Wasteland Ronin: part 4

It seemed that the MAD MAX film series was completed in 1985 with BEYOND THUNDERDOME but in the late 1990s/early 2000s a fourth film was rumoured, and I followed the on-again-off-again MAD MAX reboot saga- Mel is not interested, so a grown-up Feral Kid movie is planned, possibly starring Russell Crowe, but then Gladiator happens, Russell gets huge, and Russell is out. Mel is back in, but September 11th 2001 happens, which kills the US dollar and Max’s budget, and Mel is out. Heath Ledger is in, Heath is dead. Mel is back, Mel melts down, and Mel is out. Tom Hardy is in. The desert at Broken Hill is covered in wildflowers delaying production, for a year. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong and then some. Meanwhile, in that same 15 year period, many of the fantastic cinematic worlds of my youth were mauled by their original filmmakers; STAR WARS, ALIEN, INDIANA JONES. Although Max had owned the post-apocalyptic film genre back in the 1980s, now that we’ve had THE ROAD, the PLANET OF THE APES reboots, TERMINATOR reboots, the I AM LEGEND reboot, INTERSTELLAR, HUNGER GAMES and a horde of ZOMBIE movies, would he have anything fresh to offer? Consequently, I was both interested in, and afraid of being let down by FURY ROAD and tempered my enthusiasm right up until the theatre lights dimmed on opening weekend..

FURY ROAD Film franchises are rebooted every few years, restating the ‘origin story’ each time, but not so with the first MAD MAX movie in three decades. George Miller allows us to briefly absorb a scene of Max and his iconic Interceptor; a two-headed lizard scurrying in a barren desert shows the effects of nuclear war, and Max stomping and EATING that same lizard shows how far he’s fallen since DiNKi-Di dog chow was his favourite food. Then the movie starts: anaemic marauders chase after Max, capture and take him to be enslaved in THE CITADEL; the crib of IMMORTAN JOE. He’s the meanest desert warlord since Jabba the Hutt, demonstrated vividly when Joe applies Trickle Down Economics on the desert-dwelling saps below. These are the random citizens we saw in the first MAD MAX movie, who now pick through the dust for scraps left by the muscle men in hotrods. There’s evidence of nuclear fallout in the the chronically sick WARBOYS, and the infertility/breeding obsessions of the villain. While tooting on an asthma inhaler (that he nicked from Darth Vader) Immortan Joe discovers that his 5 WIVES have been set free by one of his hench-lieutenants named FURIOSA, and they’ve escaped in her truck, called a WAR RIG.

FURY ROAD was utterly bonkers in the best possible way. Fever dream imagery strung on an action-narrative thread, where each action and shot were intricately choreographed like an insane diesel ballet. Emotions and themes were expressed in a dance of human bodies and auto bodies done with real vehicles and flesh-and-blood stunt crew, elevating it to another level of beauty and wonder. I’m often mystified by real dance, actual poetry, true opera and genuine ballet, but respond to poetic balletic and operatic qualities used elsewhere, such as this nutty masterpiece. George Miller once said that he wants to make pure-cinema films; understandable to foreign audiences even without subtitles, and that’s exactly what he’s done. MAD MAX’s post-apocalyptic world, where civilisation and humanity have been stripped bare and the protagonist is reduced to his monosyllabic basics, is a laboratory for Miller to explore the limits of non-verbal cinematic communication. Zach Snyder’s SUCKERPUNCH, or the Wachowskis’ SPEED RACER were praised by some as pure kinetic cinema, but left me utterly cold, and I suspect that Michael Bay has always strived to make a film like FURY ROAD, but all he can manage is a Michael Bay movie. What FURY ROAD has, that so many similar similar movies lack, is clear visual staging, superlative action choreography and inspired editing, resulting in a transcendent cinematic experience. Filmic visual language, and the boldest world-building since 1977’s STAR WARS, tell us all we need to know, and with hardly a word spoken.

In the 1970s-1980s MAD MAX movies, Max had witnessed the end of society and thus would’ve been of the same generation as Immortan Joe. Although Mel Gibson has fallen from grace in recent years, an older weatherbeaten Mad Mel would’ve been interesting to me and Mel’s recent rocky history might’ve added interesting shadings to this story of a broken man who redeems himself, but Tom Hardy was incredible and I quickly got used to his younger Max. In this reimagining, Max is the same age as Furiosa and thus couldn’t remember the time before the fall of society 30–40 years prior, so he may not be the same Max that I once knew. That Max was a cop with a wife and toddler son but this Max’s flashbacks were of a 10 year old girl and a variety of other as-yet unknown characters. Various fan theories attempt to explain this, and other fan theories about those fan theories aside, the MAD MAX movies were never a ‘saga’ with a beginning middle and an end. To me, they seemed to be yarns about a wandering antihero, told by other characters touched by him. ROAD WARRIOR was narrated by the Feral Kid, and THUNDERDOME was narrated by Savannah, both having become community leaders via the long-ago assistance of Max. There was no narration in MAD MAX, but it may have been told from the point of view of Max’s boss, Fifi, remembering a gifted young man who fell to savagery, becoming a symbol of the lost potential of humanity. In FURY ROAD the narration is by Max himself, effectively denting my pet nerd-theory but the broader point still holds; looking for timeline continuity in the MAD MAX movies is a dead-end. Miller clearly intends to change Max’s back story in this ‘reimagining’ and in typical Miller style, screen time isn’t wasted on jibber-jabber. We just need to trust Miller and hold on because his War Rig is already moving.

