Mad Max: Fury Road
High-functioning insanity.
The metaphors and similes you could use to describe Mad Max: Fury Road might make up an entire chapter in and of themselves. Watching it is like taking a flaming tequila shot without a chaser. Its scenery is like if the Book of Exodus was addicted to meth. Its performances remind you of caged jungle cats. The production design is like if Hot Topic outfitted the U.S. Army. The cinematography is like if Fight Club attempted the land speed record. The cars are beasts. The action hits you in this chest. This movie’s amazing. This movie’s fucking amazing.
Any critical analysis of Fury Road flirts with incoherence and risks hyperbolic disaster, much like the movie itself. The surge of adrenaline the movie inspires inevitably distills all praise down to something basic and chemical: Holy shit. When Fury Road landed in theaters in May 2015, its two-hour rush through Mad Max’s dusty, chrome-tinged apocalypse[1] was heralded as an extraordinary achievement, one of the most distinctive visions ever put to screen, and one of the finest action movies ever made. And yet, the movie’s success walks such a fine line between brilliance and catastrophe that, upon learning the full story of its fraught production and atypical creative development, it feels miraculous it exists at all.
Born from an insane mind and risen from the darkest pits of filmmaking hell, Fury Road somehow embodies the modern ideal of what a movie can be in the 2010s. It leans on an established franchise, yet defies all conventions of a reboot or sequel. It comes from a single-minded creator, yet remains entirely unpretentious and completely inclusive. It contains large ideas about feminism and survival, but never feels self-important or preachy. Fury Road is gorgeous. Fury Road is insanity. It makes that paradox completely sensical—and that’s a paradox in and of itself.
But again, we’re starting to tangle ourselves up in trying to capture the movie’s essence. Let’s zoom out, and let’s go back to the late 1990s, when Fury Road director and Mad Max creator George Miller[2] first conceived his idea to make a fourth Max movie, the first since 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome, as he was crossing an intersection in Los Angeles. It’s an unremarkable beginning for one of the most excruciating productions in modern movie history.
Fury Road is a post-war refugee. The movie took 16 years to go from Miller’s imagination to the public eye, but it was only supposed to take three or four. Its first stumbling block, actually, was history. Pre-production for the movie was underway by 2001, but the September 11th terrorist attacks tanked American dollar values and ballooned the movie’s budget. By the time things recovered enough for Hollywood to greenlight production, the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003 brought even more delays.
Not one to sit idle, Miller shelved Fury Road in favor of another original project he was shepherding: the 2006 animated dancing-penguin movie Happy Feet[3]. By the time he was done with that (and its sequel), Miller revisited the fourth Max movie, but so much time had passed by then he had to start adapting his vision.
Fury Road turned a human action hero into a werewolf. In the early days of production on Fury Road, Miller was set on bringing back franchise star Mel Gibson to reprise his role as Max, but after Gibson became mired in domestic violence charges and was caught on tape issuing racist tirades, Miller changed course[4]. A few names traveled through the rumor mill[5], but in 2009 Miller chose Tom Hardy—best known then for his excellent supporting roles in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Inception.
Hardy’s a primal, frayed, slightly off-kilter actor who always seems to commit to the role 10 percent too much (in a good way). His Max is a far cry from Gibson’s square-jawed, shoulders-back performance; Hardy barely speaks, seeths and flails a lot, springs and stalks like an animal, and is more tormented and wrecked than outright badass. He’s off-putting, but actually pretty excellent. The performance is one of the primary adjustments fans have to make with Fury Road. Hardy’s Max doesn’t seem like a continuation of the character. It’s more of a transformation.
Nonetheless, production began to cruise after Hardy came aboard. Fury Road’s crew—some 1700 members at full strength—shipped off to Australia’s Broken Hill desert, production site for each of the original movies, to begin photography. Joining the personnel were 200 fully operational and completely customized Max-ian vehicles (more on these later), the bare minimum of visual effects technology, crateloads of explosives, and a leather-jacketed George Miller. Finally, filming was set to begin.
