George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is the best movie of the present decade. ‘Fury Road’ topped the A.V. Club’s published list of the 100 best movies of the 2010s. The movie ended up appearing on all but four of the 18 ballots submitted by The A.V. Club’s film writers. If you remember, back in May, I got a head start on everybody by polling 250 industry critics and industry people. It seems like I started a domino effect because now Paste, Consequence Of Sound and Film School Rejects have all placed Miller’s movie atop their own 2010s lists as well. Let us not forget that it is also currently first on Metacritic’s compilation of all the decade lists.
Sadly, I missed the now legendary premiere of ‘Fury Road’ at the Cannes Film Festival back in 2015; I ended up seeing Miller’s masterwork only a few months later instead, but the whole thing, a deranged punk rock cinematic vision, blew my eye sockets away. Visually it was unlike any movie I had seen before. Miller is a master at framing his big and bold action sequences. Of course, maybe the success of Miller’s movie derives more from the fact that it’s probably easier to like a ‘Fury Road’ than, say, risk-taking and non-conformist films such as “The Master” or “The Tree Of Life” (the two best films I have seen this decade).
I wrote this when “Mad Max: Fury Road” got released in May of 2015:
“You can't deny the sheer impact of’ Fury Road. ‘Director George Miller's fourth installment of the film franchise is proof that not all blockbusters should be greeted with an indifferent shrug. If anything, this brutal action film is even more intense and exciting than its predecessors. With its nihilistic outlook on human nature and a nasty, in-your-face style, this is Miller's triumph through and through. The amount of detail that he brings to every frame is as obsessively meticulous as any Wes Anderson picture I've seen, as is the editing by Margaret Sixel, which – as we stand –is most deserving of next year's Film Editing Oscar. Edited at a breakneck pace and staged with manic fury, Sixel is the unheralded hero here. The celebrated one is, of course, Miller who's passion and vision comes through in every frame. The total control he must have had with this project to pull off what he did on screen is unheard of, which is good for him and great for us.”
George Miller worked on his baby for the better part of 20 years. He never gave up his fight to have his uncompromised vision splattered on-screen. “Fury Road,” in its insistence of having practical effects and the kind of minimalist storytelling reserved for arthouse, was supposed to start a new trend in Hollywood. Back in 2015, many writers, including myself, thought that maybe the movie could have studio execs learning a thing or two about how action could be done without overreliance on CGI. However, we haven’t really seen that revolution occur yet — no, “Fury Road” did not start a new trend in action. Maybe it didn’t occur because it would have been so damn hard replicating the obsessive attention-to-detail Miller brought to the film. Hollywood just couldn’t match the level of passion Miller had for every frame of his movie. Judging by the back-stories I have read these last 4 years, about how for close to two decades Miller’s life was entirely consumed by this film, one just couldn’t be happier that the 70-year-old director is finally getting recognized.
And so, the film’s immeasurable feat may just be that, despite the immense scope of the whole thing, this was very much a movie that one would qualify as “auteur cinema.” Driven by its director’s total and unadulterated creative brain, “Mad Max: Fury Road” was unlike anything we had seen before — a radical and visionary blockbuster that transcended description. What a lovely day, indeed!
The theatrical version runs 108 minutes, so we're talking a nearly 2-hour-10-minute cut of a movie that works because it's lean, and I'm not sure anyone needs that.