A cock-blocked Immortan Joe calls his Warboys to back him up as he chases his 5 Wives, who are high-tailing it to a promised land called THE GREEN PLACE. The most anaemic Warboy of all is NUX, who uses Max as a mobile blood-bag strapped to his ride. Although Immortan Joe has the management style of Joe Stalin, any warlord who has a blind guitarist and albino taiko drum crew on retainer as part of his war party has a lot of post apocalyptic panache. Meanwhile, the chase enters a cyclone and Max gets free, only to have a savage brawl with FURIOSA.

From the very beginning, Miller set his MAD MAX films at an unspecified point in the future so he was not bound by mere realism. They are broad, operatic and even cartoonish but within that neo-mythological framework, Miller explores real-world issues. Many viewers respond to feminist themes (clearly Max has come a long way since Phillip Adams accused him of being ‘a special favourite of rapists, sadists, child murderers and incipient Mansons’ in 1979) while some male fans groan that their macho-male-movie-icon has been reduced to a supporting character in his own movie (and to women, no less). These angry boys in their “No Gurlz Allowed” treehouse forget that Max was always a passenger in stories driven by other characters’ goals; Max’s boss Fifi in the first film, Papagallo in the second, and Aunty Entity and Savannah (yes, women) in the third. I admit to an internal groan when Charlize Theron was cast, but in my case it was fear of Hollywood meddling, THUNDERDOME-style, and because I’d been soured by her role in PROMETHEUS, another franchise restart by a 1970s director-hero that was (for me anyway) a total clunker. I need not have worried because Charlize Theron was utterly fantastic in this movie. Using her dancer training she expressed so much in movement, and nuanced acting evoked the complex inner life of the marvellous character Furiosa, all with little dialog.

Some dismiss FURY ROAD as merely a ‘two hour chase sequence’, but watching two hours of complex action staging and never losing sight of what is actually happening is extraordinarily rare. In most action movies today, the objects moving through frame and the cameras themselves both flail in an attempt at dynamism, but create an incoherent mess. Batman enters, there’s a flurry of shaky-cam shots, and 10 baddies are suddenly on the floor. In FURY ROAD, Miller trusted us to figure out the details as we watched, and we could follow because he gave us the information to do so, visually. This craftsmanship alone would have left me in awe of FURY ROAD but it also had astonishing thematic and emotional weight embedded in its beautifully kinetic Busby Berkeley routine. In a standard action movie, the action is sandwiched between moments of character and plot development, but FURY ROAD attempts to advance character and plot through the action itself. This clearly doesn’t work for everyone, but for me this ‘two hour chase’ is brimming full with stories of desperation and redemption, the healing power of human empathy, and that to truly overcome oppression the answer is not escape but to change the status quo.

Max grudgingly becomes Furiosa’s ally and helps her and the 5 Wives fight off the BMX Bandits and the Spiky-Car Club. Cirque du Soleil collides with a mobile Monster Truck show, as every colourful kook in the outback is after them. Max, Furiosa and the 5 Wives finally escape from this rolling Burning Man and Survival Research Laboratory parade with some boy-howdy fancy shootin’ and Smokey and the Bandit style purty drivin’. They arrive at the fabled Green Place, but Furiosa is bummed to discover that it’s dry and shitty-looking as everywhere else. The consolation prize is meeting some really cool old bikie grannies called the VUVALINI. Max finds a lightbulb in the desert and holds it over his head; ‘Hey, Let’s turn around and storm Joe’s Citadel!’

