Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) - Be Mad To Be Good.

★★★★☆

Before entering the cinema for ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, I’d watched none of Director George Miller’s films except ‘Babe’ series probably, and thought his ‘Mad Max’ series were nothing more than the money-making, exaggerated, hollow ‘Fast & Furious’ shows. But I was wrong.

‘MMFR’ is simply fascinating and satisfying in action film genre. The action sequences are down-to-earth, energetic, jaw-dropping, and creative. Sure there’s a slight touch of CGI, but all you see are basically real vehicles speeding, chasing, spinning, crashing and blowing up with crazy warboys charging, attacking and flying all over. It’s a mess, but there’s beauty and rhythm in it, thanks to the ingenious score and editing! The characters are by no means paper thin, especially the heroine Furiosa played by Charlize Theron that’s really a big surprise to me, as I thought it was all about Max, and certainly of silly masculinity. If you feel like ‘Furious 7’ is great, you haven’t checked out ‘Mad Max’ yet!

In an action film like this, the story may not have to be so serious and sensible since the audience would probably only eye on action choreography. Set in an apocalyptic world of endless, hopeless desert, ‘MMFR’ nonetheless, tells a bleak yet encouraging story about men’s redemption and revolution. It’s not complicated though. There’re basically runners and chasers. Tom Hardy’s Max runs not only just to survive, but also from ghosts that he could’ve saved but didn’t. He lives with guilt and regrets. Furiosa runs to want to find out the Green Place. She lives in hopes of going back to where she belongs to start a new life. Later, Max learns that constantly running away is not the way of seeking peace of mind, redemption in other words. Furiosa learns that the only way to start anew is to go back to where haunts her and start a revolution. And we, may or may not, learn that if we can’t get away from whatever’s polluting us, we ought to face it, mock it and hopefully change it from inside!

‘Hope’s a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane’. Max is right about ‘hope’. Whatever we hope for, it’ll all turn out nothing but a mirage. Still we’re all kind of addicted to it, though it fuels us, and burns us out over and again! But what’s broken is broken. You just can’t possibly fix it. Even if you can, it won’t be what it was anyway. Thus, I don’t think you’ll go insane if you can’t fix it, but you definitely will if you attempt to.