The Reviews Are Finally In! MAD MAX: FURY ROAD Is An Explosive, High-octane, Runaway Hit With A Surprising

The reviews are finally in! MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is an explosive, high-octane, runaway hit with a surprising yet refreshingly strong and welcome feminist message among film critics! Have no fear: this truly is a very LOVELY DAY!

"A relentless action spectacle that will dazzle audiences with its visceral torque and blazing vehicular madness... [George Miller] takes a traditionally testosterone-fueled series and reimagines it as a kind of feminist manifesto with much on its mind... 'Fury Road' might be the most intense and bruising action ride of the year, but the film also moves like a speeding maniac in possession of big and provocative ideas — ideas it scatters out the window while it’s moving at breakneck speeds... Come for the blistering, full-tilt action, stay for the thought-provoking consideration of the post-apocalypse... ‘Fury Road’ is ultimately a satisfying and ferocious piece of machinery; its batshit badassness should provoke primal screams of joy in even the most ardent and hardcore action purists."

— Rodrigo Perez @ The Playlist

"In a movie season exhaustingly cluttered with never-ending superhero sagas and reboots, ‘Fury Road’ arrives, despite its pedigree, as a daring, fascinating, thrilling jolt of original energy. It’s invigorating the way a big cinema spectacular should be, reveling in the medium’s towering possibilities, and transporting us to a thoroughly realized world that’s wholly unlike our own... We’re not talking about a particularly profound film here—survival is its chief big, blockish theme—but it is the rare mega-budget movie that has both heft and playfulness; it’s dark but fun, a churning orgy of sand and fire that pirouettes with balletic grace. It’s startlingly well-choreographed, impossibly nimble for all its heavy metal-and-bone construction... The film’s musculature is both lean and intricate, to supremely satisfying effect. It’s a crunching, grinding thing, ornate and ludicrous, that somehow still glides. ‘Fury Road’ is a bracing, nervy, weirdo adventure that more than lives up to its beautifully cut trailers. I doubt there will be a more rousing potential blockbuster released this summer. Go see it. It’s maddeningly good."

— Richard Lawson @ Vanity Fair

"In any other movie those women would be background noise, showing up just to be menaced/sexually assaulted. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ isn’t any other movie, and the Five Wives — Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton — each get their own character arcs and moments, and each react to their situation differently. Some fight, some cower, some want to return to the familiarity of their abuse, but all react as humans, not as plot devices. “We Are Not Things,” they write on the wall of their chamber before escaping. This is where the film’s surprising feminism shines through. Max isn’t the savior of these women, Furiosa is. It’s about women helping women, and Max is there as a (reluctant) ally. There’s a question that lingers over the whole film, “Who killed the world?,” and the answer, of course, is men. And they continue to grind it down ever further, and so Furiosa takes the women away in search of a Green Place, where a woman warrior group known as the Vulvani live. In the world of ‘Mad Max’, women can have traditional female qualities—they’re life givers, they’re caretakers—while also kicking copious amounts of ass and riding around on cool motorcycles."

— Devin Faraci @ Badass Digest

"We live in an era in which the word ‘awesome’ can be used to describe a fast food sandwich, so perhaps we have either become immune to hyperbole, or perhaps our standards are far too low. In either case, into this jaded epoch power-slides ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, a film that actively tries to be one of the greatest action movies ever made, and actually succeeds... Let that sink in. George Miller’s long-awaited fourth film in the ‘Mad Max’ series achieves what few action movies even dare to attempt: a nerve-jangling adrenaline freakout, packed to the gills with amazing (and real) stunt work, exciting characters, luxurious cinematography and manic detail... It’s smart and thoughtful but more than anything else, it is an experience that must be seen to be believed. No hyperbole, no joke: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is the real deal, the kind of superlative action filmmaking that rips away at our collective acceptance of mediocrity. The bar has been raised, and it is the definition of awesome."

— William Bibbiani @ Crave Online

"’Mad Max: Fury Road’ may well be the “Götterdämerung” of drive-in movies. It has its roots in the Western and the post-apocalyptic road-rage action saga, but it also feels like an epic mic-drop, where Miller dares anyone else to follow in his tire treads.... If nothing else, this could be the movie that kills the blue-and-orange color scheme, if only because no one else is ever going to blue-and-orange as hard as ‘Fury Road’ does... Despite the testosterone on display here, it’s girl power that fuels a great deal of ‘Fury Road’, with some indelible moments provided by a talented ensemble of actresses both young and more experienced... Miller redefined action cinema with ‘The Road Warrior’, and it’s no stretch to suggest that ‘Fury Road’ ups the ante on what the genre might deliver in the future."

