From Cannes: New 'Max' Has Highest Octane Yet

Let’s be clear: “Mad Max: Fury Road” is the best blockbuster of the last ten years, period. Packed from the first minute with breathtaking and non-stop action sequences, it is so devastatingly and aggressively exciting that even the pickiest critic should applaud mastermind director George Miller.

The energy level of the film starts at an incredibly high level: It opens with a 30-minute action sequence featuring Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, Tom Hardy’s Max, and an entire army. Starting with Max’s attempt to escape from the Citadel, a fortress controlled by the tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Burne), the sequence develops into a full-blown battle and finally ends as the warrior Nux (Nicholas Hoult) drives towards a huge sandstorm, screaming maniacally, “What a lovely day!” The visual genius and intricate choreography evidenced in this first sequence are only surpassed by the fact that the rest of the 120-minute film maintains the intensity of this opening. In the age of “The Avengers” and “Transformers,” when special effects seem to be only about the number of explosions and the size of destruction, Miller shows that action sequences can still be creative, smart, and even artistic.

“Mad Max” is also something rare among current Hollywood blockbusters in that it spends very little time on exposition. It wastes no time in flashing back to the characters’ pasts, telling a clichéd or forced love story, or cramming in a childish moral lesson, all of which Hollywood seems to obsess over but are most often embarrassingly boring. Interestingly, although the movie almost solely consists of action sequences, the characters are much more three-dimensional than those in most summer blockbusters. They spend little time explaining who they are or what they are looking for, but they convey this message through their actions and choices. In particular, the director and screenwriter pay special attention to female characters—even supporting characters, who are usually objectified in blockbusters. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, for example, acts in both “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and “Mad Max.” While in the former all she does is run and scream, in “Mad Max” she is an expecting mother determined to fight against her fate as a sex slave of Immortan Joe, someone who learns to be a real fighter from Furiosa. This alone proves that a $150 million Hollywood film does not necessarily have to be simple-minded.

“Mad Max” has many of the best action sequences of the last decade—even in the history of action films. At the same time, it deftly paints a number of believable characters and tells a straightforward story. “Mad Max” is everything a blockbuster should be.

—Staff writer Tianxing V. Lan can be reached at tianxing.lan@thecrimson.com.