Here's Another Positive Internet Review for Mad Max (Spoilers, to the Extent this Movie's Spoilable)

For the first 45 minutes of Mad Max: Fury Road, I had no idea what the hell was going on. Because my eyes and brain spend all day alternating between laptop, phone, and TV screens like a frenetic ping-pong rally, my attention span is worryingly bad for things like reading books and watching films. I kept asking my girlfriend — who works offline, can focus on these things, and hates when I talk to her in the movie theater — if she understood what was happening. Annoyed by both me and Mad Max’s inaccessible narrative, she kept answering that she did not.

So it wasn’t just me, and in retrospect I *think* I get what they were doing. Granting that analogies to The Wire are played out, it was kind of like that where they just threw you into a deep end at the beginning without explaining relevant context. Where The Wire took about eight episodes before you “got it,” it was about an hour into Mad Max where you fully realized their setting is it-doesn’t-really-matter how many years into the future, where an oppressive warlord (I no longer recall his name) has seized power of a desert through the monopolizing, hoarding, and occasional rationing of the water supply.

I think, though I’m not 100% sure, that they kill off all the women except the ones who are enslaved as the warlord’s childbearing concubines? I don’t remember if they ever showed any women between birth and adult, so maybe my supposition is incorrect. Again, it doesn’t really matter, because while there is a story and occasional dialogue, it’s not even a front for the sensory overloaded, futuristic clusterfuck of a car chase battle scene.

There is sparse character development of Max, Furiosa, the warlord, and one of his infantrymen (who apparently had a babyface turn in a sequence I must have been looking at my phone or just zoning out during), but everybody else was just disposable. The death of a pregnant woman and her baby demonstrate that the warlord was most disdained with the loss of his “property,” but the sad emotion from the protagonists here and when their other teammates die is ephemeral and contrived — they’re so over-the-top that it becomes laugh out loud funny. This was by design, I think?

This is not to say that the acting was bad. Everybody, especially Charlize Theron, who is going to become a billionaire from this franchise, fit their roles superbly. But, they were just pawns in the big game of delivering a cinematic experience that was basically a new kind of drug. Where the Fast and Furious and Taken movies make you wait like 25 minutes through forced, awkward storytelling (think the BBQ scenes with Liam Neeson talking about real-life with his other-secret-agent friends) so you’re thankful when they finally get to the good shit, Mad Max went hard from the get-go. It must have been 80% action.

The scenes and imagination of the world (if not depth of its individuals) and battle vehicles were mind-fuckingly ornate. The demon on the hood of one of the truck, crushing the double guitar/flamethrower (and made zero sense for awhile) will be one of enduring aspects of this film. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him, or much else. It’ll be fascinating to see if the non-stop action is re-watchable when you know what’s coming, and aren’t spending the first half of the movie trying to figure it all out.

As far as the plot goes, I’d be willing to wager that Furiosa and Company aren’t gonna have this peaceful utopian society that they think they’re celebrating at the end of the movie. There’s way too much money in a series of sequels for that to be the case.

UPDATE: That this was already the fourth movie of the franchise (the last one was 30 years ago), and had to be pointed out to me by a reader, really underlines why I write about sports and not film. Will try to do better next time I go out of my lane.