Jake’s review published on Letterboxd:
Here they come again. Worming their way into the black matter of my brain.
Fury Road takes a little of every Mad Max that came before it. Tanker chasing action, insane car stunts, a character design from Thunderdome for the warboys, destorying the interceptor (twice), and a Max that doesn't want to get involved but inevitably does before leaving to make his own way. Accelerating footage to create a sense of speed, bulging eyes edited in before sudden death, and even cutting frames during actions sequences for kinetic impact. The identity of this series is back in full force. The cars more insane and fantastical than ever, the carnage more extreme, bodies flying in explosions of cars made scrap and flame, its the most beautiful destruction has ever looked. It does more than take from its previous films, it uses it all to elevate this into masterpiece by a veteran filmmaker. I'll always remember the release of this. It felt like an event for me and my friends at the time. Its a well deserved modern classic.
Witness me.
You can look at so many things as being the best in the film. Only 30 minutes in and we get the initial war-rig fight with the buzzards, the sandstorm, and the Max Furiosa fight scene. Then we get the sequence with the rock riders, jumping over the war-rig dropping bombs while an amazing score sounds. This movie is absolutely stacked. I could wax poetic for hours over about any 5 minute sequence in this. It starts strong and stays strong. In stunts, the way it shoots its action, and the emotional core of this leave this without any weak points.
You know, hope is a mistake. If you can't fix whats broken, you'll... you'll go insane.
This is the best Max has ever been. The overgrown unkempt look at the start to emphasize the point that he's not living, just surviving, like the theme of Mad Max 2. Most of what we get from Max is just grunts, growls, and lone words. Tom Hardy is genuinely the best in this role. He plays both the animalistic and altruistic parts of Max perfectly. The Interceptor returns again, another character in itself. It gets destroyed again, twice so I shed two tears, but reappears throughout the film as an antagonist, altered into a chrome monstrosity to torment him like another devil from his past.
Yeah, feels like hope.
I love that Max is a universal donor, like he's genetically predisposed to helping people. There's this one scene where when Angharad went under the wheels, there's this figure that appears out from the dust of the wreckage. It might not be, but it resembles what Max sees as he looks out into the salt later in the film. Even if we wasn't seeing his wife/daughter, the fact that thats what this movie made my mind go to is amazing. We're in the headspace of Max where we realize with him in that moment that he's lost another person he should've been protecting, another ghost to haunt him. Even though he has these ghost, and it seems that he can't help but create more of them, and though he's apprehensive, he has an instinct to do the right thing. Its almost as animalistic as his instinct to just survive. Though the world has soured and changed beyond his recognition with little hope of repair, and though he is undoubtedly broken, he allows himself a little hope and offers it to those without. It reminds me of movies like Kurosawa's Charisma and Children of Men, sometimes we and others just want to do the right thing no matter how meaningless is might seem against it all. Even if we're partly doing it for ourselves.
At least that way, you know, we might be able to... together... come across some kind of redemption.
