What’s Aged the Best?
The action sequences; Charlize Theron's performance as Furiosa; George Miller's thesis of a near-continuous chase with a human MacGuffin
In the discussion (7)
Approx. transcript time · 00:17:58Read transcript
- The obvious recommendation is the action sequences, pinnacle work only three years after release; the other suggestion is everything Charlize is doing, a classical performance in which she is really the Mad Max of the film, clearly the star and the hero on something like a Joseph Campbell journey.
- Furiosa is called an iconic action-movie performance by far, a character never seen before and a version of the Mad Max archetype: the lone, complicated but still moral person in a desert moral wasteland.
- Max's quick flashbacks apparently point to a story set between Thunderdome and Fury Road that mirrors the first film, Max failing to save a woman and her child, but the film never shows it, so the emotional investment lands with Furiosa and the lie at the centre of her journey; her collapse into the sand when hope turns out to be an idea rather than a place is a shot Oscar montages will play for 30 years.
- The action is the pick, with agreement that Charlize is magnetic: her introduction, a figure striding away from everything as if about to leave this world, the bionic arm, everything about her reads as a badass you cannot take your eyes off. — Jason Concepcion
- Furiosa kneeing the metal grate on Tom Hardy's face, realising it hurts and doing it again because she needs to put him down is the badass moment singled out. — Micah Peters
- She is called a great badass action-movie creation; another pick is George Miller's thesis, crafted 10 to 20 years before the film: could a film be an almost continuous chase, how much can the audience apprehend of character, relationships, world and backstory, and the MacGuffin should be human because we are all commodities now; this is one part highfalutin, one part genius, and the film-crit reading finds feminism, ecological collapse and the tolls of war inside a movie about Excitebikes throwing bombs onto a truck full of oil and women.
- The dialogue works like the Kuleshov effect, cutting between people to convey feeling; watching with closed captions reveals revelations buried under exhaust sounds, such as why Max is so angry.