Director: George Miller
Runtime: 120 minutes
For a movie franchise that has lain dormant for 30 years, George Miller's Mad Max saga has never looked or sounded better. Both a sequel to and a reimagining of Miller's original trilogy, this long-in-the-works film is an exhilarating, exhausting, and loopy adventure that has what so many blockbusters lack: a personality. For better and for worse (mostly for better), Fury Road is undeniably an un-compromised work from a singular vision that has clearly stayed limber.
That singular vision is amplified, not restricted, by the limitations of the story. Despite several well-chosen lulls across the film's two hours, Fury Road boils down to one big chase. With this straightforward template laid out, Miller is able to stuff each scene to the gills with visual and sonic flourishes. Frankly, a more complex plot would have only gotten in the way of Fury Road's blunt visceral impact.
For even though this tale of Max (Tom Hardy) and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) on the run from a psychotic warlord touches on some important issues, it does so through the lens of an adventure. Imagine if Wagner had composed "The Ride of the Valkyries" while snorting cocaine, and you'll have a decent idea of what to expect from this cinematic circus maximus.
Like Max, the viewer is thrust into a post-apocalyptic nightmare with little time to fully understand the specifics. After Max's initial remarks (via voiceover), he is immediately captured by a group of thugs for the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a bloated mass of a man with a shock of white-blonde hair and eye make-up that would send the Devil packing. Joe's citadel contains many luxuries, but only for the chosen few. The huddled masses are at Joe's mercy, and their desperation comes through not just in their screams, but in the lifetime of trauma shown on their bodies. Fury Road takes the pop-punk dystopia elements of its predecessors and turns them up to 11. The scars and deformities are unlike anything you've ever seen, and that's just touching the surface of the warped imagination on display.
Since Miller's story and his characters' goals are so minimal, it comes down to these world-building details to make it all somewhat convincing. In that regard, Fury Road is a downright masterclass. Between 80 and 85% of the stunts that occur (and 100% of the vehicles used) are real, and it shows. There are cars stacked on top of oil tankers, and old-fashioned buggys covered in nasty metal spikes. There's a mega-truck that has a damn tractor mounted on the back. And, yes, there is a vehicle whose sole purpose is to blast screeching death metal, led by a demonic musician with an electric guitar that shoots fire. And yet, for all of the bombast on display, Miller refuses to become indulgent when showing off the madcap stunts of his ensemble. Fury Road is as subtle as a scream and has all the blunt force of a hurricane, but it's also an exercise in understanding when to give the audience a break.
Had Miller kept up the pace of the first half hour for the remaining 90 minutes, Fury Road's simplicity would have quickly become its undoing. Instead, Miller weaves in a string of moments that either greatly reduce the action, or stop it all together. Yet in these spaces that allow the eyes and ears to recover, Miller never loses control of his story's momentum. There are no expository flashbacks or longwinded speeches that threaten to grind the narrative to a halt. There is great seriousness amid Fury Road's chaos, but Miller never pushes it to the point of dour pretension.
The simplicity of the story is reflected in the simplicity of the characters, and that includes Hardy's Max. Max is, if anything, no more than a gateway character. His manic grunts and twitchy head movements (he spends a quarter of the film acting as a living IV bag, after all) show that he is a man pushed far over the edge. And yet Hardy never goes out of his way to steal the show. Max is the outlier of the story, and a surprisingly good fit to play second fiddle.
The first chair, quite clearly, belongs to Theron's bald, bionic woman, and Fury Road is all the better because of this. Max's motivation can be reduced to mere survival, but Furiosa is out for something that cuts deeper: redemption. In the bright orange wastelands of a world gone horrifically insane, she seeks asylum not just for herself, but for the living cargo she carries with her: five slave brides married to Joe for the purpose of breeding and producing milk.
Despite the muscle cars, explosions, and outlandishly macho cries for a glorious death, Mad Max might just be one of the most unabashedly feminist blockbusters in recent memory. Though Joe's slave brides spend most of the film in skimpy white bikinis, they prove to be more than damsels in distress. And, later on, Miller introduces an entire clan of warrior women of all ages, who prove up to the task of going toe-to-toe with Joe's horde of male soldiers. There are characters in Fury Road who exploit women, but Miller himself does all he can to empower them. Fury Road is about fighting against the odds, not post-apocalyptic love, and the dedication to life-or-death stakes leaves the film refreshingly asexual.
With only a few notable instances of visual effects (the most obvious being an overwhelming sandstorm), Mad Max stays relatively grounded (yes, even with the flame-spewing guitar) compared to contemporary blockbuster fare. It's a chase movie that lives and dies by the success of its vehicular carnage, and not by how many fantastical digital creations it can force onto the screen. There is madness aplenty, but it is sweaty, tear-streaked, gnarly madness rooted in a self-contained story. This isn't a tale about cataclysmic events that changed the world, but rather a story of survival long after the dust has settled, and there's nothing to do but charge forward. As Furiosa herself puts it, "You wanna get through this? Do as I say. Now pick up what you can, and run."
Grade: B+
Director: Bryan Singer
Runtime: 131 minutes
At once a sequel, prequel, and complete narrative overhaul, Marvel's X-Men: Days of Future Past certainly hasn't been shy about its ambitions. With casts from the original trilogy and 2011's First Class, returning director Bryan Singer, along with a plot involving time travel, Days of Future Past seemed like an unwieldy entity. After leaving the X-Men franchise to direct the leaden Superman Returns and the flat Valkyrie, Singer's return to the director's chair was understandably met with hesitation. Yet he and writer Simon Kinberg (atoning for the mostly awful X-Men: The Last Stand) have avoided running Marvel's prized mutant family into the ground. While the franchises of the various Avengers heroes are clearly Marvel's top priority, Days of Future Past returns the X-Men to their glory days. This is more than a step in the right direction. It's a full-blown resurrection, with plot, spectacle, and drama all skillfully woven together.
