Furiosa does a great job to set up the events of Mad Max Fury Road.

Dementus riding a chariot towed by motorcycles was awesome.

I saw Furiosa this weekend by watching it on Max. I'm a casual fan of the "Mad Max" apocalyptic universe. This post will have some spoilers in it, so here is your official "spoiler warning."

First off, Chris Hemsworth is fantastic in this movie. I'd like to say that Anya Taylor Joy was also fantastic. But even though she occupied a lot of the scenes and it was her story, she had no dialogue. Most of the movie, people just thought she was mute. What she did do was act like an angry woman nearly all of the time. But just to be fair, she had a lot to be angry about in this story.

I think what Furiosa tried to do was to set up the struggle that we saw in Mad Max: Fury Road, and it did this really well. The movie runs right up to the exact moment when Furiosa hits the "Fury Road" to try and save some women from the death cult of Immortan Joe. Leading up to these events was a wild ride, and the most important player in this was the character of Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth. Chris was so damned goofy, but in a dangerous "cult of personality" way.  I loved how there was a sort of crumminess to him compared to the other warlords. The peevish little whine in his voice, always having to spin failures.... When he finally got a face-to-face with Immortan Joe (who had made himself a god in his own death cult), watching Dementus's bravado falter before Joe's war boys was fantastic.

George Miller has a unique perspective when it comes to the post-apocalyptic world. The road wars, the violence, the raiders...places like "Gas Town" and "The Citadel" are unique and striking locations. The world breeds its own kind of crazy, and you get these cultish types like Dementus and you see that they are really good at destroying things, but they have no ability to rule. It turns out that ruling is much different than just conquering. With Immortan Joe, you see something different. He used a bunch of religious rhetoric to manipulate his people, yes, and his motivations were cruel and utterly self-serving. But, he found and built an empire in the wasteland, because he controlled a freshwater aquifer and he was using it to produce food, grow green things, and had some sort of bizarre nightmare breeding program going to try and have "full life" offspring. Gross, yes. But a civilization of sorts?

In a way, I also think that Chris Hemsworth has a bit of Kurt Russell in him. If they ever do a remake of Big Trouble in Little China, I think Chris Hemsworth would be a natural fit in the role of Jack Burton. He's got just enough goofiness and self-awareness that I think he could really pull off a "Jack Burton" well.

All in all, I loved Furiosa. It does have its issues of course. For one, the world portrayed is way too barren to have the amount of people it has living in it. I just can't make the story work. I mean...it's obvious that there are plenty of cannibals feasting on human flesh as we saw in the maggot bunker (and eating maggots as well). So, I guess people did what they had to do to survive. But even with all of that, the population didn't make sense. And the second thing that doesn't make sense is how these people can be so stupid, yet they build things like the War Rig or they create prosthetic limbs. And by "stupid" I mean things like using flame throwers around petroleum or gasoline (guzzolene in the movie) and other such nonsense. I don't know how you go from being that dumb to being able to build these incredible machines. However, these kinds of questions don't serve Furiosa well. I think what you should do is just sit back and enjoy it. Honestly, this is the most metal movie I've seen in a good long while. 

 

This footage from Mad Max: Fury Road just proves that it was robbed by Spotlight at the Academy Awards

Mad Max: Fury Road was a miracle of a film from beginning to end. I'm still a little shocked that it failed to win Best Picture earlier this year at the Academy Awards. But if you still aren't sold on how much effort went into making this film, please PLEASE watch this video. It shows just how much of the movie was real, how much was stunt work, and that the actors were totally committing themselves to a very controlled (dangerous) chaos.

Twenty years from now, no one will even remember Spotlight (the film that actually won Best Picture). But people will still be talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. And to anyone that says the plot was too basic, I think it was actually brilliant. After everything the characters had gone through to get where they were, they realized they had nowhere to go but back the way they had come. And after a solid thirty minutes of heart-stopping action sequences, the entire audience groaned “Oh shit!” exactly at that second because we ALL knew what would come next. And we were not disappointed.

Thank you, George Miller.

Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action movie of the summer and deserves to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

We really should all just take a moment and appreciate Max in this gif. The
world has gone completely crazy, and it's clear he's the only sane one left.

Now that summer is almost over, I think I'm going to make a crazy prediction. Not only was Mad Max: Fury Road the best movie of the summer, but it could very well go on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Yeah, I'm saying it now. Wouldn't that be insane? It's a little short on plot but what Mad Max movie isn't? And it has great reviews on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes with a 98% fresh rating the last time I checked. That pretty much puts it in "this is a masterpiece" territory with critical reviewers. It took me watching the honest trailer for it to fully gel this opinion (that you should take with a grain of salt), and I think if you give it a moment of your time, you'll agree that in the least Mad Max: Fury Road was the best action movie of the year. Seriously, watch the honest trailer. It's the best three minutes of your life you'll spend today.