Their cargo is a highly combustible cocktail of petrol and pregnancy, Joe’s enslaved wives (dressed in diaphanous floaties and One Million Years BC haute couture) making a bid for freedom from his breeding farm. Teaming up with renegade War Rig trucker Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron, sporting an Alien 3-era Ripley crop), Max and co strike out in search of “the Green Place” – a mystical land of mothers, a lush riposte to Waterworld’s elusive “DryLand”.
This is a world in which water, oil and ammunition are currency, with a sideline in “mother’s milk” pumped from steam-punk contraptions that cross Terry Gilliam with Tinto Brass.
Tom Hardy is Max Rockatansky, chased and imprisoned by the vampiric War Boys of Immortan Joe (one-time Toecutter Hugh Keays-Byrne), bolted into a post-Bane face mask and used as a human blood bag. Make no mistake, this is not a film of light and shade – it is an orgy of loud and louder, leaving us alternately exhilarated, exasperated and exhausted. Add to this Finnish Eurovision winners Lordi’s wardrobe and a shooting/editing style designed to make you feel like you’ve been run over while being shouted at, and this insane post-apocalyptic pile-up runs little risk of understatement. Hell, we even get sonic assault vehicles armed with drummers, speaker stacks and a mutant axe-man wielding an Ace Frehley-style guitar-slash-flamethrower. Watching Mad Max: Fury Road is the cinematic equivalent of putting your head in the bass-bin at a death-metal concert where everything is turned up to eleventy-stupid. It’s clearly struck a chord with George Miller as he reboots his low-budget 1979 road-warrior hit with more money, more trucks, and much more noise. D eep Purple famously asked their sound engineers to make “everything louder than everything else”, a phrase variously adopted by the likes of Motörhead and Meat Loaf to characterise their OTT ethos.
0 kommentar(er)
