George Miller is certainly a respectable filmmaker, and certainly not the man of a single franchise (we owe him the charming series of “Babe” and “Happy Feet”), but we did not expect a revival of such a level: while one could fear the worst from a rehash of his “Mad Max”, thirty years after the final (and poor) part of what was until then only a trilogy, he signs there is a marvel of an action movie. Both an ideal blockbuster and a conceptual nugget, it transcends screenplay material that fits in a pocket handkerchief: within the same crumbly and arid world as that once surveyed by Mel Gibson (who handed over to the charismatic Tom Hardy), Max is neutralized by the thugs of a tyrant who enslaves his people, especially the women.
Brutal and epic, generous and surgical
One of them, Furiosa (Charlize Theron), takes advantage of conveying gasoline and food to make the despot’s favorites escape, who launches his army in pursuit. As a universal donor of hemoglobin, a precious commodity to perk up wounded soldiers, Max is sent on the road… Based on this game of cat and mouse, the film pushes the limits of the genre, mastering the smallest parameter of its staging. Brutal and epic, generous and surgical, he never ceases to invent the better to return to the source of the genre: to get drunk on speed, pyrotechnics and adrenaline, to find a way of grace and elegance in the spectacle of barbarity, coupling the rough beauty of the Australian bush (where the film was shot) with the most advanced special effects.
The whole thing is dazzling: not only does George Miller revive his little post-apocalyptic world by making the most of modern technological resources (here he signs a masterpiece of digital animation), but he reshapes it in the light of concerns of his time: Max shares equal responsibilities and heroic propensities with a woman, and the green subtext, a constant of the franchise, has never been more relevant than today. Let’s be honest: “Mad Max: Fury Road” is one of the greatest films of the 2010s.
Thursday February 2 at 9 p.m. on TF1 Séries Films. Australian science fiction film by George Miller (2015). Starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron. 2:00.
