Mad Max 4 - Fury Road - a furious ride!

Howdy Folks, it’s exhortation time! I am exhorting you to drop everything and go see Mad Max 4: Fury Road.

Now that I've come down from the aural/visual/sensual high that is this extraordinary film, I urge every single one of you to head to the nearest big screen cinema and strap yourselves in for the cinematic ride of 2015. Fuck yeah!

Take your loved ones, your parents, your (older) children, your grandparents, your friends, and while you’re at it, your pets. Let George Miller take you through a crash-course in Directing Action Films 101.

It features real humans performing real stunts – and I mean seriously death-defying stuff. It uses minimal CGI. It features Charlize Theron rocking a gorgeously butch haircut, looking like the sun-kissed Amazon of the Veldt she is. It features the melancholically pretty and thankfully near-mute Tom Hardy as the eponymous Max. Megan Gale makes an appearance in the nuddy.

Strange as it sounds, there are quite a few nods to iconic silent films. Yes, you read correctly - silent films. In amongst the noise, the crunch and the crash, amidst the thrash of drums and electric guitars, there's some real visual poetry here.

Without giving too much away, the early scenes inside the Citadel look a lot like Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis, and the henchmen perched atop the long swaying poles evoke the Keystone Kops or Buster Keaton-style antics from that same era. Muddy reckons they reminded him of Balinese fisherman hanging off fishing poles! In a pre-audio world, silent films told stories through physical action, body language and facial expression alone. No words required.

So much has been said about its feminist slant – brutal patriarchy overthrown by a ballsy chick, a pregnant supermodel-cum-Boudicca, a bunch of grannies on motorbikes and a couple of tag-along blokes lending their muscles on the journey – that I don’t need to add any more. If you’d like to read a good deconstruction of the film, then check out Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane

For me, the image of a girl madly clutching a handbag containing precious seedlings thirsting for soil and water is one of the film’s more poignant images. The film is full of these arresting moments that take you by surprise and make you think, but never slow the film down.

This is a stand-alone epic. No need to have seen the originals.

Check it out on the big screen while you can.