The second people got their hands on it, Mad Max: Fury Road felt special. The movie, which came 30 years after the last installment in this franchise, felt like a miracle. Set almost entirely in the desert, its sheer scale and intensity were so marvelous that, even though it’s a deeply weird movie, the 2016 Oscars simply couldn’t resist nominating it for many awards.
10 years later, Fury Road‘s stature has only grown. Even though we got Furiosa, which I’d argue is every bit as good as Fury Road, Miller’s first return to Mad Max since Beyond Thunderdome is undeniably the one with the bigger cultural imprint. It’s a movie we’re not likely to ever see again, not just because of its greatness, but because no one else will be dumb enough to try.
Part of the reason Fury Road feels like such an overwhelming success is because you get the sense, even just watching the movie, that the whole thing could so easily have gone sideways. The movie is set almost entirely outside, and by her own admission, one of its stars didn’t fully understand what they were doing.
Charlize Theron said that she was “incredibly scared” while shooting the film because she had never worked on a project like it and “didn’t always understand the narrative that we were telling.”
An entire book was written about the making of Fury Road. The movie could have gone off the rails in so many different places. Instead, it feels like a singular, kinetic achievement because of the person behind the camera and his approach to the material.
Perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay to director George Miller is that you can watch Fury Road with the sound off and the movie still totally works. Fury Road is kinetic cinema at its finest, a movie where characters’ actions are explained almost entirely by how they move and where the point of almost every second of screen time is to see where characters are headed next.
It’s been pointed out that Fury Road is essentially a two-hour chase scene. The irony is the main characters decide to turn around a little over an hour in and just head back to where they came from.
The pointlessness of all that plotting could kill a movie with less visual flair than this one has. Instead, the movie manages to pack a punch not in spite of the circles it sends its characters in, but because of the combination of movement and stasis. These are characters trying to find a better life who realize that they’ll have to build one for themselves.
Director George Miller is working at the peak of his powers here, and he was given the resources to make what seems to be almost exactly the movie he wanted to make. Furiosa, for all of its brilliance, is slower and more operatic than Fury Road. This is the kind of action cinema we rarely get on this scale, and it rips from the second it starts.
Fury Road is brilliant enough, but the most remarkable thing about the movie might be that it manages to center its main character’s emotional journey through all the chaos that surrounds her. Theron’s Imperator Furiosa is such an indelible character that Miller felt the need to make an entire prequel about her.
Much of that is thanks to Theron’s performance. As Furiosa, she’s fierce, vengeful, and protective, a pseudo-mother to the wives that she rescues from imprisonment. The film’s most important moment belongs to her and her alone, as she collapses onto a once green desert, realizing that her entire plan is hopeless.
It’s telling, too, that Furiosa so gracefully takes the mantle from Max and that the movie seems designed to facilitate that transition. The moment when Furiosa nails a shot that Max can’t make, using him to steady her rifle, is brilliant and subtle, and one that both Theron and Tom Hardy sell completely.
Fury Road rules because it doesn’t feel safe. It’s the kind of movie that can only be a home run or a disaster. Thankfully, it was the former. The modern blockbuster is defined in part by the desire to ensure that it will make enough money.
That means, in part, sanding all the edges off of every movie until all that’s left is the parts that everyone can agree they like. Fury Road has imagery in it that could easily alienate, and that imagery likely did bother at least some people. For all of its success, Fury Road did not gross $1 billion, but it was a success nonetheless because it achieved a kind of word-of-mouth status that is still rare in Hollywood.
Few filmmakers ever get the chance to make exactly what they want on this scale, and even when they do, it’s not something as daring and impressive as Fury Road. We should celebrate this movie’s existence every chance we get. It’s one of the great cinematic experiences any of us will ever get, and it seems unlikely we’ll get another anytime soon.
Buy or rent Mad Max: Fury Road on Amazon or Apple.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.