characters are established and delineated through their actions. Each character does something; they all have goals and pursue those goals as effectively as their knowledge, skill and circumstances permit.
The characters are memorable: Immortan Joe, Imperator Furiosa, the War Boy Nux, minor characters (in terms of screen time) such as the Bullet Farmer and the People Eater. Even the wives, who could have all been interchangeable MacGuffins, come across as individuals with their own distinct personalities.
Then there’s Max Rockatansky himself; a man seeking redemption even though (by my count) he’s already achieved redemption twice. Watching this film you realise this is a character who is not going to accept redemption, no matter what he achieves or accomplishes. Whose sense of guilt is so strong that all he can dwell on is his failures, no matter what his successes are. A man who will walk away from his accomplishments, as he does at the end of the film, to seek a lasting redemption that he will probably never find. A surprisingly tragic figure in what is a franchise of action movies.
That's my take on it.
02 Nov 2016, 7:30 pm
