Film Friday: George Miller's 'Mad Max: Fury Road' with Tom Hardy & Charlize Theron

George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road is the ultimate how-to guide when it comes to action films. Audiences don't go to action movies to see poorly written dialogue delivered by actors that create needless plot holes. We just want to see cars flip, gas trucks explode and people senselessly beat each other up. That Miller has made a film that delivers only those things while still including a coherent story should go down as one of the great accomplishments of 21st century filmmaking.

Fury Road comes 30 years after the previous Mad Max movie, but that franchise has never left our cultural consciousness. Those three films shaped what we expect from post-apocalyptic stories. But rather than retread familiar territory, Miller pushes his most famous creation forward with the kind of gusto his younger colleagues can't even think of. There's a young man still in Miller that's on full display with every crash and every explosion.

The plot is incredibly simple. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) tries to escape The Citadel with the wives of Immortan Joe (Hugh Kays-Byrne), to help them escape a life of slavery. And that's basically it. Immortan, a ruthless leader, tries to throw everything at Furiosa to stop her, but Max (Tom Hardy) reluctantly helps her, even as he tries to get the annoying Nux (Nicholas Hoult) off his back.

Yes, weirdly enough, Max is an almost inconsequential character in his own film. It's more about Furiosa's own shot at redemption than Max, who is merely trying to survive. Sure, we see flashes of the guilt Max feels for letting his family die (one of the few plot points carried over from the original films), but that's there just to give him some motivation. Miller shows far more interest in Furiosa and even the five wives (played by Rosie Huntington-Whitely, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee and Courtney Eaton) than turning Max into an anti-hero with depth. Perhaps after three films with the character (originally played by Mel Gibson), Miller wanted to shake-up his franchise with a focus on the strong women who survived an apocalypse.

The film is quite literally (in the correct usage of the word) one long chase. Even when the characters reach a critical plot point and stop their War Wagon, there is always Immortan's armada behind them. Miller might ease on the gas pedal a bit in the middle of the film, but he only does that so he can rev up the engines again.

This could also be the most gorgeous action movie ever made. Despite the lived-in approach, the cinematography by John Seale (an Oscar-winner for The English Patient) is stunning. The shot of Furiosa kneeling down in wind-swept dunes might be the best shot of 2015. Seale's kinetic camera is a perfect match for the feeling Miller was trying to get, putting the audience directly in the chase.

Despite having little to do beyond helping Furiosa, Tom Hardy gives a remarkable performance as a quiet, introverted Max. He and Theron show that actors can show emotion and move a story along with little to no dialogue. And since Miller doesn't give a damn about romance, it's exciting to see these two actors keep their thoughts to themselves while still making them clear to the audience. That's a real trick – they don't want to show emotion to that each other would see, but they still have to show it for us. And, they are in a cramped War Wagon for two-thirds of the film. Theron may laugh in one of the bonus featurettes about this being like a silent movie, but it's no joke. They manage to pull it off brilliantly.

Fury Road hits Blu-ray on Sept. 1 and it is easily the best Blu-ray release from a major studio this year so far. There's nearly two hours of extra content that covers nearly every aspect of the filmmaking process. Sure, the featurettes don't explain why it took Miller 30 years to make another Mad Max movie, but there's everything else you could want to know about the process. It's also wonderful to see how much of this was made with practical effects. One of the extras is a reel of just crashes before any post-production work on the shots and they are fascinating. Unfortunately, it only lasts four minutes. I could have watched a full cut of the main film without any post-production work. That would have been cool. There's also three short deleted scenes, but they aren't major cuts.

How Fury Road got the green light will probably puzzle those in the business for years, but this is the kind of film we need to prove what you can achieve with an action film. While talk of this film being considered for Oscars outside the technical categories might be little overzealous, this is still a joyous ride. I never knew watching a flamethrower-guitar player get mauled by Tom Hardy would be so much fun.

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