— Alonso Duralde @ The Wrap

"What compounds the fun is Fury Road’s wholesale rejection of the generally accepted blockbuster code of conduct, which dictates that expensive films have to be marketable to teenagers but still watchable by eight-year-olds in order to maximise box-office returns... Enormous, naked women are milked like cattle, dwarfs are hoisted on palanquins, and men as pale and gaunt as Méliès aliens are knocked out, gnawed on, sawn up and catapulted through explosions. Imagine if Cirque du Soleil reenacted a Hieronymus Bosch painting and someone set the theatre on fire. This is more or less what Miller has come up with... Few people, surely, were expecting robust feminism from the new ‘Mad Max’ film – yet here we are, and Theron’s character is far from the only instance of it. See also Immortan’s escaping wives, who may be young and sylphlike, but are the opposite of damsels in distress, and play an instrumental part in their own dash for freedom..."

— Robbie Collin @ The Daily Telegraph

"All these goofy, psychotic tribes outfitted like thrash-metal gladiators battling over the last dregs of petrol in jerry-built hot-rods. The brand name refers not only to its tortured hero — it is a statement of intent. And now, with $150 million-plus change at his disposal and the devil’s gleam in his eye, Miller has surely achieved maximum madness... Miller has put all the money, all the perverse and poetic flights of his imagination, on the screen. The scope is more operatic, the attitude still punk rock. It’s almost as if a petrol-head David Lynch has been given license to despoil the homogenised blueprint of the modern blockbuster. Racing into a gigantic, surreal sandstorm, the pursuit is assaulted by forks of lightning, tornadoes and scarlet fireballs, an echo of the nuclear holocaust that has left the world mad... ‘Fury Road’ is a defiantly, at times deliriously, cinematic experience. Utilising 3,500 storyboards, 480 hours of raw footage, multiple frame rates, handhelds, swooping cranes, crash zooms, a blithe disregard for the personal safety of a garrison of stuntmen and the tangible bulk of real metal being hurled about at ridiculous speeds, he has created a symphony of destruction. IMAX will melt your brain."

— Ian Nathan @ Empire Magazine

"Vastly more complex on a technical scale but simpler on a conceptual one, “Fury Road” is, for all intents and purposes, a two-hour car chase interrupted by a brief stretch of anxious downtime, and realized with the sort of deranged grandiosity that confirms Miller’s franchise has entered its decadent phase. All the more remarkable, then, that the movie still manages to retain its focus, achieving at once a shrewd distillation and a ferocious acceleration of its predecessors’ sensibility. There is gargantuan excess here, to be sure — and no shortage of madness — but there is also an astonishing level of discipline... The feminist undercurrents rippling through this movie are by turns sincere, calculated and teasingly tongue-in-cheek: Our first good glimpse of the Wives, clad in skimpy white rags and gathered around a water spout, plays like a vision out of “Girls Gone Wild: Coed Car Wash.” Even when they join in the fight, it can be hard to tell where erotic fantasy ends and empowerment fantasy begins, which is very much in keeping with the film’s unapologetically grindhouse attitude. Yet if “Fury Road” doesn’t deliver as pure a hit of girl-power retribution as say, Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” it’s hard not to respect the dramatic stature with which Miller elevates his female characters; Huntington-Whiteley and Kravitz, in particular, embody the sort of quiet defiance that ensures these women, though victimized, are never reduced to mere victims."

— Justin Chang @ Variety

"The first two [Mad Max] features ran barely 90 minutes, and it takes guts and real confidence to dare push a straight chase film with very little dialogue to two hours. But Miller has pulled it off by coming up with innumerable new elements to keep the action compelling: The pitiless mindset of a brutish-minded society; bending poles sticking up from vehicles that allow marauders atop them to by lowered into enemy trucks for hand-to-hand combat; an insane heavy metal guitarist affixed to one of the Citadel's rigs, whose raucous wailing and flame-throwing ability perfectly express this world's extremity; and a central woman, missing one arm, who's as tough-minded as any man but also retains a special link to a remote society of women she intends to find..."