Fury Road was cursed by God Himself. Just as Miller and Co. were setting up in Australia, rainfall met the Broken Hill desert for the first time in 15 years. The barren wasteland that was the trademark visual backdrop of the first three Max films bloomed from a dusty landscape of nothing into a lush, green landscape. The earth was alive. The movie was ruined.
Producers at Warner Bros. told the Fury Road team to wait things out in Australia while the desert dried out again, but the land was stubborn, and after 18 months, little had changed. It was time to find a substitute wasteland, so location scouts scanned the globe, ultimately deciding the sands of Namibia, Africa would serve to communicate the movie’s desolate, hopeless setting. Fury Road’s traveling circus up and moved again.
Fury Road is like if an ultramarathon became an action sport. When shooting finally began, the process proved one of the most grueling endurance tests anyone on the cast or crew had ever experienced. Miller’s vision was so meticulous and specific, the attention to detail so high, the commitment to practicality so complete, Fury Road’s time in the desert amounted to almost five months of utter madness, pockmarked by terrific explosions, on-the-move shoots at 50 miles per hour, and so much dust that more than once the movie’s stunt drivers had to halt production because they couldn’t see where they were going. There wasn’t a sound stage for miles around. The production process provides a meta-narrative of survival in and of itself. Crucially, the finished movie reflects and rewards all those efforts.
Fury Road is a bisected adrenaline rush. The movie is split into two halves: The first is a chase; the second is a race. Plot-wise, the movie’s simple—a woman tries to smuggle a dictator’s five wives to freedom—but the details of that plot are bonkers and the themes woven into it are rich and full. Here are some of the details:
The woman at the center of Fury Road is named Imperator Furiosa, who has one real arm and one mechanical arm. She’s played by Charlize Theron[6].
Furiosa is freeing the five wives from Fury Road’s villain, Immortan Joe, played by Hugh Keays-Byrne (he also played Toecutter, the villain of the original Mad Max). In Fury Road, Immortan Joe rules a kingdom called the Citadel via control of the region’s water supply. He has long white hair, wears a giant respirator, and drives a car called the Gigahorse, which is made up of two 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Villes welded together (in the wasteland, having more than one of anything is a sign of wealth).
Immortan Joe’s five wives are named Angharad, The Dag, Capable, Cheedo the Fragile, and Toast the Knowing. They’re his wives because unlike most people in the wasteland, they appear to be without blemish or disease. Immortan Joe held them in a biodome as his “breeders” until Furiosa broke them out.
Furiosa attempts to escape the Citadel in the War Rig, the flagship vehicle in Immortan Joe’s fleet. This is a giant 18-wheeler combined with a 1948 Chevy Fleetmaster, with a modified VW Beetle attached to the back as a defense turret, plus an extra fuel pod.
In relation to all this, Tom Hardy’s Max is a peripheral character. He commands the opening scene of Fury Road, and the movie gives him a small redemptive arc, but the main story here is more interested in the women than its titular hero. Really, for most of the movie, Max is an antagonist opposite Furiosa and the wives, impeding their flight amid his own attempts to escape Immortan Joe.
Fury Road is an intellectual movie hiding behind heavy-metal face paint. The movie focuses on themes of liberation and survival, examining how different people respond to oppression both against themselves and against others, but it covers it all in a layer of action-movie cool, from its wild nomenclature to its coked-up stunts. Immortan Joe and his troops—called the Warboys[7]—spend most of the movie pursuing Furiosa and the Wives within a classic action-movie chase scene structure, but this external conflict is a lubricant for the internal and interpersonal conflicts happening inside the War Rig, where Max’s selfish lone-wolf instincts butt against Furiosa’s sacrificial mission to save the wives.
This all sounds elaborate, but its execution is straight-forward and subtle. Fury Road hits your senses like a flare gun more than it does a dramatic textbook; its mode of communication here is visual, not verbal. Hardy’s Max has only 41 lines in the entire movie—most of which are wolfish grunts and utterances—and Furiosa, the main character, has less than 100. Fury Road’s dramatic themes are all communicated through action, such as when Max and Furiosa’s first encounter leads to an insane one-on-one fight in which she scrambles to protect the wives—a voluntary burden—while he drags around a Warboy he’s shackled to—his dogged ball and chain[8].
