Mad Max: Fury Road

It may sound like the grumbling of an old man, but they just don’t make films like this anymore, and that is the key reason for the deserved unanimous enthusiasm that accompanies Fury Road. Against the background of today’s technology, the new Mad Max is a film from an era that has long since passed – in terms of style, it comes across as the essence of 1980s Australian trash flicks laid out in the form of an epic fresco following the example of the peak of Hollywood’s creative era of the 1970s. Fury Road is simply Miller’s Apocalypse Now or Heaven’s Gate. In the promotional campaign, the constantly emphasised appellation “visionary director” was for once not a hollow phrase, but an appropriate statement, in every sense of the word. Miller reveals himself to be not only a filmmaker with a well-though-out vision, from which he builds a portrait of a distinctive post-apocalyptic world thought out to the smallest detail, but also a filmmaker who has yielded completely to his own delirious vision, which is both absorbing and fascinating. Though Fury Road is both a variation on the original trilogy and its continuation, it thus remains fundamentally distinctive and unique. So, even though fans will identify various similarities between the new film and the trilogy, Fury Road never engages in that current pop-culture scourge, quotespotting. There is no recycling, no knowing winks at fans, no references to other films or pop culture, and not even any franchise elements. Fury Road is not exclusive and elitist like contemporary blockbusters, which create enclaves of true believers by flattering different audience segments. Into the artificial and overly sophisticated waters of the contemporary mainstream, Miller has released his own raging monster, which, with the roar of an infernal machine, cuts a path through all of the rules about the habits of the target audience, commercial trends and the producer’s calculations, and it has no regard at all for what a contemporary blockbuster is supposed to look like or what supposedly works in it and why. Like its world, the film is simultaneously disjointed and deranged, yet in spite of that, it is also completely coherent and functional. The archetypal three-act narrative concept is crushed here by a single permanent confrontation and non-stop tension (the first shot, in which the characters are not in motion or in immediate danger and are only talking to each other, seems as if it is from another world). Out of the bowels of the degenerate macho action-movie genre, a matriarchal parable has grown, with the male characters surprisingly relegated to supporting roles. And all of this is set in a pulsating world, which we don’t see from the outside, but are rather thrown into. As the characters carry us along at a frenetic pace, we see, unwittingly and literally at the edge of the field of vision, that world’s practical functioning and, primarily, its complex mystique, which emerged from omnipresent madness and pain. In an interview, Miller said that he liked the feeling he had when, as a child, he walked out of the cinema and felt like he had stepped off a roller coaster and wanted to get right back on it. Whereas the seasonal blockbusters of recent years have merely zipped passed viewers, leaving only a dim memory on the horizon, Fury Road picks up viewers at full speed and, like its protagonist, runs them paralysed and strapped to the hood through the tumult of its creator’s vision. If the post-apocalypse previously infused archetypal heroic stories with new blood and replaced the foul taste of the distant era of westerns and chivalric tales with the intoxicating promise that the age of heroes would come again in the future with the fall of civilisation, then Fury Road likewise revives the validity of the mythological epic in the destruction of the world. Though the film’s narrative has certain similarities to The Iliad and The Odyssey, its matriarchal level refers to even more ancient traditions. Even though it evidently undermines machismo and the patriarchy, it also offers a celebration of heroism and masculinity in accordance with the aforementioned revitalisation of archetypes. The appearance of those traits here, however, is not only classical in nature, but also mythically absolute and post-feministically complex in equal measure. When the roar of the engines subsides and the smoke from the explosions clears, we see the tragic and paradoxical nature of the heroism of not only Max, but primarily of the other main character, who, infatuated with the myth of patriarchy, rushed like a raging dog of war to the gates of Valhalla, but only achieved true heroism when he abandoned the father figure and accepted the role of helper and protector alongside his mother. Fury Road takes a no less complex approach to women, who, in the manner of legendary matriarchal societies, not only personify life and procreative and regenerative power, but also serve as warriors. However, they are not limited to the one-dimensional ideal of badass goddesses of war. Like the male characters, each of them has her own story and motivations, which are alluded to in the narrative, and those are what condition their heroism, which is all the more impressive thanks to its believability and inspirational nature. (16/05/2015) (less) (more)

Men in chains. Mad Max: Fury Road is entertaining as a film about a bunch of psychopaths chasing each other through the desert can be. The film’s greatest strength is rooted in its greatest betrayal. For at least half of the film, the titular protagonist is a pacified and passive supporting character who certainly has no bearing on the direction of the story despite introducing it with his own words (unlike in the second Mad Max, the scope of the narrative isn’t tied nearly as closely to Max – rather, we are “insolently” informed of one of his actions only by a big explosion somewhere in the distance). Women are in the driver’s seat, in both the literal and figurative sense. They are beautiful and scantily clad (like most of the other characters, so I wouldn’t lay blame on the film for employing a double standard), but merciless when it comes to men, who are automatically – and for the most part justifiably – perceived as a threat. Max is no exception, as he wouldn’t even have to have a mask on his face or his wrists in shackles to be mistaken for an animal controlled by instinct. While his goal is summed up from beginning to end in a single word (“survive”), Miller makes maximum use of stylistic techniques to ensure that we experience his survival at first hand (the “relieving” silencing of the music). By comparison, the motivations of the savage women have greater depth and raise numerous questions that you normally wouldn’t ask in relation to action blockbusters. ___ All of the men in the film are to a certain extent obsessed with physical strength, destruction and domination. Dominance over women and over their machines, which evidently intoxicates them as effectively as fresh blood does. The deification and fetishisation of high-performance, high-octane machines, with which their drivers would like to merge (spraying their mouths with chrome wheel paint), are in places pushed beyond the boundary of the most off-the-wall comic stylisation (as are the names of the characters, among which only Sillius Soddus and Biggus Dickus are missing), which is somewhat in conflict with the realistic basis of the depicted world and the raw brutality of the violence. Fury Road is sometimes a bit more and sometimes a bit less of an overwrought opera on four wheels, with massive explosions and chainsaw fights instead of arias. Just as Leone’s spaghetti westerns were operas in their own way. The last time I had a comparably intense impression of uninterrupted action that barely gives you time to breathe was when I saw the South Korean pseudo-spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, the Weird (for its pacing and crazy ideas, Fury Road would deserve the subtitle The Very Bad and the Weird). ___ In connection with the ideas of eco-feminism, the women conversely personify care, creation and the effort to restore humanity’s connection to nature (at one of the critical moments, their lives are saved by a tree). They don’t want to change the rules of the existing world, but to build (or perhaps better said, “let sprout”) a new world founded on protection, cooperation and caring instead of war, control and pillage. Their greatest wealth is not weapons or petrol, but planting seeds. The film is not militantly radical in its advocacy for an alternative life principle – instead of complete separation from men, it proposes partial synthesis as a solution – but it still took some proper courage to make the return of a great action hero a hell of a wild feminist ride. (If the picture hadn’t been unpleasantly dark, I wouldn’t have known about the 3D except for one shot.) Appendix: I believe that someone more qualified will write a more analytical text about the editing of the perfectly rhythmised action scenes and the use of characters as orientators, thanks to which the frenzied action is perfectly clear despite the jumps across the axis. 90% (14/05/2015) (less) (more)