Mad Max: Fury Road
When Imperator Furiosa first uttered the words ‘fang it’, I almost didn’t believe it, so long has it been since I had last heard the term. But another character uttered it later, so I hadn’t imagined it. Fair enough, given the Australian roots of the Mad Max franchise — and this movie is all about fanging it. (A quick check on the internet shows several sites explaining what ‘fang it’ means, prompted by… ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’.)
Mel Gibson is gone, of course, replaced by Englishman Tom Hardy. He does a fine job as Max, excepting only his English accent. But given how little dialogue there is in this movie, you can kind of let that pass. In a fitting tie to the past, the chief villain, Immortan Joe, is played by Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played chief villain Toecutter in the original 1979 Mad Max. (But it isn’t the same character: Max prevailed over Toecutter in the original in the usual way… by killing him.)
In one sense, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is simply a fitting continuation of the series. In another, it’s a stunning work of art and movie making. In 2011 ‘The Artist’ won the Best Motion Picture Oscar for its audacious achievement in delivering a moving story in silent movie format. Mad Max: Fury Road is similarly audacious, telling its story almost without dialogue, almost entirely through non-stop action. Its six Oscars are mostly for technical achievements, well deserved. The Oscar for Best Achievement in Film Editing was surely the most deserved — the editing made this movie tell the story.
And the visuals. Production Design also scored an Oscar, surely at least in part for saying much without words. So a massive safe door silently conveys the value of the treasures
that were stolen. The hydroponic green room is shocking in contrast to the water-starved masses below. And then there are the cars. The mighty war truck of the pursued, the relentless fanfare truck, carrying a half dozen massive war drums, and fronted by an insane guitar-wielding iOTA and an untellable number of loudspeakers. Finally, there’s the astonishing landscape. Even the extremes of Australia couldn’t offer that, so they went to Namibia. Flat orange desert from one horizon to the other. On and on forever. Nothing could be better for this postapocalyptic world. And one reason why you must see it on Blu-ray. Those long shots with fleets of vehicles racing far off across the desert would show the cars only as indistinct splotches at DVD resolution.
Whether or not you want to see it in 3D is another matter. I watched the 2D version and was entranced by the visuals throughout. Initially I was perturbed by some stutters in the movement until it became clear that these were intentional, with frames being dropped in post production to provide little accelerations in the on-screen movement. Don’t worry, it isn’t your system dropping frames.
The 3D version, which was generated post-photography, proved variable. The hyper-sharp exteriors with an enormous depth of field lend themselves to 3D very nicely, and the layering was for the most part not too overblown. But very occasionally there were background details in which the left and right eye separation were too much to allow the images to combine properly into a single item, thereby leaving a double image, and quite often the backgrounds near the screen edges lost their clarity. I’d stick with the 2D version.
The sound gets Dolby Atmos treatment, which means for home theatre purposes the ability to include a real Z height dimension to the normal X and Y of the sound field. I have no doubt that this was used atmospherically, but it wasn’t used much to isolate specific sound elements to the ceiling for the purposes of storytelling. There was plenty of that in the X and Y dimensions, though — for example with a screaming body flying entertainingly from front of screen over the viewer’s left shoulder during the sand storm.
But the greatest thing about the sound track was the glorious, glorious bass. The thunder of the war truck pounding across a gravel road, deep and without limit. The roar of nature during the aforementioned sand storm, and the power of the war drums. The better your subwoofer, the better this movie.