Mad Max: Fury Road (#SFWApro)

There’s not much to say about MAD MAX: Fury Road (2015) that hasn’t already been said, so I’m not even going to try. Suffice to say, both TYG and I loved it. Creating amazingly real F/X is so normal these days, it’s been a long while since an SF movie’s visuals actually impressed me. This one delivered — it’s an insanely strange-looking desert trek as Max and Furiosa (Charlize Theron) struggle to get a local warlord’s wives somewhere they and their kids can live free. It’s also astonishingly fast moving—when I checked my watch I couldn’t believe an hour had already flown by. That’s some fine filmmaking.

Interesting points:

•Furiosa’s missing arm isn’t discussed at all. No history, no tragedy, no vows of vengeance on whoever cut it off, it’s just a fact of her life. That seems like a nice break from stereotype.

•There’s a real mix of women in this: young and pretty, hardboiled and old and tough.

•The film has caused a number of anti-women men to freak out over the film for showing a very tough protagonist in Theron and thereby implying a woman can, in fact, kick ass.