I saw Mad Max: Fury Road last night and I found it highly entertaining with a lot of intense action, superb visuals, and an exciting and well-paced narrative. And to be perfectly honest, I was expecting to get all of that so I wasn’t surprised at all that I did. What did surprise me, however, was how compelling the story was and how well the film makers crafted characters that had depth and could be related with on a human level. Understand, of course, that this is a straight on Action flick, and the storyline is not terribly complex, nor are the characters. However, I believe that Mad Max: Fury Road is upping the game for the Action genre not only because it has some of the most insanely choreographed and filmed action sequences I’ve ever seen, but also because they took the time to develop characters that the audience could empathize with and care about. What I find most refreshing about Mad Max: Fury Road is that it isn’t trying to be something that it’s not. Director George Miller (who directed all of the previous Mad Max films) stayed within himself and simply tried to make a good film. In doing so, he created a visual spectacle that also contained a simple yet strong narrative and characters who were likable and compelling.

There are three main characters in the film that experience the greatest character arcs and it’s the third one that I’ll get to that puts the film over the top for me. The first character is Max, played with a subtle gruffness by Tom Hardy. Similarly to Mel Gibson’s Max of the late 70’s and early 80’s, he’s a loner and a man of few words. Miller, who also wrote the script along with Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris used an admirable economy of dialogue with Max. They didn’t clutter him up with a lot of unnecessary dialogue, but rather let his actions speak for him. He did grunt a lot as a device of his character, but to me scenes like when he’s holding Furiosa and the other girls at gunpoint and waving the gun and grunting in order to order them around as opposed to shouting some profanity-laden tirade fits the character a lot better and also creates an air of mystery around him. He’s keeping his thoughts inside, so no one, not the audience and not the other characters knows what he’s going to do. He also bears guilt from his past and one thing that I wish Miller had done was play that guilt up a little more. Max would rather be a loner, and he tries to leave Furiosa and the girls behind once they’ve initially escaped Immortan Joe and his clan. He ends up having to take Furiosa because only she knows how to disable the sequence of hte kill switch on the war machine, and then she won’t leave without the girls. I would have liked to have seen a more clear connection between how Max’s guilt over being unable to save the girl from his past makes him unwilling to protect these girls now. So Max seems to be an uncaring bastard at the beginning, but over the course of the story he grows into a caretaker for Furiosa and we see him make a sacrifice at the end in order to try and save her. He still ends the film as a loner, but he has found redemption in that he gets Furiosa and the other girls back to safety when he wasn’t the way he wasn’t able to in the past.

The other main character is Furiosa (Charlize Theron). She starts out the film seemingly as an ally of the film’s antagonist, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). She’s driving the War Rig and sent out with a convoy of War Boys to steal gas from Gas Town, but then we realize that she has another plan in mind. She’s secretly holding Joe’s Five Wives, young women how are forced to breed his children, and we eventually find out that she’s trying to take them to the safety of her homeland. She’s a terrific character from an archetypal standpoint because she’s a shapeshifter and a trickster. She’s a shapeshifter in that the film opens with the audience believing that she’s going to be an enemy to Max, and she is in fact an enemy to him when they first meet. As the film moves on, she quickly shifts to being his ally and she also shifts from being a bloodthirsty warlord to a nurturing motherly type of character. She’s an archetypal trickster in that Immartan Joe believes her to be his ally but then realizes that she’s a traitor after it’s too late, and he must now consider her to be his enemy. I feel that Charlize Theron was uniquely qualified to play this role as she is so effective at playing both extremes. She can effectively play cold blooded (Monster, Prometheus) and warm and caring (Mighty Joe Young, The Italian Job), and she combined those qualities in this role to create a character with supreme depth, pathos and personality. This is a character that we root for, care about, and despite the extraordinary circumstances of her existence, can relate to.

Finally there is Nux (Nicholas Hoult) who is more of a secondary character, but who has what is undoubtedly the most complete and most effective character arc in the film. He starts out the film as a fanatical follower of Immortan Joe, and he uses the captured Max as his “blood bag”. After Furiosa has deserted them, he wants nothing more than to capture her so that Immortan Joe will send him to immortality in Valhalla. During the initial chase he uses Max as a shield and he looks like he’s killed in the sequence’s climactic crash. However he somehow survived and manages to sneak on to the War Rig and spends the next few minutes of the film as a major thorn in Max’s side. However, he too becomes an archetypal shapeshifter after seeing Immortan Joe act in a decisively inhumane way, and after meeting and falling love with one of the Five Brides, he loses his fanaticism and becomes an ally to Max, Furiosa and the girls. In fact, he becomes more than just an ally as he joins Max and Furiosa in becoming one of the most heroic characters in the film. The reason I feel that Nux’s character is the most complete and is the one that put this film over the top for me is that it happens organically within the story. It would have been very easy, and in fact likely, to see this character get forced on us in a way that felt either unnatural or unrealistic. However we were introduced to him in such a way that we see that he isn’t a bad person, but he’s very eager to please. So it feels realistic that he could see and do things that would change his perspective, and then that’s what happens. It’s all done very simply within the confines of the story, but also very effectively.

I was also very impressed with this film from a storytelling standpoint. Many action films use the story merely as a means to get from one action sequence to the next. This film isn’t terribly different from most other action films in that regard, but the action sequences in this film don’t live in a vacuum. It’s not like these are car chases that could live in any other film. These action sequences are a part of the Mad Max universe and they are choreographed in a way that is unique to that universe. So while the story does merely serve to bridge the action sequences, it feels like the action sequences live within the film and are an organic part of the storyline. This particular film couldn’t exist without these particular action sequences and the sequences advance the story and develop the characters. Again, they kept the story very simple, but they told it very effectively.

One of the other effective storytelling devices that they used was the thematic principle of redemption. Many films will have several thematic elements going on at once, but the main thematic element in Mad Max: Fury Road is the idea of redemption. There are some other subtle ones like avoiding the perils of fanaticism, but finding redemption is that main spine of this story and the outer journey that Max, Furiosa and even Nux take is symbolic of the inner journey that they all complete in their own individual ways.

One last thing that I’d like to say is that this is also a very artistic film. The art direction and production design created a unique world that was simultaneously alien and familiar. I sincerely hope that Production Designer Colin Gibson and Art Directors Shira Hockman and Jacinta Leong at least receive Oscar nominations for the exceptional work that they did in creating the world in which this film took place. It was beautiful and ugly all at the same time and the detail in which this world was created should not go unrecognized.

Overall, this is a terrifically entertaining film. It’s not going to win any non-technical Oscars, but it provides the type of entertainment value and movie escapism that are worth the two hours that you’ll spend watching it.