George Miller takes bombast in his stride. It's at once a curious surprise and an appropriate one that so versatile / so wayward a director should prove so capable at exploiting action movie platitudes for maximum effect and for innovative ends. Mad Max: Fury Road storms through Miller's chaotic vision, one so thorough it infects every cell in the film's gargantuan frame: the most minute of details carefully crafted to possess the same punkish vigour as the film's overview itself. And Miller is as precise with the details as he is amiably flippant with the bombast - that punkish spirit encourages a carefree, though not careless attitude toward his own creation, and Fury Road often plays as a tribute to fecklessness, there in its makeshift aesthetic, lovingly and tiresomely created from the dregs of wealth and style, only to be discarded in the service of destruction. Create and destroy - this is a self-sustaining work, high enough on energy to throttle through even the most fearsome of sandstorms. When Miller relents on the near-relentless action, he spends his downtime sensibly, and designs a rousing feminist narrative that is suitably malcontent with the position that convention dictates it assumes. Luckily, no-one here appears to give the tiniest fuck about convention, and Fury Road's women are the undisputed stars of the film, the narrative's central thrust, key proponents, emotional centres, moral fortresses and lead roles; Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa will likely emerge as one of 2015's most indelible original characters. Want to know just how deep Fury Road's feminism goes? Even as the action picks up again, Miller's focus remains his ladies, and their actions remain the film's primary concern, and indeed the action's primary source. A breathtakingly kinetic, brilliantly insane, wondrously pure, outstanding banner for equality.
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