Harrison’s review published on Letterboxd:
I've watched a few hundred movies since I last logged Mad Max: Fury Road and in that time I've realized just how much of a cinematic anomaly this beast of a film really is. Do even the lightest of research on the behind-the-scenes production of Fury Road and you'll very quickly learn that a vast majority of the frankensteined sports cars/monster trucks in this film were engineered and built in real life. Read more, and you learn how many of the stunts and action sequences were created with stunt performers who were actually dumped off the sides of moving vehicles in the desert. And then, on top of all of that, read more and you realize that said masterworks of vehicle engineering, cars that legitimately could have been preserved in a museum, were actually destroyed on-camera for the movie. Before even reaching post-production, Fury Road was all but guaranteed to be a wonder of the world, even if it was poorly edited and sound-designed it wouldn't change much about the film's intense action spectacle, because all the heavy lifting was already done right there on camera.
Mad Max: Fury Road just happens to also be a masterclass in editing, sound design and scoring, because of course it is. Gratuitous overediting in Hollywood action films can very easily become nauseating, but the rapid-fire cut-cut-cut editing of Fury Road helps maintain a fast and chaotic pace during the action while never losing clarity of the action. It's really cool how such a pace can warp the viewer's perception of time, it can really be felt in the encounter with the bikers in the canyon. Most shots are barely even a single second long, but the bike jumps last for 2-3 seconds instead; the comparatively longer focus on the acrobatics makes the already epic stunts into something even more graceful within the context of the scene and the story's world.
Speaking of worldbuilding, Fury Road is one-of-a-fucking-kind in that area too! The original trilogy of Mad Maxmovies always had characters that were violent, crude and sexually vulgar, but the average Fury Road character is so far beyond that template to an insane degree. All of the men in this movie are some combination of calloused, tumorous, pale, grimy and/or monosyllabic, all having their own unique penchant for the gawdy and wildly impractical that makes them stand out in the very dense crowd that this movie often can be. And what's really cool is how meticulously the vehicles have been designed to be extensions of the characters driving them, e.g. Immortan Joe's car being made out of several cool expensive cars just stacked on top of each other with reckless abandon of aesthetics or aerodynamics, because he's a greedy goddamn hoarder. The cars have also been enhanced to have something of a beastly lifelike quality of their own, with some of them like the War Rig having animal noises overlayed over the roaring sounds of its engines.
For a movie so outwardly simple, it's honestly incredible how Fury Road improves the more scrutiny it's given, as those are the conditions that usually cause the average action blockbuster to fall apart. And I've only really touched lightly on its technical feats here, there's so much going on thematically to look into, even if it can be a little obtuse to grasp in that department for me. There just really aren't any other movies that seek to accomplish what Mad Max: Fury Road was aiming for, and the ones that might have certainly never had the kinds of resources Miller and co. had to pull it off. It honestly makes me so excited to think that we're only a few short years away from Furiosa showing up to (hopefully) change the game all over again. Thumbs up to this lovely goddamn movie.
(p.s. if you want to see how this website has changed me, go back and read my first review of this movie after reading this LMAO)
