#Mad max fury road rating movie#
#Mad max fury road rating full#

(The life-giving power of blood and water, in particular, book-end the film in an important way.) In a nightmarish early image, we see women hooked up to industrial milking machines - motherвЂ™s milk being one of the precious, life-giving fluids on which the world and the themes of Fury Road depend, along with water, blood and gasoline. One-upping Islamic polygamy, which traditionally permits no more than four wives, Joe keeps a harem of five women in sexual slavery, chosen for their health and fertility in a world poisoned by fallout radiation. The cult, led by the monstrous warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter, the main villain in the original Mad Max), talks about Valhalla, the Norse hall of the honored dead, and his warriors, called War Boys, have shaved heads and wear white stuff on their skin, giving them a skeletal or zombie-like appearance.

#Mad max fury road rating movie#

ItвЂ™s also a movie about the dehumanizing, domineering power of a violent religious regime over its subjects - particularly women, but also men.

#Mad max fury road rating full#

This is a movie in which the enemy rides into battle spurred on by a truck full of war-drumming timpani players and an immense tractor unit stacked high with an towering array of amplifiers, upon which, dangling from bungee cords, flails a flamboyantly scarlet-clad, cowled heavy-metal guitar hero called the Doof Warrior, ferociously shredding a double-neck axe like a 1980s arena-rock superstar at the height of his guitar solo - and if this isnвЂ™t already the most bizarre sentence I have ever written, let me add that the guitar, for absolutely no practical reason at all, is also a fully functioning flamethrower. This is a movie largely made up of extended chase scenes involving characters with names like Toast the Knowing and Rictus Erectus. That last paragraph sounds so heavy that I want to recall what a gonzo work of lunacy Fury Road is. As the film unfolds, it reveals the hidden humanity of this world and of its broken title character, a shell of a man haunted by past horrors and initially reduced to the bare impulse to survive.

In other respects, though, the cult suggests an alternate-universe counterpart to the Islamic State or Boko Haram, with its blend of nihilistic violence, tyrannical social control, crushing ignorance melded with fanatical religious fervor, and especially subjugation of women as property, valued only for their fertility.ДЄnd partly itвЂ™s because, by stripping down plot, dialogue and characterization to the bare minimum and focusing on the action, the film paradoxically heightens the significance of the action, by which the characters define themselves and which becomes the vehicle for the filmвЂ™s themes. Partly itвЂ™s because of MillerвЂ™s reliance on uncompromisingly old-school practical effects and stunts over computer imagery, as well as the disciplined visual clarity with which all this action is filmed and edited, so that however crazy things get, you always know where everyone is and whatвЂ™s going on. Yet, against all odds, Fury Road remains gripping to the end.

Past a certain point, pitting more and more Avengers against more and more Ultron-bots becomes a reductive experience rather than a cumulative one. I wondered this myself.ДЄnd when a movie sustains this level of action mayhem, on such a scale and level of complexity, the outcome is almost always numbing. It is possible to wonder, in what is basically a thunderous entertainment rather than a difficult but profound art film, whether the brilliant achievements are really worth enduring the suffocatingly oppressive milieu. Set in a nightmare world dominated by a nihilistic blood cult, Fury Road is full of nasty, grotesque imagery and horrifying incident. George Miller, returning after a three-decade lacuna to the grim franchise that put a young actor named Mel Gibson on the map and helped to cement the tropes of contemporary post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction, has crafted one of the biggest, nuttiest, most overwhelming movies ever made.