In Mad Max: Fury Road, he blunders into the path of Imperator Furiosa (a terrific Charlize Theron), who drives an amped-up big rig for warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played Toecutter in the first film), and who's about to make a risky bid for freedom along with the man's five formerly captive young wives. Like James Bond, he's become as much an idea as a person, wandering eternally into and out of the lives of humankind's remainders like the reworked, cataclysmic Western antihero he is. Tom Hardy, taking over for Mel Gibson, portrays Max as a feral animal, grunting out his few lines and, in the first moment we see him, chomping on an unfortunate lizard that happened to scurry by.Įven by the franchise's fuzzy timeline, Max should be getting on in years, so there's something reassuring and fantastic about the way the recasting suggests that, in the 30 years since we last saw him, he's barely aged.

He's come a long way from the Max Rockatansky of the first movie, too, so far in fact that he's a new man. And the title character is pretty solidly off his rocker, though judging by the unsurprised reactions of everyone he encounters, this is not an uncommon condition. These survivors exist among the tattered remnants of mankind, in the kind of place that would drive a fellow insane. What survivors are left prey on one another out on the open road or by way of tyrannical tribal societies. Fury Road is so beyond those trappings of civilization that it's practically alien, taking place on an Earth that's all wasteland, a desiccated, dusty stretch as far as the eye can see. It's not necessary to have seen the early Mad Max movies to get the gist of where things lie in the indeterminate future of Mad Max: Fury Road, though it's funny to look back at the Australia of the first installment and remember that it had diners and a court system and that its main character had something terrible happen to him while on vacation. The movie makes a fume-drunk, totally convincing case for how thematically lavish and awesome-looking the apocalypse can be, as long as you don't have to live there.

It's fitting that a week before the arrival of Tomorrowland, Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof's earnest argument in favor of hopeful futurescapes, the face-melting fourth installment to George Miller's franchise is gunning into theaters to suggest there's nothing like the flame-out of humanity for unprecedented spectacle. The world has totally gone to hell in Mad Max: Fury Road, and goddamn, does it look great.

Mad max fury road explained