The second people got their hands on it, Mad Max: Fury Road felt special. The movie, which came 30 years after the last installment in this franchise, felt like a miracle. Set almost entirely in the desert, its sheer scale and intensity were so marvelous that, even though it’s a deeply weird movie, the 2016 Oscars simply couldn’t resist nominating it for many awards.
10 years later, Fury Road‘s stature has only grown. Even though we got Furiosa, which I’d argue is every bit as good as Fury Road, Miller’s first return to Mad Max since Beyond Thunderdome is undeniably the one with the bigger cultural imprint. It’s a movie we’re not likely to ever see again, not just because of its greatness, but because no one else will be dumb enough to try.
Fury Road could have been a disaster
Part of the reason Fury Road feels like such an overwhelming success is because you get the sense, even just watching the movie, that the whole thing could so easily have gone sideways. The movie is set almost entirely outside, and by her own admission, one of its stars didn’t fully understand what they were doing.
Charlize Theron said that she was “incredibly scared” while shooting the film because she had never worked on a project like it and “didn’t always understand the narrative that we were telling.”
An entire book was written about the making of Fury Road. The movie could have gone off the rails in so many different places. Instead, it feels like a singular, kinetic achievement because of the person behind the camera and his approach to the material.
Fury Road is action filmmaking in its purest form
Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay to director George Miller is that you can watch Fury Road with the sound off and the movie still totally works. Fury Road is kinetic cinema at its finest, a movie where characters’ actions are explained almost entirely by how they move and where the point of almost every second of screen time is to see where characters are headed next.
It’s been pointed out that Fury Road is essentially a two-hour chase scene. The irony is the main characters decide to turn around a little over an hour in and just head back to where they came from.
The pointlessness of all that plotting could kill a movie with less visual flair than this one has. Instead, the movie manages to pack a punch not in spite of the circles it sends its characters in, but because of the combination of movement and stasis. These are characters trying to find a better life who realize that they’ll have to build one for themselves.
Director George Miller is working at the peak of his powers here, and he was given the resources to make what seems to be almost exactly the movie he wanted to make. Furiosa, for all of its brilliance, is slower and more operatic than Fury Road. This is the kind of action cinema we rarely get on this scale, and it rips from the second it starts.
It’s got a generational performance at its center
Fury Road is brilliant enough, but the most remarkable thing about the movie might be that it manages to center its main character’s emotional journey through all the chaos that surrounds her. Theron’s Imperator Furiosa is such an indelible character that Miller felt the need to make an entire prequel about her.
Much of that is thanks to Theron’s performance. As Furiosa, she’s fierce, vengeful, and protective, a pseudo-mother to the wives that she rescues from imprisonment. The film’s most important moment belongs to her and her alone, as she collapses onto a once green desert, realizing that her entire plan is hopeless.
It’s telling, too, that Furiosa so gracefully takes the mantle from Max and that the movie seems designed to facilitate that transition. The moment when Furiosa nails a shot that Max can’t make, using him to steady her rifle, is brilliant and subtle, and one that both Theron and Tom Hardy sell completely.
Fury Road was a risk, and one that wouldn’t get taken today
Fury Road rules because it doesn’t feel safe. It’s the kind of movie that can only be a home run or a disaster. Thankfully, it was the former. The modern blockbuster is defined in part by the desire to ensure that it will make enough money.
That means, in part, sanding all the edges off of every movie until all that’s left is the parts that everyone can agree they like. Fury Road has imagery in it that could easily alienate, and that imagery likely did bother at least some people. For all of its success, Fury Road did not gross $1 billion, but it was a success nonetheless because it achieved a kind of word-of-mouth status that is still rare in Hollywood.
Few filmmakers ever get the chance to make exactly what they want on this scale, and even when they do, it’s not something as daring and impressive as Fury Road. We should celebrate this movie’s existence every chance we get. It’s one of the great cinematic experiences any of us will ever get, and it seems unlikely we’ll get another anytime soon.