Most of Fury Road’s storytelling happens subtextually, then, whether through its action choreography or uber-detailed production design. This has roots in the movie’s writing process, too. In addition to a traditional script, Miller and Co. illustrated Fury Road across 3,500 individual storyboard panels, like a giant comic book. Everything regarding the plot, characters, and deeper themes was conceived with the consideration you would be looking at it. The hope, as Miller has said, echoes a famous wish of Alfred Hitchcock throughout his various thrillers: You could watch Fury Road in a foreign language and not need subtitles to follow what was happening.
Fury Road is a charred tapestry of a world gone insane. Its Oscar-winning production design is one of its grandest successes, illustrating the details of the wasteland, and often delivering subtle exposition, through costumes, makeup, props, and setting rather than dialogue or flashbacks[9].
The production design is particularly informative when it comes to the wasteland’s different factions, demarcating each of the tribes and clans through particular aesthetics, battle tactics, or vehicle classes. The Rock Riders who populate the wasteland’s canyons, for example, barrel down the slopes on dirt bikes, lobbing grenades at their foes and staying anonymous behind thick goggles and headscarves. Meanwhile, the Buzzard tribe patrolling the wasteland’s open sands prefer spiny, hedgehog-like vehicles. They use buzzsaws to rip apart enemy machines. More prominent than either of these are the Citadel’s main allies: the tribes from Gas Town and Bullet Farm. Gas Town is run by the People Eater, a bloated maggot-looking man with a dead foot and a customized stretch-limo chariot[10], while his Bullet Farm counterpart, the aptly titled Bullet Farmer, wears a wig of bandoliers and drives a half-tank, half-Charger called the Peacemaker[11].
The specifics are fun to recount, but the broader point is that everything you see in Fury Road has a story behind it, even if 95 percent of the time you never hear that story. It’s an unfussy, matter-of-fact approach to worldbuilding that stands in sharp contrast to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the new Star Wars entries. Despite offering maybe 10 percent of the explicit detail of those movies, Fury Road seems to run deeper. At the same time, its lack of explicit expansion doesn’t render its characters inert or flat: Everyone here is just as motivated, rich, and complete as any Skywalker of Spider-Man. Fury Road tells one story of the wasteland. It lets its mise en scène—its tiny flourishes—communicate the possibility of what you’re not seeing[12].
Fury Road took the torch of progress and modified it into a flamethrower. It took superhero movies and Star Wars films, meanwhile, decades to make advancements in representation and diversity: 2017’s Wonder Woman was the first significant female-lead superhero movie in Hollywood (no apologies to Halle Berry’s Catwoman in 2004 and Jennifer Garner’s Elektra in 2005), and 2018’s Black Panther was the MCU’s first movie starring a black lead (but actual apologies to 1998’s Blade starring Wesley Snipes—a super underappreciated movie in today’s post-Panther world). Star Wars, too, couldn’t find diverse roles outside of Sam Jackson’s Mace Windu until Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, and Oscar Isaac were made the stars of the new trilogy.
Major blockbuster franchises have had to force their way into diversity, like Disney did with the female-lead Captain Marvel, black-centric Panther, or the upcoming Shang-Chi flick. These movies are important notes of progress, but they were more the result of criticism against the MCU for its prior lack of diversity, not anticipatory devotions to giving minorities the chance to see themselves as heroes.
Fury Road’s slant on feminism and liberation, however, seemed injected into the movie from its inception, when Miller first thought to transform the commodified-oil construct of the old Mad Max trilogy into the more urgent, high-stakes subject of human cargo. What kind of human cargo would be the most valuable in the wasteland? Women. Who would feel most likely to launch a rebellion against this kind of slavery? A woman like Furiosa. How would a lone wolf like Max relate to this conflict? Peripherally, and, if he were involved at all, reluctantly. There’s nothing contrived here; it just makes sense.