— Todd McCarthy @ The Hollywood Reporter

"Extravagantly deranged, ear-splittingly cacophonous, and entirely over the top, George Miller has revived his ‘Mad Max’ punk-western franchise as a bizarre convoy chase action-thriller in the post-apocalyptic desert... It’s like ‘Grand Theft Auto’ revamped by Hieronymus Bosch, with a dab of Robert Rodríguez’s ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’... Dialogue is at a minimum, and when Max says anything it is usually preceded by an eccentric rumbling, mumbling mmmm sound, like a macho Mr. Bean. He is impassive, to say the least: the nearest Tom Hardy’s Max comes to an emotional outburst is when Splendid does something very brave while hanging on to the side of the truck. Max gives her a little smile and boyish thumbs-up. It’s the Mad Max equivalent of hugging her and declaiming: “Darling, your courage is magnificent.” And when Nux wishes to express defiance or euphoria, he sprays his mouth with silver-grey paint, to make his face look even more like a skull. That is pretty dysfunctional..."

— Peter Bradshaw @ The Guardian

"The first act of the film is where most of the money shots from the trailer come from, and we are clued in quickly to something rather shocking: Max isn’t the main character. Oh sure, he’s there in one form or another for the duration of the picture, but the primary action figure is Ms. Theron. Even when Max goes from a bystander to an aggressive participant, the focus remains on Theron’s would-be rescuer, and all of her charges are given agency and sympathy. You may have heard that George Miller brought in ‘Vagina Monologues’ author Eve Ensler to consult on the film and wow does it show. ‘Fury Road’ is not a film that just uses the notion of human sex slavery for topical seasoning and/or an excuse to show quivering young girls half-naked in shipping containers or cages. It is very much about the notion of a world that has ditched most of the remnants of so-called civilized society yet has kept the patriarchal system that keeps women under the thumb of arbitrarily designated male rulers and consigns them to be no more than (often unwilling) breeders. If you’ve read me for any length of time, you’ve heard me whine about the quantity and quality of female characters in mainstream motion pictures. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ is everything I say I want."

— Scott Mendelson @ Forbes

Mad Max: Fury Road AU Headcanons

Basically, the entire War Rig group doesn't die and Imperator Furiosa and Max Rockatansky are now platonic best friends who sometimes argue over important decisions and key things happening in and outside of the Citadel because they're now both co-leaders of their massive desert fortress. The pair also act as somewhat stern but caring parental figures and fierce battle mentors to The Splendid Angharad, Capable, The Dag, Toast the Knowing, Cheedo the Fragile, and Nux.

But Max is still deeply nomadic by nature, and so he sometimes goes on long and dangerous scouting or scavenging journeys by himself while Furiosa handles the daily affairs of the Citadel (with one of her major decisions exiling any and all those who were still loyal to Immortan Joe into the Wasteland), and this arrangement suits them both well. 

Whenever Max returns from his solo missions after long stretches of time, the Five Wives and Nux never fail to ambush him in excitement and pump him for details of his adventures outside the community. If Max is in a particularly good mood (meaning, he is not plagued by visions of his dead child), he'll bring home assorted gifts for his surrogate family such as trinkets and clothes he found in abandoned towns and villages. Never one for sentiment, Furiosa simply fills Max in on what has happened in the Citadel in his absences while drinking Aqua Cola (oh sorry—water) together.

The Splendid Angharad gives birth to a healthy son whom she names Frax (a combination of Max and Furiosa's names) and asks Max and Furiosa to be the godparents (which they both accept and declare her child as the heir to the Citadel), with the rest of the Wives acting as very doting and patient babysitters. Despite her hatred for her child’s biological father that she feels will never fade away over time, Splendid does not hold such negativity against her son and vows to love Frax unconditionally and — when he is old enough to learn the ways of their post-apocalyptic world —  to teach him how to treat women with respect and integrity. Angharad also takes it upon herself to be a guidance counselor of sorts to the liberated females who were used as milk factories by Immortan Joe, and she finds personal catharsis in having a group of women to help with the emotional healing process aside from the Wives.

Capable and Nux agree to take their relationship at a very slow pace considering what they each have been through in their lives. With the Wives in unified agreement to become useful members of their small community, Capable decides that she wants to become a vehicle mechanic so she can learn how to fix and repair the various forms of land transport in the Citadel, and so Furiosa asks Nux to teach her the tricks of their trade. Living up to her moniker, Capable picks up the lessons quickly and loves that she gets to spend a lot of time with Nux while also learning about how all the mechanical stuff works in their desert home.

