With any luck, this time Hollywood will follow him.Īs for Max, he’s being followed already, hounded across the desert by a gang of chalk-skinned mutant cultists known as War Boys. Miller’s probably heading back into the dunes regardless.
A whole generation of moviegoers haven’t seen anything remotely like Fury Road before, and they likely won’t again for quite some time. The action galaxy hasn’t seen a genre-redefining corrective like this since Lana and Lily Wachowski gave us The Matrix in 1999. But you could easily argue things are better this way. Sure, it would have been nice to see it when the original trilogy of Miller’s automotive warfare classics wasn’t so shrouded by the lingering fallout of Gibson’s implosion. Now it’s here though, both a decade and half too late and right on time. dollar, and Mel Gibson, who had played Max in the first three movies, noisily self-destructed. While they were away, the events of 9/11 ran roughshod over the U.S. Miller and Max Rockatansky didn’t follow the industry, instead disappearing into their own wasteland. The closest this movie comes to a plot twist is everyone doing a U-turn and heading back in the direction they came, only faster.Īt some point between 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and the germ of Fury Road wriggling into 70-year-old Miller’s nitro-boosted imagination, Hollywood made its own sharp change of direction – away from the Australian director’s handmade practical stunts, and towards the cheaper, safer CGI we see so much of in the movies today. It only cares about furious forward momentum never stopping, never slowing down, barely even relenting. It doesn’t mean anything, and Fury Road doesn’t really care about it. But constant, cacophonous noise is no different to silence. It isn’t that you can’t hear anything the engines never stop rumbling, the desert sand never stops hissing, and there’s a skull-faced dude strapped to a truckload of amps, riding into battle spewing riffs and plumes of flame from a double-necked guitar with complementary flamethrower. In the post-apocalyptic Australian outback sound seems almost superfluous. They could probably enjoy this one on mute. Throughout the press tour for Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller frequently parroted something Hitchcock had said about his desire to make movies so visually clear that the Japanese could enjoy them without subtitles.