Luke Stagg’s review published on Letterboxd:
It is near indescribable how impressive it is that George Miller is able to create something I’ve never seen before while borrowing filmmaking fundamentals from all of movie history, including his own films. The themes and heart of this story are identical to his other Mad Max films, though consciously elevated to now include women’s rights at the crux of the power struggle.
Something that’s always struck me about the opening moments of this film is how similar they are to scenes by the likes of Charlie Chaplain and Buster Keaton. As we’re thrown directly into a totally unknown setting, using little to no dialogue Tom Hardy tells us everything we need to know with his facial expressions and frantic movements: he needs to get the hell out of wherever he is. As he scrambles through the sewer-like caverns being chased by pale brutes, more techniques of the silent film era reveal themselves. Hardy’s actions are sped up in the edit as he climbs and crawls around and loud music screams the tone of his adrenaline-pumped desperation. Even the moment when Hardy is about to escape feels like a hyper-real, extremely bright mirror of the iconic clock tower moment in Safety Last!
And all of that happens before the title card brands itself onscreen. As the film continues, more and more set pieces that seem at least conceptually familiar (“train” heists, getting wheels unstuck from mud, and of course car chases) are flipped on their head with guzzolene, explosions, electric guitars, and burning rubber. Because of all this, and many more stories of this film’s miraculous production, I don’t think it’s dramatic to say that Mad Max: Fury Road is the ultimate culmination of technical filmmaking at this stage in history.
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