Mad Max: Fury Road

Tom Hardy takes over the title role in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Unlike his predecessor in the part, Hardy has probably never addressed a female police officer as "sugar tits."

Perhaps you didn't realize that you needed to see Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron spend 120 minutes driving a giant war-semi covered in pointy things across a blasted and poisonous hellscape with literally one tree in it while they're being hotly pursued by a sort of mobile homicidal Burning Man Cirque du Soleil show on wheels, but trust me, holy crap you need to see that immediately and when you do you will not be able to believe your eyes.

A lesser movie would have just shown us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur. Mad Max: Fury Road gives us a gearshift knob made out of the head of a human femur that pulls out of the gearshift and reveals itself to be the handle of a stiletto.* I really respect that kind of attention to detail.

If most action movies are advertising, then this one is poetry. Oh, Reader, this one is savage, glorious, blood-spattered poetry, full of explosions and piercing war cries and unlikely objects flying through the air in every direction. That's right, Reader. Shit in this movie gets so real that I can only convey the intensity of my excitement by addressing you directly. As soon as we got home, my boyfriend John plopped down on the couch in front of his Xbox, and, with glazed eyes and a dreamy tone in his voice, simply said: "I need to shoot things."

Start to finish, MM: FR is a chase scene. You would think that this would get boring, but it doesn't. MM: FR is a series of images rather than a series of words, and from the structure of his neverending chase, director George Miller suspends such exquisitely modulated, lovely, grotesque, heartbreaking images that I'm tempted to use words like "archetypal." This isn't an undergraduate term paper, so I'll leave "archetypal" out, but seriously, lots of parts of the movie were... that. The motorcycle-riding old wise woman who carries a precious leather valise full of seeds. The quiet moment when, surrounded by giant smoke-belching death machines, a young woman dressed in white sits in the cab of a vehicle, turning the crank of a tiny tinkly music box. And that part where a grief-stricken Charlize Theron tosses aside her prosthetic arm and drops to her knees in the sand to mourn.

As a side note, Charlize Theron's prosthetic arm is awesome. The movie constantly shows us human bodies and machines, how they're similar, how they interact with each other, how they can be broken, how they can be weapons, how they can be valuable, and how it's frequently important to get the right liquid into the right tube.

I don't want to tell you much more about this new Mad Max other than that it's the best movie I've seen in years. Big budget action films too often throw money at the screen in a way that's depressingly unimaginative, and this movie is an antidote to that. It is... not like other movies. It has nothing unnecessary in it, and there's a lot of stuff in it. Plus, it portrays women as believable, complex, interesting humans and in so doing has incurred the ire of so-called "men's rights activists," and anything that pisses off that gaggle of tiny-dicked, Ron-Paul-voting, internet-circlejerk-chatroom trolls has to have something going for it, right?


*The knob is actually made of the head and greater trochanter of a femur, but acknowledging the greater trochanter made the paragraph cumbersome, so I let it go unmentioned.