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Mad Max: Fury Road is no mere retro reboot. As we said on its release, it was "the most refreshing piece of action cinema in years", earning its place among the best Netflix movies to stream.
A big part of that is because the astonishing, adrenaline-pumping things you see on-screen aren't CG: it's a masterpiece of stunt work and practical visual effects with very little CG enhancement. As director George Miller explained: "There's no flying people or space vehicles, no alien planets. This is a real world, it's crazy to do it CG when you can do it for real. You want the world to be authentic, to be immersive."
Immersive is an understatement. This is a fender-bending, bone-crunching, tyre-squealing rollercoaster of a road movie that takes everything that's great about the original Mad Max and gives it a blast of nitrous. It's bigger and better in almost every way, and if you haven't already seen it you're in for a real cinematic treat.
The Fast and the Fury Road-ious
Mad Max: Fury Road has a whopping 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and garnered a string of rave reviews. And many of those reviews praised Charlize Theron, who doesn't so much steal the movie as hijack it and strap a jet engine to it. "Charlize Theron delivers a captivating, challenging performance as Furiosa, arguably her best since Monster", wrote Autostraddle.
"It's like an insane 80's B-movie, but one made with thought, effort, and enough of a budget to match its deranged aspirations," Alternative Lens's Jennifer Heaton said. And for Trace Thurman of Bloody Disgusting, it was "the best action movie I have seen so far this year, and I doubt anything else coming out will be able to top it".
Empire magazine gave it the full five stars. The film is a "wildly entertaining" episode in "one bat-shit crazy franchise... Miller has surely achieved maximum madness." Theron is spectacular and Tom Hardy's Max "cuts an even more enigmatic figure than Gibson's muttering Robin Hood... Fury Road is a defiantly, at times deliriously, cinematic experience."
