Mad Max: Fury Road – what the new trailer teaches us
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Version 0 of 1. Mad Max: Fury Road has been in development for a quarter of a century. So the buzz has had some time to build. After disappointing remakes of futuristic classics such as Total Recall and Robocop, you’d be forgiven for hoping we just might be finally getting the bombastic return to the glory days of madcap 80s sci-fi fans of this sort of thing have been waiting for. Luckily, the latest trailer for George Miller’s return to the post-apocalyptic Aussie outback doesn’t disappoint. In the dust and despair, loner Max (Tom Hardy) meets Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a woman who wants to cross the desert. The synopsis suggests that our hero is the more experienced; this trailer hints his punky client is the one really in the know. In fact, Max mostly looks a little shellshocked. Understandable, perhaps: he’s facing off against shaven-headed, flamethrower guitar-wielding desert Nazis with attitude problems. There has been much discussion of whether Fury Road is prequel, sequel or “sidequel” to the Mel Gibson-starring originals. The evidence here suggests that this relatively green Max is far from the gnarled road warrior seen in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. But there’s also a flashback segue which hints that he’s still suffering from a painful memory involving a group of children. Are these the Qantas Boeing 747 survivors from Thunderdome? If so, Fury Road has to be a continuation of Gibson’s adventures. Just don’t make Hardy’s character the earlier Max’s son, please, or there will be riots in the cinema. We do know, from earlier trailers, that water has joined oil as one of the major commodities of this new Mad Max universe, and the new promo suggests that its people also traffic in slaves. This makes sense: in a world with few animals and precious little plantlife, man has been restored to the desperate status of luxury item. Or should we say woman? The evil, masked Immortan Joe appears to be the “owner” of a tribe of attractive scantily clad maidens who are determined to escape his clutches for a better life, provided they’re allowed to take their desert-style lingerie with them. One of them is played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, the English model whose performance in Transformers: Dark of the Moon saw her unfavourably compared to Megan Fox. “As the world fell each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy, me, or everyone else,” says our hero, as bug-eyed loons beat the drums of mayhem and the desert bursts into flames. This new take on Mad Max makes no more sense than previous instalments: in a world of scarce resources, why are vehicles and their drivers so ornately garlanded? If its inhabitants are lacking water, why do they choose to live in the desert? Yet Miller certainly appears to have upped the ante this time around, and without the use of incongruous CGI. Fury Road may have intensified the operatic craziness of its car chases and fight scenes, but there’s a grit to the on-screen action that’s rare to see these days in futuristic action fare. Mad Max: Fury Road arrives in the UK on 14 May, the same day as its out-of-competition debut at the Cannes film festival, and in the US and Australia the following day. |