Before
I write anything about this, I'll start off by saying that I've never
seen any of the Mad Max films. I guess I was either too young or too disinterested in cars when it was the 1980s. I was assured by a number of people that
this was certainly no boundary to enjoying Mad Max: Fury Road. Having watched
the film I'm less sure, only because I would have liked to have understood a
little more about what was going on. Other than this there is a lot to enjoy here.
The film takes place almost entirely on the road, in a drugged up
post-apocalyptic desert world where water is controlled by the warlord
Immortan Joe. The only thing more important than water it seems is
petrol, which fuels the various bonkers vehicles that the acolytes of
Joe use to career around the desert. The plot is that for some reason
Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) decides to abandon whatever
privilege she has obtained for herself in Joe's kingdom and escapes with
his favoured 'breeders' - a group of lightly-clothed and generally
pregnant woman. Almost immediately Joe mobilises his automobiled army of drugged-up drone-nutters to catch her - for 100 minutes.
It is impossible to disagree with Mark Kermode's assertion that
watching Mad Max: Fury Road is something akin to being shouted at while
being run over. It's a chase movie fro start to finish, almost the
entire film takes place on the backs of a variety of bizarre-looking
buckets of souped-up rust careering about a post-apocalyptical wasteland. Characters are a mix of insane drone-like beings who live
for the thrill of the chase, ethereal pregnant breeders and a couple of
vaguely normal-looking petrol-heads - who we presume are our heroes -
played by Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy. Plus a guitarist who leads Joe's warriors into battle from the front of a coverted articulated truck / Ork battlewagon, his guitar spewing flames from its neck obviously.
As an action
film it's probably exactly what anyone would want from the genre. It's
simple goodies v baddies in a bonkers world of explosion and unshown
consequences where most of the participants value life so little that
their own deaths are embraced as an opportunity to show off one's bravado. There is a comic book style
to the landscapes and characters, reminiscent of the recent Borderlands
computer game series (though that in itself was perhaps based on the
original Mad Max films). I also felt that there was an element of 300
about it in both style and content, the colour palate has an unrealistic
deepness to it, enhancing the fantasy distopia. This works well with
the fact that most of the stunts and collisions are real stunts and
collisions, creating a world in which action scenes have the look of a
typical comic book action sequence, but with the weight you can only get
by actually seeing an actual car smash into another.
I'm
not sure what I was expecting; I had been promised a feminist action
film, but I don't understand how you can interpret it that way. I ended
up watching 100 minutes of insane comic-book violence; a quite mesmerising blend of the real with the digitally-enhanced that should hold most people's attention for its full run-time. Can't really recommend it if you're not into this sort of thing. But if you enjoy a bit of bonkers relentless action, well then this'll scratch your itch - then run it over.
No comments:
Post a Comment