"Mad Max: Fury Road" is a 2015 motion picture, set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, perhaps in Australia. The film also has strong traits of the fantasy genre. It seems to be extremely popular, but I admit that I don´t understand why. To me, it comes across as a parody of a dystopian post-apocalyptic movie. The tropes are so exaggerated that they are difficult to take seriously. But sure, maybe I´m missing some kind of self-referential irony? (Did you note the rock band atop one of the warrior trucks, by the way?)
And if you love action, well, the "plot" of this flick is essentially one long road battle. There is also a "feminist" element, since most of the good guys are females, while all of the bad guys are male (or perhaps male-ish mutant creatures). However, the gorgeous looks of most of the women tells us that "Mad Max: Fury Road" probably isn´t intended for a female audience...
The plot, such as it is, doesn´t really revolve around the road warrior Mad Max, who comes across more like a supporting character. The main protagonists are the female warrior Furiosa and a truly bizarre cult leader, Immortan Joe. The latter´s citadel is inhabited by "warboys", some kind of brainwashed mutants convinced that they are going to Valhalla if killed in combat on behalf of Joe. For some reason, there are also ordinary people in the citadel, mostly treated as dirt by the cultists. Do they use them for organ harvesting, or what? Furiosa, who works for Immortan Joe, decides to escape in a large truck (rig), searching for a mysterious green place inhabited by Amazons with Irish-sounding names. She also takes Joe´s wives with her. After various action-packed situations, Max and a de-programmed warboy decides to help Furiosa find the Promised Land...which turns out to be a pipe dream.
In the final part of "Fury Road", this unlikely band of sisters (and two brothers) decide to turn back to the Citadel and take it by storm. When it turns out that Immortan Joe is dead, both the cultists and the half-crazed ordinary humans apparently start worshipping Furiosa as their new deity, while Mad Max blends with the crowd and presumably absconds, perhaps to a sequel.
Not sure if this counts as a happy ending, tbh. But there you go. Not sure why this moved people almost ten years ago...
Tbe original Mad Max movies with Mel Gibson were exellent. Fury Road is just expensive crap.
ReplyDeleteFun fact: The first Mad Max movie should just have been about the mental breakdown of a traffic cop in a relatively normal Australia but the director didnt think it worked out well and decided along to way to turn into a post apocalyptic dystopia.
I´ve only seen the Thunderdome film of the original ones. I also have a faint memory that "everyone" in Sweden regarded the first Mad Max films as extremely violent...
ReplyDeleteYes, thats why me and couple of friends rented the first Mad Max movie on VHS when we were 12-13 yrs old. Very violent yes, but not in a very explicit way.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, when we rented "SALO" we got more than we bargained for. That movie made us physically ill for hours after watching.
By the way, this review of SALO by "The cinema snob" is probably the funniest movie review ever made:
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/BlqE4VVEo-0?si=ucwXjws09aHqeEEn