Cars, bikes leave dialogue in the dust in ‘Fury Road’
DAVID BASCKIN
MOVIE fans tend to rave about the overwhelming benefits of movie theatres with giant screens versus the television arrangements of most homes.
A couple of nights ago, determined to see gain, I saved it on the PVR, settled myself into my professional television reviewers’ watching chair, put on my expensive but magnificent sound editors’ headphones and hit the play button.
WHAMMO! And there it was, Mad Max: Fury Road complete with the one armed version of Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy wearing a garden spade over his face while welded into a giant crucifix on the front of a sand busting dune buggy with a supercharged V8 and a hairless driver with eye shadow connected to Mr Hardy’s blood stream via a plastic tube and giant phlebotomist needles stuck in their mutual necks. WHAMMO! Or have I said that already?
But first, the plot. A caravan of astonishing motor cars, trucks and motor bikes race through a deserted landscape.
They meet a similar arrangement of vehicles travelling the other way. They fight. Then caravan #1 returns to base, to which one should add “kinda, sorta” to maintain a positive relationship with truth.
Everything else is special effects and camp gestures, not to mention a post-nazi approach to human reproduction plus a human dairy. That all this runs virtually unbroken by dialogue is a massive achievement, as are the costumes, weapons and vehicles.
Meanwhile, back in the middle of nowhere – see this as a cameo – one armed Charlize aka Furiosa is driving a giant rig. In the hold – yes, the hold – there’s a collection of scantily dressed but quite extraordinarily clean young women, some of whom are pregnant. These are the inmates of the gang leader’s harem. They are hitching a lift to the Green Place, about which I am going to tell you nothing at all.
Tom Hardy playing Mad Max connected by a long chain to a car door, shoots one of the harmen aunties in the leg with his Glock. She complains to Furiosa and since this is one of the few moments of interactive dialogue involving complete sentences and real words, I’ll quote it in full.
Furiosa (our Charlize): How does it feel?
Harem auntie (Rosie Alice Huntington-whiteley, formerly of Victoria’s Secret): It hurts.
Furioso: Out here everything hurts.
Allow me a non-sequential observation. While there is no shortage of weaponry both standard and fictional, the Glocks get the biggest exposure from a gun marketing point of view. Despite the sand, the dust, the harem auntie blood, the water and the petrol, the Glocks just keep on doing their Glockishe stuff regardless. Talk about product placement!
As dystopian this iteration of Mad Max may be, it is already just slightly out of date. I predict a sequel not too different from Fury Road in which the Tom Hardy dude is replaced by “President” Trump. Like most Democrats, I yearn to see him wired to a giant crucifix on the nose of an out of control petrol tanker, with a garden spade locked and strapped to his face while Australians in loin cloths torment him with lewd critiques of his tiny, tiny, hands. Tastemakers, Thursday, SABC1 at 6pm Tastemaker Series is a multiracial street culture mash-up showcase magazine show.