I just saw Mad Max: Fury Road and I intend to sleep like a baby. Why? Because Mad Max creator-director George Miller has transcribed my worst nightmares onto the big screen and purged me of the need to create them myself.
You know that nightmare where not a lot happens, story wise, but you’re being chased for the duration by agile, acrobatic and really angry Cirque du Soleil performers on PCP with the milky-white complexion of a Brit boy-band? These pale byproducts of the apocalypse are called “war boys” and their opening war chant sounds just like “Wild Boys” by Duran Duran (a nightmare in itself).
Where your name is Furiosa and you’re escaping from pure evil across an infinite desert with a posse of beautiful women (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz et al), but someone has shaved your head and stolen all your makeup, but it’s OK because you’re Charlize Theron and all you have to do is rub axle grease all over your face and you look awesome?
And there’s a hot guy in your nightmare named Max (Tom Hardy, living every boy’s dream) who comes to your rescue — when you’re not saving him from his hellacious flashbacks — and you say little but tussle a lot and you’d really like to kiss him, but he spends the first few scenes wearing an iron chastity belt on his face.
You know the dream: where the leader of the freaks chasing you looks like old Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall, or David Crosby crossed with a rabid dog, and this man-beast with rotting skin and no mouth wants you back in one piece so he can breed with you? (Hugh Keays-Byrne, of the original Mad Max). There’s more than one group in pursuit: there are People Eaters and Bullet Farmers, marauding bands from every corner of poisoned earth, each with his own brand of mayhem and nuclear-fallout deformity.
Where the monster trucks pursuing you through desert, quagmire and epic sandstorms are truly monstrous: they spew flames, grind metal, launch harpoons and occasionally resemble mammoth toxic-waste porcupines. And leading the hellish convoy’s charge into battle is not a lone bagpiper but a heavy-metal guitar-playing human puppet on strings (music courtesy of Dutchman Junkie XL), whose guitar head, like everything else in your dream, vomits fire at opportune moments.
And this isn’t only my nightmare: if you’re a misogynist — or a member of the Duggar family — you’ll be horrified that Furiosa shares equal billing with Max in the kick-ass department, and that the only people left with a lick of sense in this poisoned, post-apocalyptic world are a tribe comprising only women, and they hold the key to future civilization.
Relentless, visceral action, restrained acting, astounding detail in costuming, makeup and production design. It all adds up to one hell of a ride. Thank you, Mr. Miller, for a beautiful nightmare.
Mad Max: Fury Road screens at Scotiabank Theatre.