This is most impressive when considering the important of time travel to DOFP's narrative. There are always plot holes that crop up when time travel arrives in a story, so it's important to manage everything else smoothly enough so the stakes get more focus than potential story-telling paradoxes. Singer, clearly reinvigorated by returning to this world, shows that he knows how to handle this world better than those peers that have sat in during his absence. Working off of Kinberg's smooth, straightforward screenplay, Singer and editor/composer John Ottman are able to keep things moving along beautifully, without every leaving key characters in the dust.
That last bit is of special importance in this film more than any other X-Men adventure. Though we see plenty of mutants across the 131 minute duration, many are just there to fill the screen. Don't expect to learn more about the likes of Warpath (Booboo Stewart) or Fan BingBing's portal-creating Blink. They, along with several others, are just here to fill out the story's framing device which is this (take a deep breath): After Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) kills anti-mutant scientist Boliver Trask (Peter Dinklage), the world's governments pour money into Trask's Sentinel Program. The Sentinels are large, adaptable robots that, a la Skynet, eradicate mutants and their genetically mundane allies. With the future now a bleak dystopia, Prof. X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellan) come up with a last ditch plan. With help from Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), they will send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) into the past to reunite the young Xavier and Magneto (James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, respectively) to stop Mystique's mission, as well as its increasingly devastating consequences.
Once all of the time-travel mumbo jumbo is hashed out via's Stewart's effortlessly commanding voice, and Wolverine wakes up inhabiting his body as it was in 1973, the film really comes to life. Despite all of the VFX involved, Days of Future Past is never careless when it comes to digital trickery. The story and the quartet of Jackman, McAvoy, Lawrence, and Fassbender are the real draws here, and Kinberg gives each role enough room to breathe. While it's frustrating to see Page's role hollowed out (in the source material, she was the one who leapt back in time), the story's four leads and their various conflicts are still compelling.
Rather than retread old ground, the first half of the film plays like an inversion of the very first X-Men (2000). Here, Wolverine has to step back and be both mediator and leader, roles he was in no way ready to take on when he first joined the X-Men. Meanwhile, young Charles Xavier is a depressed, alcoholic mess who has lost his way. Beast (Nicholas Hoult) has healed Xavier's legs, but the cost has been his tremendous psionic powers. Even though Wolverine is able to make Xavier believe his outrageous time travel story, the latter hardly feels like reconnecting with his mutant roots.
Though Jackman's Wolverine has always been a central part of the X-Men movies, his role reversal is a smart choice, and he and McAvoy play off of each other quite well. There are still traces of the cynical mutant's past in Jackman's performance, but here they're held back for the sake of urgency. McAvoy, meanwhile improves on his already impressive performance from First Class as the film's mentally shattered version of Xavier. The actor's vulnerability and desperation are given the weight needed to make us care, without digging so deep as to turn the film into a pretentious existential drama.
Things only get better as Fassbender and Lawrence enter the fray. The former remains perfectly suited as the dogmatic Magneto, while Lawrence brings more genuine spark to Mystique than she did in First Class, where she was occasionally flat. Special mention should go to Evan Peters as the ultra fast Quicksilver, who is given just enough to be an enjoyable addition without leaving the film overstuffed. His part in the story is brief, but critical, and it allows Singer and co. to use Quicksilver's powers as part of the film's lightest, most enjoyable set-piece. Unlike the extra mutants in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Quicksilver's guest appearance here is superbly integrated, and it ends just in time to get back to the four established protagonists.
Every one of them has an agenda, yet the streamlined plotting ensures that motives remain clear without grinding the film to a halt. Days of Future Past is always moving, yet it never feels rushed outside of the exposition-heavy opening. The blockbuster it best calls to mind (and not simply because of the time travel aspect), is the 2009 reboot of Star Trek. The JJ Abrams film had a lot going on, yet kept its characters grounded amid all of the flashy effects to deliver an experience where the drama was earned, and therefore resonated.
Backing up Singer's handling of the story and his main stars are some of his slickest, liveliest direction to date. Eschewing the rather bland color palette of most Marvel films, Days of Future Past is much more visually engaging than the standard summer tentpole. Newton Thomas Siegel's photography, especially in the 1973 scenes, is rich and textured, and lends an extra bit of believability to the fantastical premise and characters. He and Singer also have a bit of fun capturing some of the mutant action on 70s era cameras, further grounding us in a time period where the mutants stand out even more than they do in the present or future. Production designer John Mhyre, whose stacked resume includes superhero flicks and glittery musicals, does a stellar job with sets without going overboard.
And then, of course, there are the visual effects. Though some elements are more cartoon-y than others (the future versions of the Sentinels), most of the VFX work is superbly handled. It only ups the stakes and the grandeur, rather than taking focus away from the story and characters. Even in the finale, which is filled with some truly massive effects (as well as hefty cross-cutting between past and future), the story's over-the-top emotional core stays front and center.
Like last month's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Days of Future Past succeeds because it bucks two major trends found in big-budget spectacles: being overly glib so that no drama interrupts the spectacle, or trying so desperately to be dramatic that all fun is squeezed out. Though Days of Future Past does reset the chessboard for the franchise, it still works as its own self-contained (albeit open-ended) adventure, one with an engaging story and engaging characters worth following. What could have been a jumbled, incoherent mess is, thankfully, one of the most assured and accomplished superhero films to date. As much as the franchise has stumbled over the past few years, Days of Future Past shows that when they're on their A-game, the X-Men are among the best in the business.
Grade: B+
