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‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: Three Reasons You Absolutely Have To See It

By Alanna Vopni
Published on: 16:28 PST, May 18, 2015

Mad Max: Fury Road got a lot of press before its opening weekend, and despite the fact that it lost the top box office title to Pitch Perfect 2, here are three reasons you should hit your local theatre and see Mad Max: Fury Road on the big screen.

It’s surprisingly good.

Justin Chang from Variety waxed poetic about the time between Mad Max movies.

“Thirty years have passed since our last visit to George Miller’s sun-scorched post-apocalyptic wasteland, and yet ‘worth the wait’ still seems a puny response to the two hours of ferocious, unfettered B-movie bliss offered by Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Peter Travers from Rolling Stone wrote about the pairing of Hardy and Theron.

“Hardy and Theron make a dynamite team, but Theron is the film’s bruised heart and soul. So get prepped for a new action classic. You won’t know what hit you.”

And the New York Times’ A.O. Scott talked about how the fight scenes related to the overall film.

“Even in the most chaotic fights and collisions, everything [made] sense. And Mr. Miller demonstrates that great action filmmaking is not only a matter of physics but ethics as well. There is cause and effect; there are choices and consequences.”

In a world of throwaway male-focused action movies, this one has feminist leanings, with a good story.

Charlize Theron plays a female road warrior named Furiosa whose mission is to save a group of women being held as sex slaves by sadistic warlord Immortan Joe, who also holds the titular hero, Mad Max, against his will. Max eventually teams up with Furiosa, but she’s the one who drives the plot at the beginning. In an interview with NPR, creator and director George Miller talked about what he was interested in exploring with Fury Road.

“I was very interested in a female road warrior. And here she is, a character exactly equivalent to Max. They are protagonist/antagonist. They’re the ones who go at it from the beginning. She is on this mission, and Max is a wild animal, trapped. And both of them are about their own survival. This is an uncompromising world. It’s kind of forward into the past. We regress to a neo-medieval dark age where there are no rules other than to survive.”

Charlize Theron talked to People magazine about her role.

“I always had this little voice in my head of George going, ‘Well, now I’m going to show you a real woman.’ When you come across that rare filmmaker that really wants to embrace that, it’s really nice, and should there be more of that? Hell yeah.”

And then there’s the stunts — very few of the crazy stunts shown in the two-hour-plus movie are CGI.

Miller wanted an old-school feel to the action sequences, but he also needed them to be filmed on a scale that audiences have come to expect from an action tentpole movie. So Guy Norris, supervising stunt coordinator, pulled together upwards of 150 stunt people and ran them through 303 stunt sequences over the course of the film — 70 of which were particularly dangerous.

Norris told Rolling Stone, “It was literally like going to war.”

But Norris elaborated on why he understood where Miller was coming from in an interview with Wired.

“George foresaw that people were getting tired of CG. There’s just no base in reality, no peril.”

Take a look at the trailer and go see the movie, in theatres now.

[Image courtesy Warner Bros. via The Ralph Retort]

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