I was caught off-guard by the beauty and grace of this film. The visual creativity here suggests Terry Gillam at his best, but Gilliam doesn't create the action and characters that George Miller does, and the intensity of the chaos and stakes in this film are especially compelling viewing.
The world of Fury Road is one of pessimistic existentialism. It's a world of strength, oppression, violence, pestilence, dirt and exploitation, and the design of the film, as much as the action, creates this world for us. Everything is rusty and dusty, and it’s a world created from scraps of the pre-holocaust civilization that have been repurposed for this brutal time. It’s in this repurposing that Miller’s designers are at their most creative. Vehicles have been cobbled together from a variety of forms of transport and outfitted with equipment unrelated to transportation like spikes, waving poles, a swaying guitar and flamethrowers. Likewise, the many weapons here feature guns with repeating cartridges and spears, and masks are painted with skulls and locked closed with tines leading to the eyes. Every surface in the film shows designers working to create a brutal, post-holocaust world.
And among all this, beauty. An early shot that ties destruction and beauty in the film is the image of Immortan Joe’s wives standing in the desert. Their armored tanker has broken down, and the shot of the group of women standing beside the wreck -- shapely, dressed in tailored rags, bronzed and posed like models for a summer fashion spread – juxtaposes their feminine beauty and the masculine devastation of the world. And if any element binds together these values visually, it’s Charlize Theron’s Furiosa. Furiosa is tanned, trim and beautiful, so it’s especially striking when we realize she’s missing part of her arm. Onscreen, she embodies the world of Fury Road – one of intense destruction and intense beauty juxtaposed.
All the elements of the film develop this contrast. Desperate flights have an ethereal beauty as Miller uses desaturation and color tint to create a look of splendor, and classical music sometimes makes scenes of desolation elegant. The views of the Swampland, with its large, awkwardly-graceful devices wandering on a screen of deep azure tie beauty and desolation together with cinematography, an element Miller often uses effectively in sustaining this juxtaposition. Even the choreography of the extended action scenes tends more to beauty than to the chaos of similar scenes in a film by Michael Bay. Flexible poles with fighters at their ends wave during one assault, and a chilling allusion to blind justice lends a quality of beauty to another frenzied assault on the group.
And as beautiful as the film is, the characters manage to engage us despite their limited dialogue. We feel for Furiosa as she realizes her dream is futile, and we root for Max to overcome the demons that haunt him. We experience a sense of loss when Nux dies after we’ve followed his character arc from bad guy to good. Fury Road doesn’t have the mythic element of the first Road Warrior, but it’s a beautiful pageant of starkly contrasting values.
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