I will honestly say that I didn’t plan on seeing this film when it was in theaters. Some of you might recall my review of the Mad Max original trilogy, I stated that “sadly, they are rebooting these”. Fortunately, they did this right for several reasons.

First of all, they got the original director George Miller to do the job right. Now, I remember reading a magazine back in the nineties about films that were going to be released, and they were planning a Mad Max 4 back then. I can imagine that this film spent twenty years in development hell, and I have to admit that a Mad Max film that was like the ones of the eighties would not work after the end of the cold war. So what you see in Mad Max Fury Road is what the director calls a “revisiting” of it, and it could almost fit in the first three movies.

In fact, there is kind of a sequence to the original Mad Max series. The first film was about an energy crisis that caused society to begin to crumble. The second film was after the bomb, but there was the beginning of settlements. The third film has more advanced settlements, even cities. In Fury Road, there are apparently tribes of some kind, and Max is captured by one of them at the beginning of the film.

The tribe that Max is kidnapped into is essentially a doomsday cult, and by that, I mean a cult after doomsday has happened. A man named Immortan Joe has a fortress and has somehow channel fresh water to make himself a ruler amongst the refugees. Immortan Joe has a harem, but one of his followers, Imperator Furiosa, goes rogue and tries to bring his wives to a new land.

From there, Max is somehow thrown into a chase scene that lasts the entire length of the film. Seriously, the entire film is one chase scene, and it doesn’t let up. This is the second great part of this film, is that it is 90 percent practical effects and 10 percent CG. Most films do the opposite of this, but Fury Road has real cars racing in the real desert. These cars look as post-apocalyptic as they come, often with metal spikes and all kinds of mishmash construction. I will have to say that there were too many shots that one could tell were sped up for the sake of making them look more action-oriented.

I will say that this film is disturbing. The film seems to go out of its way to show things like boils covering a whole body, deformed people, not to mention a lot of blood and violence. Personally, I would have to say that this is very gratuitous, but at the same time, I can’t help but think that a society that has fallen so much would practice very disturbing behavior. This is especially seen in Immortan Joe’s cult, which has a clear hierachy in its organization, in spite of it being completely savage.

The beginning of this film shows the depravity as we see a two-headed lizard that Max eats, raw. There is some narration stating that he once had a daughter that passed away, and a lot of weird nightmarish imagery. In fact, the whole beginning scene where Max is kidnapped by the cult is straight out of a nightmare, which means that George Miller has really embraced the fear that would accompany such a terrifying era.

The problem that I had with this film is that once the chase happens, the audience gets used to it. So much so, that it doesn’t feel like the biggest chase scene in the film is at the end. I think that is all I can say without putting too many spoilers in there. The issue is that Fury Road is one wild ride that I would be glad to go on again, and I highly recommend it.