viewer 🛸’s review published on Letterboxd:
or, Fast & Furiosa: Maximal Road
Sorry; I know everyone's doing that, but I want to play, too. I have noticed that a lot of folks are experiencing what one might call hype drain, but in this case I feel the revved-up excitement has matched the thrill of anticipation I felt from the very first trailer, and so it has been anything but draining to me. I was right along for that ride. And during that first big action sequence (the first in a sequence of sequences), when the camera came soaring in from the sky and swooped over a racing war party — diegetic electric guitar cacophony fading in and briefly thundering like martial fanfare for metalheads before fading back out as we caught up with our fleeing protagonists — I knew the hype was real. The titular madman, strapped to the front of one vehicle, squinted in the winds whipping him with sand and bared his teeth through a grill of steel while I grinned back at him. Because it was awesome. Full sense of the word, too — I haven't seen an action spectacle like this in some time. Furious 7 was fantastic, but in hindsight feels so very lightweight, left in the dust by this blistering, berserker, balletic, nightmare-fueled blast from the past.
I could take a left turn here and mention something about video games, and how the Mad Max universe has influenced a handful of them — Fallout and Rage being primary examples — but there's not much to say about the actual games beyond mentioning that. What's interesting, though, is how this new film comes along at a juncture where CGI can be used to flamboyantly enhance some very gritty imagery, searing it with digital effects and a wildly, beautifully overblown color palette. There was a time just a couple of years back where I reached a saturation point with all those orange & teal movies and just couldn't abide any longer, but Fury Road takes that style and transmutes it into something completely its own.
Referring back to video games for a moment, some of my favorites are those that tell their stories through a synergy of visuals and mechanics, without heavy reliance on dialogic exposition. Being an action film, Fury Road benefits from a certain degree of terseness, drawing a story from its sights and sounds: painted faces, chrome lips, beastly cars like chariots of demigods, bloodbags, beautiful breeders reaching for freedom, a guitar maniac (a face-melter with a melted face) shredding and chugging to the rhythm of the war drums, big bosses heralding their own arrival with quasi-religious bombast like the fierce braggarts of arcade fighters and racers. And so it reflects the best of both worlds. One thing video games could stand to take from this film, though, is its representation of women as more than just eye candy for straight men, tools and/or victims of a violent world dominated by patriarchy. Others have said it better than I could: MK R, for example, wrote in the last paragraph of her review about what a smuggling run this movie is, in every sense. Of course, this is no longer a secret, and if the explosion of hype over the last week has shown us anything it's that a loud minority of woeful misogynists have made lots of people even more excited to see it. And what a gratifying spectacle of revolution it is.
Fury Road is an action masterpiece. Witness!
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