seen 25 May 2015
The film, starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult, is directed by George Miller, and is the fourth in the franchise, arriving 30 years after the previous instalment.
Action packed, and set in a dystopian grungy and desertified future, it is basically an extended car chase film with wildly extravagant vehicles in a place where character-led plot would be an incomprehensible concept. Though the post-industrial feudalism hardly bears serious examination, the film is a blast because it carries off its principal interest - the car chase - with supreme and bravura self-confidence, while at the same time underpinning the visual spectacle with the powerful idea of a quest, or an aspiration for finding a better world, which justifies the mayhem.
Tom Hardy plays Max, kidnapped at the beginning to be a 'blood bag' but soon able to assist Furiosa (Charlze Theron) in her dash across the desert to escape the Citadel. Though he is obviously haunted by his past, nothing is explained; the advice he gives the fugitives at one crucial point is his most extended speech in the entire film and it reveals almost nothing about him, except that he is completely trustworthy. At the end he slips away with just a nod of the head. Amidst all the extravagant and baroque imagery of the Citadel, where the idea of a treadmill has been elaborated beyond a workhouse's wildest dreams, this gesture somehow manages to speak volumes.
Furiosa is not quite so opaque, as at least she has a goal and a past; Theron's performance is a masterclass in understated determination. Nicholas Hoult, as the Warboy Nux, has the most development, struggling from unquestioning adolescent warrior bravado to an understanding that the world might be more complex than he could have thought, and finally turning his warrior code to meaningful and sacrificial effect. It is with allegorical, almost mythical, gestures of this sort that the mere mechanics of vehicles chasing through the desert are invested with significance
The stunts are marvellous, totally over the top but consistently exciting to watch. There is no attempt to distract from these with melodrama; everyone just gets on with chasing or fleeing, with being evil or good. This means that the rare scenes of quietness, when there is no engine throbbing, can focus on desert expanses, or the eerie sight of figures on stilts making their way through a blasted swamp, with no histrionic soul-searching.
