David James 🍩’s review published on Letterboxd:
I had a couple weeks to myself in the old house, packing up and moving our things into storage while my wife stayed at her parents' house and began her new job in a new town. This meant a chance to watch some of my favorite Dad Movies at high volume as a sort of last hurrah marathon for the four years spent in that home. The first night, I went with Heat because of course I did. Too obvious not to. The second night was a curveball with Stalker, a movie that surprisingly benefits from having the sound cranked way up - Eduard Artemyev's eerie-ecstatic score and the atmospheric sound design completely enveloped me in the dark living room. The third night, I had to go big again with what I can easily call one of the best action movies ever made: Mad Max Fury Road.
I don't even know what to say here. Maybe I'll write a full review someday, but I was honestly tempted to write something stupid in all caps like "THIS MOVIE FUCKS" and leave it at that. I grew up on R rated action movies from the seventies and eighties and eventually nineties, scifi and kung fu, Verhoeven and John Woo and everything in between, and yet I walked out of the theater back in 2015 saying to my best friend, I think this might be the best action movie ever made. One viewing was all it took, and Fury Road keeps holding up every time I revisit. Granted, this is a movie I save for special occasions when I can watch VERY LOUD so it's still only been four our five times total over the years now. This time I got to catch it on 4k with apparently even better sound, and the sharpness definitely helped me appreciate some of the insane costume design and stunt work even more than I already did. There are so few movies so densely packed with unparalleled badassery, edited to perfection without an ounce of fat. This shit just charges on and on and on and then BLAM whoosh it's over and you feel rattled and worked over and it rocks.
I did like this bit from my first review that kinda says it really well. So here goes 2019 me to close this up:
The fact that the story allows for multiple full character arcs and surprising, organic twists while hurtling through barely interrupted stretches of high speed scenery? And that it's shot like a mutant hybrid of Roger Deakins western monumentalism and early Sam Raimi spastic kineticism? And that the film manages to subvert typical damsel roles and satirize toxic masculinity while blowing up tons of machinery with tons of wild stunts, and serve up an interesting, beyond-satisfying finale? That's fucking crazy.