Toast the Knowing desires to follow Furiosa's footsteps and become an Imperator just like her, and so she undergoes intensive training overseen by Valkyrie and the rest of the Vuvalini, who are also accepting any interested young women within the Citadel to learn how to become protectors and defenders of their reformed oasis kingdom.

Cheedo the Fragile and The Dag have always been the closest to each other and they have both opted to choose peaceful duties within the Citadel in order to deal with the traumatic events they have endured under Immortan Joe's abusive rule. Inspired by the Keeper of the Seeds, the Dag spends her time tending to the lush crops growing atop the rock towers of her desert home while Cheedo — being the youngest of the Wives — becomes an educator for the Citadel's War Pups and other young children with the assistance of the Wives' elderly governess, Miss Giddy.

With the help of the Vuvalini's Keeper of the Seeds who has transformed the Citadel into a fertile oasis, Nux's health is restored through potent natural medicine and says goodbye to his deadly twin tumors, Larry and Barry (surgically removed by a now reformed Organic Mechanic), so he can live a full life and have his happy ending with Capable. Despite having a newfound worldview thanks to Max, Furiosa, and the Wives, Nux still loves certain aspects of being a War Boy like driving and fixing cars and doing tasks that are within his skill set in the garage caves of the Citadel. And yes, he now adorably seeks approval from both Max and Furiosa, even though it sometimes grates on their nerves.

This page from the first issue of the prelude mini-series to MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (revealing the backstories of both Nux and Immortan Joe) is incredibly significant because this implies so much about the resilience of the Five Wives featured in the movie.

According to official canon (since all the stories in the comic prequels were conceived by George Miller himself with help of fellow FURY ROAD writers Nico Lathouris and Mark Sexton), the Immortan gathered all the healthiest women he could find that were scattered across the Wasteland so he would be able to produce a healthy male heir given that three of his older sons were imperfect and could not carry on his twisted legacy in the desert kingdom that he created and ruled. Two (Scrotus and Corpus Colossus, pictured above) had physical deformities while one (Rictus Erectus, played by Nathan Jones in the film) had a developmental disability despite his relatively healthy exterior and physically intimidating size.

It is revealed that the first few waves of women taken to become Joe's breeders had tried and failed to sire him a healthy male child. What is troubling is the fact that Joe had imposed a strict "three strikes" policy upon them: if a breeder produced a child that had any physical or developmental imperfections, or if they delivered stillborns, or miscarried and committed any of these offences three times, then they would be cast out to languish among the Wretched populating the grounds of the Citadel.

While we will be able to find out more concrete details about the Five Wives (as well as Furiosa) in the second issue of the prequel miniseries coming out next month (to be released by Vertigo Comics, by the way), I'm now very curious as to how Angharad, Capable, Toast, Cheedo, and The Dag lasted so long under Joe's captivity and achieved the status as his "most prized breeders" considering that there was a three-strikes rule in play among his harem of imprisoned women.

"The Dag has a flightiness to her, sort of like a frantic characteristic, and that can be mistaken as being like a nervous or careless person. But really, she has a very heightened sense of awareness of things that are going on around her. She sees things before a lot of other people see them."

— Abbey Lee on her role as The Dag in "Mad Max: Fury Road" (x)

COUNTDOWN TO EUROVISION 2015 IN VIENNA, AUSTRIA : DAY 07

With Greece's economy suffering in recent years, it's no wonder that the nation sent a song to Eurovision about free alcohol in the 2013 contest. Obviously, the track is definitely on the bonkers side of Eurovision, but the good kind of bonkers, of course! Lively and energetic, and a judicious use of the Greek language for the verses, Koza Mostra and Agathon Iakovidis proved that singing about their nation's financial crisis can be cheeky and fun as opposed to being negative and depressing. And note to Eurovision: please send more ridiculously good looking European men dressed in kilts for obvious male objectification reasons.

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"Alcohol Is Free" by Koza Mostra and Agathon Iakovidis: Greece's bouncy folk-punk entry for Eurovision 2013, finishing in sixth place with 152 points.

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P.S. I mean, really: you can never go wrong with handsome men singing and dancing in kilts, even if they're not technically Scottish. And let's not forget how lead singer Elias Kozas was basically eye-fucking the camera the entire time during their fantastic performance. Yes, sir, I definitely want some of that free alcohol you're offering! And did I mention they were wearing kilts?