~ Andrew Rénway > Contributor he most recent Mad Max movie was a surprising success, which appeared unlikely if you look at the way it was brought together. Almost thirty years after the last film-- Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome—a director who had taken time off from action movies to focus on films like Babe and Happy Feet returned to a series he pioneered with surprising results. It feels like it’s been ages since such a menagerie of powerful machines and characters hit the big screen on any action movie. The film was well-researched, and builds a world that feels deaf to the concept of hope, while also introducing a guitar flamethrower. The crazier thing is that somehow this works and blends almost seamlessly. The film feels like a non-stop, heart-pounding action scene, and plot wise it honestly is. However, the veteran director George Miller knows that it’s not enough to have characters in danger if you don’t care about them. The film builds and extensive and fleshed-out world without ever stopping the movie to sit down and explain it to the audience. Contrasting this with some of the world’s largest earners in Hollywood action movies like Transformers, Miller makes many modern action movies looking child-like and amateurish in their execution. Culture 1! hollywoodredux.com The movie almost never stops, but still has appropriate enough pacing to keep the audience just on the edge of emotional, exhaustion throughout its journey. Tom Hardy is a welcome replacement to Mel Gibson, doing a job easily the equal of his predecessor. Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa puts out a stunning performance. This one-armed woman has a vaguely told back-story that is told by who she is and the world she lives in rather than a slow, emotionally manipulative exposition dump. Furiosa jumps off the screen as something more than just an underdeveloped girl version of max that seems to have plagued cinema since the 90’s. She doesn’t start out strong and turn into some weak willed love interest; she stays a bad ass and unquestionably the film’s protagonist the whole way through. Her quest is to save a group of sex slaves from the insane group of desert marauders she’s grown up with. The film’s impressive, because it doesn’t just tell us that women aren’t things, it shows us they aren’t with every character. She’s a character whose every look and glance convey her every thought and emotion with such intensity it makes it obvious why the film manages to work with so little talking. The sparse dialogue might make the movie feel anemic in characterization, but instead it just feels like everything said counts. The main villain, Immortan Joe, is a character that looks so ludicrous it feels like it should be hard to take him seriously until you see him on screen. His strange breathing apparatus and booming voice make his rule over this apocalyptic wasteland seem more than believable, but like a simple fact. If that monstrosity of a man told you to do something, it would be hard to do otherwise. This insane world of bullets and gasoline and Nordic mythology feels like it’s been put together out of the pieces of our society. Altars of steering wheels and vehicles that look like all of the vehicular ingenuity and hubris has been crushed and tweaked into something barely serviceable. The movie would be worth watching just for the technological design itself. The semi cobbled together into a war-truck, Furiosa’s metal prosthetic crafted with a welded wrench where her bones should be all make the ludicrous and almost alien tech feel real. Ina strange fantastical sort of way, it sucks you in and makes you believe this simultaneously absurd but poignant world of metal and flesh. If nothing else, it certainly displays what happens when you let a director from the golden age of action movies return to form, and show the Michael Bays of the world how it’s done.