MAD MAX FURY ROAD (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

Though a lot of franchises founder if the audience hasn't seen them in a while, ROAD was immensely popular upon its theatrical release, even though the last MAD MAX film appeared in 1985. To be sure, director/co-writer George Miller conceived the template of ROAD back in 1995, but numerous complications delayed the film for twenty years. 

By that time, former "Mad Max" performer Mel Gibson was scratched from the project, at least partly because of his advanced age, and so Max was for the first time played by a new actor, Tom Hardy. Aside from a handful of other American players, most of the cast was Australian like the director, and ROAD, like the other entries in the franchise, exploits the "wide open spaces" of Down Under in order to capture the untrammeled joy and terror of racing hot rods without any civilized restraints to get in the way. 

In keeping with his established procedure, Miller drops the viewer into his post-apocalyptic world with next to no exposition. But if one does not know going in that Max is a former Aussie cop who's now a very reluctant hero, his psychological conflicts are at least suggested by Max's peculiar flashbacks of dead people he failed to protect. Nevertheless, it will take most of the picture before Max gets religion-- though part of this is due to the "dog-eat-dog" existence of the apocalyptic world. 

Max gets captured by a petty warlord who makes Auntie Entity seem like a benevolent tyrant: elderly Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who rules a desert citadel replete with a bounty of subterranean water. Joe keeps a harem of nubile women and an army of freakish, sometimes diseased warriors called "War Boys." One War Boy hooks Max up to his hot rod in order that the machine can feed off Max's blood-- and this exigency causes Max to be unwillingly drawn into the film's first big chase scene. 

Furiosa (Charlize Theron) has only been pretending to be Joe's faithful servant. Her true purpose at the Citadel has always been to steal Joe's entire harem and transport them to her all-female tribe. (As with most Amazon societies not much is said about how this one perpetuates itself.) Furiosa flees the Citadel in one of Joe's big-rigs, and so all the War Boys race after her, dragging Max with them.

Again, there are so few scenes of character interaction that next to ROAD, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK seems like an Altman movie. Furiosa's nebulous altruism aside, everyone else, including Max, is defined by the need to assert physical independence, and often superiority. Max gets free of the War Boys but is entirely willing to steal the big-rig from Furiosa and the women, being prevented only by Furiosa having gimmicked-up the rig's controls. Then it's one blistering chase scene after another, and even though Max ends up defending the females there are no standard scenes of "bonding with the underdogs." Only after many, many fights and chases, when Furiosa finally reaches her goal and learns that her people have almost died out, does Max make a suggestion that implies his alliance with Furiosa's cause. He advocates making a frontal assault on the Citadel, given that the absence of the pursuit vehicles have left the redoubt unguarded. And, without going into the many assaults and reverses that follow, that's pretty much what happens. But Max, like his ancestor Shane, is fated not to be part of the community he fosters.

Joseph Campbell might term the Citadel's decadent ruler as "the Tyrant Holdfast," the ruler who bottles up resources and deprives all of his subjects of a piece of the action. As such, Joe is more of a concept than a character, and since he spends the whole film in a breather-mask, actor Keays-Byrne must use his voice to project authority, just as, oddly enough, Tom Hardy had done in 2012, essaying the villain Bane for THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Nevertheless, the scenes of Joe dispensing water to his starving subjects establish the economy of the post-apoc world as well as Joe's cruelty, and his monopolization of the world's pretty women is clearly meant to create a parallel. Joe is the Dead Hand of the Past, and Max must liberate the powers of life from his control. The vague feminist tropes of ROAD are not nearly as evocative. Still, ROAD probably appealed to a 2015 audience in creating a hero who was willing to rescue hot girls but didn't try to sleep with them.

There's no question that ROAD is one of the most kinetically exciting films ever conceived, easily in the same pantheon with the original STAR WARS and the aforementioned RAIDERS. Miller's mythology is not nearly as resonant as either of those movies, but it certainly blows away most of the MCU movies of the time, particularly its 2015 competitor AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, one of the first films to display many of the problems with Hollywood's current approach to adventure movie-making.