And this logical approach means Fury Road isn’t showy or flashy about its politics, either. There’s no slo-mo female empowerment moment or self-important zinger about girls “having the balls to fight, too.” Fury Road treats Furiosa and the wives like any other Mad Max movie treats Max, or like a Die Hard movie treats John McClane, or like a John Wick movie treats John Wick. These women are your badasses, and you’re going to think they’re awesome as hell and you’re going to be blown away by their fight scenes and the movie is going to give them tons of jaw-dropping stunts for no other reason except they should have tons of jaw-dropping stuns as the stars of an action movie. Fury Road is a feminist statement, but it doesn’t advertise itself as such. What’s more, the movie’s significance in this regard is elevated because of its sheer excellence, its lack of compromise, and the relative absence of aspirational female characters in the rest of mainstream action filmmaking[13].
Fury Road singular engineering will keep it barreling forward into the annals of pop culture history. The movie is a masterpiece of production, winner of six Oscars out of 10 nominations[14], but it satisfies on a basic entertainment level as much as any movie can, all while its machinations make any movie buff lose their minds over how they pulled this off, from every real-live explosion to every fully-functioning vehicle to—yes indeed—the flamethrower/guitar-wielding Doof Warrior shredding atop his speaker-stacked artillery truck. You will ogle at the 300-odd stunts in this movie as much for their danger and peril as for their total action-movie awesomeness[15].
This movie exists at the crossroads of awe and insanity, of genius and obsession, of torture and ecstasy. Tom Hardy says filming Mad Max: Fury Road was “a nightmare—a brilliant nightmare.” The stunts set world records[16] and the shoot drove people insane and production took decades and the final product was undeniably, impossibly worth it.
George Miller was asked once why he dove so deep into the details on this movie, in a time when CGI reigned supreme in Hollywood, just about anything could be faked, and most viewers wouldn’t have an eye for the small stuff. His answer could be the movie’s thesis statement: “Just because it’s the wasteland doesn’t mean people can’t make beautiful things.”
If these are the end times of Hollywood, life after the apocalypse has a glimmer of hope to it. What a lovely day indeed.
[1] The Mad Max franchise comes from Australia. It began with 1979’s Mad Max, a breakout for star Mel Gibson and director George Miller (this was once the most profitable movie ever, making over $100 million worldwide on a roughly $265,000 budget). The original Max is a tight revenge thriller pitting Gibson against a motorcycle gang, but its two sequels would see Miller greatly expand the mythology of his resource-starved outback. In 1981, Road Warrior was praised as one of the greatest action movies ever for its awesome car chases and wild BDSM-adjacent production design, and in 1985, Beyond Thunderdome made things even crazier, adding characters named Ironbar Bassey, Pig Killer, and Dr. Dealgood. Somehow, Fury Road would combine the strengths of both.
[2] George Miller is the most baffling filmmaker alive. He’s made two of the greatest action movies of all time: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Fury Road, but he also wrote Babe (yeah, the one with the pig), wrote and directed Babe: Pig In the City, and wrote and directed Happy Feet. He’s also reportedly writing a 2020 romance/fantasy movie starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton (what a pairing!) called Three Thousand Years of Longing. Most directors have one lane. Miller somehow has two—post-apocalypse car movies and animal-centric kids’ movies—and is angling for a third. You can’t even begin to explain it.
[3] I’m sure you have questions. I don’t have any answers.
[4] Miller acknowledges Gibson’s controversies only in passing. He says now he wanted a younger Max for the movie anyway to be more in line chronologically with the previous movies.
[5] One tiny what-if: Miller wanted to cast Heath Ledger for Max, but the actor’s death in 2008 forced the search to move to eventual star Tom Hardy. Wild, right? Sometimes we put things in the footnotes that are good enough for the main body text, but it’s fun to plant these little rewards in here.
[6] Her starring role as Furiosa would turn Charlize Theron into one of Hollywood’s most bankable action stars in the back half of the 2010s. After Fury Road, she would join the Fast and Furious franchise as the villain of F8 of the Furious, playing a regrettably dreadlocked hacker named Cypher, but she’d earn more legitimate action bona fides as the star of Atomic Blonde in 2017. As of this writing, she’s signed on to an adaptation of the graphic novel The Old Guard, about a group of immortal mercenaries, playing a character named “Andromache of Scythia.” Can’t wait.
