If you want a vision of the future, at least from George Miller¡¯s perspective, picture a boot stamping on a human face for about two hours. Those in search of a bludgeoning good time will find it in his new scorched-earth action extravaganza, ¡°Mad Max: Fury Road¡± ¡ª it¡¯s hard to remember the last time a summer tent-pole movie over-delivered in the ways this does.
In resurrecting the Australian post-apocalyptic road-movie series that made his name ¡ª and launched Mel Gibson¡¯s career ¡ª over three decades ago, Miller has skipped the salad and gone straight for the steak. Never mind that his last live-action feature was ¡°Babe: Pig in the City¡± in 1998, ¡°Fury Road¡± is a master-class in cinematic onslaught. It¡¯s as if the director had taken the climactic tanker-chase sequence from ¡°Mad Max 2¡± and strung it out into an entire film. It¡¯s exhilarating, but also exhausting.
Working with cinematographer John Seale and editor Margaret Sixel (who is also Miller¡¯s wife), the 70-year-old director adopts an approach that could almost be called old-school, especially when compared to the weightless CGI that defines most big-budget action flicks nowadays. His set pieces ¡ª and this is a film that consists of little else ¡ª have a pleasing sense of gravity and physical heft to them, the product of bravura stunt work, judicious digital tweaking and lots of heavy metal colliding. There¡¯s real coherence in the way they¡¯re spliced together: The shots all connect, and only in the most frenzied moments does it become hard to parse what¡¯s going on.
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