Mad Max: Fury Road

Men in chains. Mad Max: Fury Road is entertaining as a film about a bunch of psychopaths chasing each other through the desert can be. The film’s greatest strength is rooted in its greatest betrayal. For at least half of the film, the titular protagonist is a pacified and passive supporting character who certainly has no bearing on the direction of the story despite introducing it with his own words (unlike in the second Mad Max, the scope of the narrative isn’t tied nearly as closely to Max – rather, we are “insolently” informed of one of his actions only by a big explosion somewhere in the distance). Women are in the driver’s seat, in both the literal and figurative sense. They are beautiful and scantily clad (like most of the other characters, so I wouldn’t lay blame on the film for employing a double standard), but merciless when it comes to men, who are automatically – and for the most part justifiably – perceived as a threat. Max is no exception, as he wouldn’t even have to have a mask on his face or his wrists in shackles to be mistaken for an animal controlled by instinct. While his goal is summed up from beginning to end in a single word (“survive”), Miller makes maximum use of stylistic techniques to ensure that we experience his survival at first hand (the “relieving” silencing of the music). By comparison, the motivations of the savage women have greater depth and raise numerous questions that you normally wouldn’t ask in relation to action blockbusters. ___ All of the men in the film are to a certain extent obsessed with physical strength, destruction and domination. Dominance over women and over their machines, which evidently intoxicates them as effectively as fresh blood does. The deification and fetishisation of high-performance, high-octane machines, with which their drivers would like to merge (spraying their mouths with chrome wheel paint), are in places pushed beyond the boundary of the most off-the-wall comic stylisation (as are the names of the characters, among which only Sillius Soddus and Biggus Dickus are missing), which is somewhat in conflict with the realistic basis of the depicted world and the raw brutality of the violence. Fury Road is sometimes a bit more and sometimes a bit less of an overwrought opera on four wheels, with massive explosions and chainsaw fights instead of arias. Just as Leone’s spaghetti westerns were operas in their own way. The last time I had a comparably intense impression of uninterrupted action that barely gives you time to breathe was when I saw the South Korean pseudo-spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, the Weird (for its pacing and crazy ideas, Fury Road would deserve the subtitle The Very Bad and the Weird). ___ In connection with the ideas of eco-feminism, the women conversely personify care, creation and the effort to restore humanity’s connection to nature (at one of the critical moments, their lives are saved by a tree). They don’t want to change the rules of the existing world, but to build (or perhaps better said, “let sprout”) a new world founded on protection, cooperation and caring instead of war, control and pillage. Their greatest wealth is not weapons or petrol, but planting seeds. The film is not militantly radical in its advocacy for an alternative life principle – instead of complete separation from men, it proposes partial synthesis as a solution – but it still took some proper courage to make the return of a great action hero a hell of a wild feminist ride. (If the picture hadn’t been unpleasantly dark, I wouldn’t have known about the 3D except for one shot.) Appendix: I believe that someone more qualified will write a more analytical text about the editing of the perfectly rhythmised action scenes and the use of characters as orientators, thanks to which the frenzied action is perfectly clear despite the jumps across the axis. 90% (05/14/2015) (less) (more)