[7] The first 20 minutes of Fury Road hint at a grand philosophy Miller created for the Warboys. These troops, all skin-and-bone white males, have painted themselves the color of cement. They hold customized steering wheels like trophies and spout Scripture-adjacent sayings such as “I live, I die, I live again!” or the now famous benediction Immortan Joe gives Nux before a suicide mission: “You will ride eternal, shiny and chrome.” As Joe blesses Nux, he spraypaints the underling’s mouth with chrome and gives him a high that will ease his death and journey to “Valhalla.” A lot of this is subtext. Miller could have written a Bible about this movie’s lore.
[8] Max is chained to Nux in this scene as a “blood bag.” Something about the Warboys’ post-apocalypse condition renders them in periodic need of healthy blood. In an early scene, Max is kidnapped and blood-tested and labeled a universal donor. When Furiosa escapes, the Warboys are still transfusing his blood to Nux, so Max is lashed to Nux’s 1934 Chevy Window Coupe and driven face-first into the wasteland.
[9] Fury Road does have flashbacks of a sort, but they’re snap images of a child Max once failed to save. There aren’t many more details within the movie about who the kid is or what her relationship with Max was like, but there’s enough to understand that she still motivates him to do the things he does, and that’s a good example of Fury Road’s MO when it comes to backstory.
[10] The People Eater is a strong example of how Fury Road uses production design to communicate theme. In this case, excess is a sign of wealth. The People Eater character is obese, a rarity in the wasteland, and this atop his stretched ride, cohort of servants to help him in and out of vehicles, gas mask catheter, false nose, exposed nipple piercings, and business suit, implies a backstory that probably goes as deep as any other supporting character.
[11] The Bullet Farmer’s death marks the pivotal point in Fury Road when Furiosa and Max join forces. Furiosa balances a sniper rifle on Max’s shoulder to shoot the Bullet Farmer down, but when Max goes to finish off the minions, the movie stays with Furiosa and the wives rather than follow him to the action. Max isn’t the concern here; it’s about the women. Eventually, Max returns covered with blood, but no one asks what happened, and we never learn what he did.
[12] One of the more fun unspoken narratives comes along with Fury Road’s now-iconic Doof Warrior, the drummer boy figure of Immortan Joe’s army who shreds on a flamethrower/guitar atop a mountain of speakers. The Doof Warrior’s red jumpsuit hints at some sort of institution in his pre-wasteland life, and if you look close enough, you’ll see his instrument/weapon is built using a hospital bedpan. George Miller says he knows exactly where the bedpan came from. The rest of us can only speculate.
[13] This isn’t to say Fury Road didn’t take itself seriously as a female-forward movie. In fact, Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler consulted on the movie’s story. She described Fury Road as being about “women who are willing to give up enslaved comfort for liberation and risk death to do it,” adding, “All the women in the film maintain their inherent woman-ness. They’re tender and loving and still fierce. They get to be all those things. It’s this powerful question: How do women survive in a patriarchal, violent culture? How do they keep their souls intact in a war zone?... I think George [Miller] has managed to weave that story into a movie that will attract a lot of people for other reasons. At its heart, this is a woman’s story.”
[14] No surprise, Fury Road won the Academy Awards for Best Production Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Costume Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing. It missed out on Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects, as well as the two big ones: Best Director and Best Picture (Spotlight took home the latter that year).
[15] Real Cirque de Solei performers stood in for the Pole Cats jumping from car to car! A real stunt driver crashed the War Rig! Real BMX bikers played the Rock Riders! The explosive boom sticks are real, the Buzzards’ buzzsaws are real, the War Rig’s gas pedal—made from a foot measurer that locks into place with a push of your toe—actually works that way. We’ve said it so many times: This movie’s just the most incredible thing.
[16] The first stunt in the movie, a shocking rollover crash of Max’s famous V8 Interceptor, holds the record for longest car crash on screen.