"Mad Max: Fury Road" is basically one long chase with ever more insane variables. They're hidden on board, fleeing across the vast wasteland in search of the matriarchal oasis she calls the green place of many mothers.
It turns out she's decided to liberate Joe's breeders. The action kicks off when Joe's top raider, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron with a shaved head, sets off on a mission in a long ramshackle truck called the war rig before suddenly veering off course. The only prime specimens are Joe's breeders, a pampered harem of willowy model types tasked with bearing him healthy children. Actually, everyone's disfigured, starving or sick from radiation. The film is well underway before we get our bearings, and Max, who's the same character, only even madder and more haunted and played by Tom Hardy, barely registers for the first half-hour.Īt the start, he's captured, branded and chained up by raiders from a towering citadel presided over by a sickeningly disfigured tyrant called Immortan Joe. I only wish it were a better piece of storytelling. I get happy feet at the thought of "Mad Max: Fury Road" restoring his luster. I dwell on Miller's past because he's a hero of mine. It was eight years before Miller made another movie, the animated penguin musical "Happy Feet." The less said about the bloated "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome," the better, but Miller redeemed himself with the intense medical drama "Lorenzo's Oil" and "Babe: Pig In The City," a dark, Dickensian masterpiece - I'm not joking see it if you haven't - that inexplicably bombed. And its sequel, "The Road Warrior," was even more spectacular - a post-apocalyptic punk biker Western in which most of the characters ended up a mash of tin and innards. Those who saw it back then - I was among them - could scarcely believe the brilliant fusion of so many disreputable, low-budget genre tropes. It's been 36 years since the first "Mad Max" and its eye-popping, blacktop-scorching horizontal thrust. Film critic David Edelstein has this review.ĭAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: The majority of sequels have no reason for being apart from sequel money, but watching "Mad Max: Fury Road," I could sense the 70-year-old Australian director George Miller had been revving his engine for decades, itching to explode from behind the starting line and deliver even more spectacular automotive mayhem. Max has returned, this time played by Tom Hardy, in the long-awaited fourth installment, "Mad Max: Fury Road," which also stars Charlize Theron. Mel Gibson played Max in three films directed by George Miller, the last in 1985. The character Mad Max is an Australian cop whose family is murdered and who wanders the desert after the collapse of civilization, preferring to remain alone. Theron will be back in theaters and kicking butt in “Atomic Blonde,” which opens July 28.This is FRESH AIR. And we’ll be even more glad whenever he officially announces a Furiosa sequel is a go. We’re glad Miller went with the buzzcut and one arm look. It would have been a completely different film.” It was very much like that: blonde, bleached, very pale skin, no eyebrows. I had this white hair, kind of like Abbey Lee character.
“Originally, liked this idea that even though they were in the desert, something happened and people actually turned albino,” Theron said. It turns out Miller didn’t originally intend for the character to look the way she does in the finished cut. The Variety interview also includes a cool nugget of information regarding Furiosa’s creation.
We may not know when this prequel will start production, but Miller clearly has a script he wants to turn into a movie and Theron clearly would love to return and play the character. These “bible stories” Miller refers to is what Theron seems to be referencing when she tells Variety that individual scripts were written for Max and Furiosa’s characters.
Somewhere, if the planets align, there will be two other films.” “We dug deep into the subtext, the backstory of all the characters, and indeed the world and without really thinking about it, we wrote two other screenplays just as part of the bible of the stories. “These characters and these worlds tend to swirl around in the back of your brain like imaginary friends,” he told The Independent. Earlier this year, Miller expressed interest in making two more movies, but he’s also intent on making something on a smaller scale first. Despite the success of “Fury Road,” which made $378.9 million worldwide and won six Oscars, the director hasn’t committed to the next entry in the franchise. Miller isn’t jumping on the “Mad Max” bandwagon just yet.