Internet articles cite ‘secrets’ that make FURY ROAD work (‘It’s the editing!’ or ‘It’s the framing!’) which is like saying that the secret to Gene Kelly’s tap dancing is his right foot. As with any complicated process it’s the coordination of many steps that creates cinema magic (a much less catchy title for a Vimeo video). FURY ROAD rises above other action movies due to clarity; its various pieces fit seamlessly together as a unified whole. The ‘secret’ to the flabbergasting Hong Kong films of Jackie Chan, versus his flatter Hollywood films, is that Chan was empowered to approach his Hong Kong films holistically; involved in direction, and stunt-coordination, and performing, and editing. Whereas in Hollywood he was simply an actor/stunt performer. The career of Buster Keaton too shows a contrast between amazing films where he was involved in the entire process, and his later MGM films where Keaton only had limited input. FURY ROAD works because George Miller’s vision was applied throughout all phases of production:

STORY: George Miller wrote FURY ROAD without a script but storyboards were the equivalent, allowing all elements to be planned visually long before photography began. Comics/storyboard artist Brendan McCarthy was credited as co-screenwriter because Miller appreciates visually-scripting for a visual medium, an approach dear to my heart. (Many animated projects I’ve worked on were largely written with visuals and, whatever the credits say, the script sometimes transcribed the storyboards, rather than the other way around). DESIGN: Production designer Colin Gibson and costume designer Jenny Beavan did amazing work that facilitates the fast cutting. The Warboys’ distinctively anaemic pallor not only works for the post-nuclear story but allows them to ‘read’ clearly as they leap about. Vehicles too each had a distinctive silhouette and this wasn’t simply about looking ‘cool’, but looking cool in service of clarity. Because cinema is images in time, design is important. The audience could visually process the fast-cutting action because of design choices as much as anything else. STUNTS: The long production delays allowed stunt coordinator Guy Norris to run computer simulations to test safety and coordinate the weights of stunt performers and vehicles. Then those stunts were practised over and over again, before the beautiful butoh dance of human bodies was eventually caught on camera. CINEMATOGRAPHY: Miller knew that certain sequences would be edited incredibly rapidly, so traditional composition rules were broken to centre the action, because the human eye takes time to adjust to the composition of each new shot, and Cinematographer John Seale talked Miller into multiple secondary cameras to capture the action. Miller didn’t want yet another drab monochrome post-apocalyptic movie, so the only other place to go was supersaturated and the distinctive teal and orange colour palette of the movie is the work of Colorist Eric Whipp. EFFECTS: Having made action movies in the analog 1980s, and then worked in computer animation in the 2000s, Miller was supremely qualified to know how to use both digital and practical effects each to their best advantage. Digital effects were used to enhance the landscape, combine shots, remove stunt rigging and for greenscreening Charlize Theron’s prosthetic arm. Even the sequence which is obviously heavily CGI, the dust storm, was shot practically first. EDITING: Margaret Sixel’s background is as a documentary editor, and her skill at sifting through loads of footage to find the ideal cut was used to great effect, when 480 hours of footage supplied by Seale and Miller were whittled down to 2 hours and 2700 shots.

Furiosa finally confiscates Immortan Joe’s asthma inhaler but she’s fading fast due to her accumulation of wounds. Then, in the most touching post-apocalyptic moment since WALL-E, Max heals her with his own blood. Furiosa returns to the Citadel a conquering hero, and waves goodbye to Max as he rides off into the sunset, like a YOJIMBO of the Wasteland.

Max, Nux, Furiosa and the 5 Wives were tools of the system but inverted the roles they were exploited for. Nux was taught to sacrifice himself for Immortan Joe but used this Kamikaze role to thwart him instead. Furiosa was a lieutenant of the Citadel but used her trusted position to liberate its victims. Max was as a mere blood bag for the Warboys but used this role to nurture his former adversary Furiosa back to life. The implications for broad societal change are clear, but FURY ROAD can also be seen as a rebuke to Miller’s filmmaker colleagues. As if to say; “You may be working on a mere franchise movie, nevertheless you should imbue it with ingenuity and excitement, and some challenging themes as well.” Innovative films of the 1970s and 1980s became the template that Hollywood still regurgitates decades later but this sad trend could be exciting if even half those ‘blockbusters’ were made in the spirit of FURY ROAD.

When so many of my filmmaker heroes have made un-engaging films in recent years I’d wondered if directors inevitably lose their edge with age, but feared that the problem was actually my own jaded soul. However, in a gift from George Miller, I was immersed in wonder by a film at the age of 51 and learned that a 70 year old director can still give a masterclass in action filmmaking. Seeing this director who dazzled me in my teens do it again in my middle age is one of the many pleasures of FURY ROAD. Even though Phillip Adams still hates Max, most other critics are enthralled by George Miller’s film. After redefining action cinema in the 1980s, Miller went into animation and has not directed a live-action film since 1998. Now he proves that he’s still one of the great directors of his own generation and serves notice to the current generation too. It’s sad that George Miller says he only has two more movies left in him at his age but I eagerly wait to see what they’ll be, whether about pigs, penguins or ’pocalypse.

(part 4 of 4)