Fury Road Review

I’ll just betcha you’re all wondering about Mad Max: Fury Road—was it the blissfully escapist celluloid extravaganza that I’d been aching for?

The answer is both ABSOLUTELY and eh, not so much.

I don’t recall the first Mad Max being so shockingly, gruesomely grotesque. To say that this post-apocalyptic vision was disturbingly bleak is an understatement of mammoth proportions. This isn’t a prettified, everything’s-gonna-end-well, pepsi-sponsored, blockbuster summer flick vision of the future. And, by the by, there’s little to no humor to relieve the terror inspiring phantasm. OK, possibly there was and I missed it. Once again, I found it monster challenging to read the captions AND watch all the intense beauty and action on the big screen at the same time.

In this possible future, the bullies, the cretins, the horrifically vile, twisted monsters have won. In this barbaric desert world women are “prized” for their ability to crank out the bairn and provide milk. Yes, we're cows. Livestock. Apart from that, we’re (over-identify much, Donna?) just more rabble slaves in Immortan Joe’s (Hugh Keays-Byrne) kingdom.

Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) is the movie’s hero. Her goal is to get back to the childhood home (the Green Place) from which she was kidnapped and take Immortan Joe’s child brides with her—his breeding stock. She’s rescuing them and herself.

It was unclear to me how she, a woman in this testosterone heavy, impossibly cruel world would get the prestigious gig of war-rig driver. I assumed she was just that much more of a bad ass than every penised human around.

She was. Boy howdy, was she ever! She mostly rocked a whole silent warrior on a mission thing. Clint Eastwood in High Plans Drifter comes to mind. She was focused and driven. Furiosa would succeed.

While it's surely true that Mad Max: Fury Road is, primarily, one monumental road battle, it’s so much more. It's a gorgeously ugly, epic fairly tale of the Grimm sort.

Donna Dickens@MildlyAmused framed my first concerns, my I’ll-walk-out-if-it’s-like-this ‘tude in her post 7 ways ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ sublimely subverts movie sexism

I’ll be honest. When I first heard the plot of “Fury Road” involved five women escaping from Immortan Joe’s harem — and that the film was rated R — I considered skipping it. To me, it was obvious shorthand for “We’re going to abuse women on screen for your entertainment.” And in a lesser movie, that would’ve been the case.

Yes. This. The super model beautiful child brides struck me, at first, as delicate does incapable of fighting for their own survival. Nope. Rather, if they had been, they evolved right quick, becoming fellow glorious warriors.

Go read Dicken's column it’s awesome.

What did Jen and Oni think of the flick? TOTALLY hated it. Jen was wickedly squicked out by the extreme carnival sideshow ghoulishness. Oni would say nothing more than that it was a well made crappy movie (he was frowning and really reaching for something positive to say). I think they were both a little horrified.

So, um, I guess I owe them one.