At 79, George Miller directs as if he were 50 years younger. Not only does he not seem like a thoughtful director, one of those who become more thoughtful with age, but each of his films seems more kinetic than the last. He doesn’t stop for a second, he doesn’t pause, he barely has any breaks to breathe. There are no action scenes or sequences in his saga. MAD MAX because that’s what they are from beginning to end. Yes, it’s true, there are a few moments where the film slows down and thickens its plot, but they tend to be the most problematic. Every speech in FURIOUS It could be avoided. Every explanatory voice-over is unnecessary. It is a film about moving, surviving, traveling through what is left of the world trying to move forward, overcome traumas, get revenge or simply escape from some car that is chasing you.
After five films, the saga MAD MAX may have its complications for newbies, but according to Miller’s creed the past doesn’t matter. Or it doesn’t matter much. Yes, FURIOUS It is a prequel that explores precisely the past of the character played by Charlize Theron in FURY ROADbut it is nothing more than an excuse to set up another whole circus of traveling characters touring the desert like LAWRENCE DE ARABIA in speed. Yes, we are in a post-apocalyptic world. Yes, there are fights over natural resources. Yes, there are warring factions. And also personal issues to resolve. But in MAD MAX That is less important than the space-time logic: seeing how all of that is expressed in the form of action, movement, choreography of bullets, cars, motorcycles, trains, trucks and people.
Furiosa (played by Anya Taylor-Joy at the very beginning of the film, previously played by the child Alyla Browne) lives with her family in a still idyllic part of this apocalyptic world, but is kidnapped by one of these gangs of masked gangsters who take her away from there. But it is not easy, because Furiosa fights them tooth and nail (she is only 10 years old) and, more than anything, because her mother chases them all on a motorcycle and manages to make things very difficult for them, also generating the first great action-packed sequence of the film.
Furiosa ends up trapped in the domain of a certain Dementus (Chris Hemsworth in a “larger than life” mood), who controls this whole army of leeches. The girl will do everything possible to escape from there but it will not be easy. In a film divided into episodes, soon the girl –still a child– will join the group of women that Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) has under his control and other threats will make her escape from there. Threats that, obviously, Miller records at full speed, in an accelerated combo of space and time that does not allow Furiosa to even complete a sentence. She must be one of the protagonists with the least dialogue in the history of cinema, discounting those of the silent era…
As an adult (the “Argentine” Anya plays her role perfectly in a role that is not made for classic acting brilliance) she will join the driver Pretorian Jack (Tom Burke), she will change her appearance again and again, she will transport precious materials being pursued by various groups of violent thugs (there is something of SORCERER in the saga) and will have his sights set on taking revenge on Dementus, while resources become scarce, wars intensify and vehicles go from one side to the other pushing each other like “bumper cars” at 300 kilometers per hour. Although here the pyrotechnics are somewhat less bombastic than in FURY ROADbut it is still captivating. On the contrary, its control makes it a little more realistic, if that is the term that can be used here.
The strange thing about FURIOUS –or almost the entire saga MAD MAX— it works almost the opposite of most action films. In contemporary spectacle films, the plots are understandable because they are explained a thousand times, but the action scenes are an incomprehensible geographical chaos. In Miller’s films, it’s the other way around: sometimes the plots become confusing (the accents, watching it without subtitles in Cannes, are at times incomprehensible) and it’s difficult to know who wants what, but the action is crystal clear. Every movement, every body, every shot has its own finely tuned spatial logic.
Which creates an effect that is the opposite of that of contemporary spectacle cinema. When you watch a movie from, say, Marvel, an endless action scene ends up tiring because of how confusing they are, and you prefer them to end quickly and move on to something else, whatever it may be. In the saga MAD MAX It’s quite the opposite: what the characters have to say obscures rather than clarifies, but what Miller has to show cleanses and corrects the drama’s mistakes. “On the pitch you see the horses,” a popular Argentine phrase would say. That’s what happens with Miller. Nobody really knows what his secret is, but once he gets things moving he works like the Pep Guardiola of action and adventure movies.
