You need to re-watch Mad Max: Fury Road. Stop asking questions and do it. That’s the short version of this article.
The long version: while Mad Max: Fury Road does suffer in the transition from big to small screen – as any spectacle should – it remains a masterpiece of Australian cinema (yes, I know it is US-funded and filmed in Namibia, but shut up again).
I will confess that there were some very minor annoyances during my fourth viewing. There are a couple of spots where the dialogue is flat, and for me, pretty easy to fix. For example, Furiosa says to The Splendid Angharad – in a sound bite used in every trailer – “out here, everything hurts.” I mean, really? You’re telling Splendid, the escaped sex slave of Immortan Joe, heavily pregnant, who convinced the other wives to escape– you’re telling her everything hurts?
Anyway, enough of this churlishness. I’ll not discuss the tiniest of motes in Miller’s eye when I could be lambasting the log in George Lucas’ (and I do, below).
This is a glorious film and a re-watch only reinforces that glory: the shot where Splendid leans out of the War Rig, exposing her pregnant belly so Immortan Joe can’t shoot Furiosa: eyes watering, quick wipe it away so the wife doesn’t see. 
The shot of Max on top of a swinging pole high above the battle, watching the People Eater’s rig explode: shivers down my spine. The first chroming and kamikaze jump from the back of the War Rig by a War Boy: revel in the insanity. Nux driving his car into an apocalyptic sandstorm, explosions overhead, screaming “Oh what a lovely day!” Glorious – glorious!
In any case, this review focusses on the six mini-documentaries that come with the boxed set:
- Maximum Fury: Filming Fury Road (28 minutes)
Production was mired in ‘development hell’ for so long (Miller had the script ready to go in 1999) that more and more detail was poured into the movie. So much so, in fact, that come 2015 George had material enough for three movies. He also had 3500 storyboards for Fury Road, providing an exquisitely detailed, graphic novel-like guide as filming started.
As for filming itself, some of what the documentary tells us we knew already: the Namibian desert was hot, and also very cold, and sandy, and isolated. 90 per cent of filming involved moving vehicles, which added a degree of difficulty, as did a reluctance to use CGI.
What I found quite remarkable in Filming Fury Road was the the stunts – in this section they cover the crash of Mad Max’s car in the opening scene, and the War Rig crash in one of the final scenes. These stunts were both done live. The experts had to work out the maths of the stunt beforehand, because they could only do them once – for example, rolling the War Rig at point A, so it flips onto its side at 
point B, and then blocks the pass when it comes to a halt at point C.
George Miller was extremely concerned with safety, saying: “somewhere deep down in the pit of your stomach, you’re thinking to yourself, ‘If we’re not on top of this, we could lose someone.’” During the lead-ups to the huge set-piece crashes, George looks tense – even fearful, at one stage freaking out when he thinks someone has been injured (they weren’t).
Having the best stunt people in the world helped. Miller hired the best trail bike riders in Australia for the scenes where they jump over the War Rig dropping bombs, used performers from Cirque du Soliel for the pole-cats, and had his stunt coordinator from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior supervising all the action.
- Mad Max: Fury on Four Wheels (22 minutes)
Each vehicle in Mad Max is a character. They even have names to prove it. Each vehicle in the film is fully functional, and had to be able to drive off-road in the desert.
So we have Max’s Interceptor (which later gets re-purposed into a caltrop car driven by Slit); Joe’s Gigahorse, the War Rig, Bigfoot for Rictus Erectus; The 
Bullet Farmer’s Peacemaker (built onto the chassis of a tank); Elvis, Cranky Frank, Doof Wagon, and the People Eater’s Limo and fuel truck.
People Eater’s truck was part made from an ex-military truck, with a limousine dragging it along; the Doof Wagon was built onto the back of a rocket launcher; 
and Joe’s ‘throne’ the Gigahorse had two V8 engines integrated into a single, functioning unit.
Fury on Four Wheels is a petrol-head’s wet dream.
- The Road Warrior: Max and Furiosa (11 minutes)
Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron didn’t like each other in real life, and this was a good thing. That anti-chemistry, you could call it, fed into the tension the two characters displayed, especially in the first half of the film. During the fight scenes Tom asked her to really hurt him and Charlize obliged, breaking his nose.
They are both charismatic, physical presences in the film. They were asked to convey character through action rather than dialogue, and and man do they do it. Charlize Theron should get an Oscar just for the turn-around, bad-ass glare look she shoots off at several points in Fury Road.
George Miller spoke of wanting to have a female anti-hero who was the equal of Max. He wanted someone flawed, strong, statuesque, yet vulnerable. I think this is fantastic, as too often writers equate a strong woman with a one-dimensional female goodie (who is also literally strong). As author S L Huang has argued: why do all the complex anti-heroes have to be male?
- Tools of the Wasteland (14 minutes)
If Fury Road doesn’t receive the Academy Award for production design, I will chrome my lips, dive from the ceiling during the ceremony, and drive a thunder-stick into the announcer’s podium.
The details in the movie are nothing less than exquisite. George Miller outlines his production philosophy in this section: even in the wasteland, human beings will seek and create objects of beauty. He discusses his dislike of many post-apocalyptic films where everything is ugly. He argues – correctly, in my view – that throughout human history, from the caveman onwards, we have always sought to create items pleasing to the senses.
His rules for Fury Road were that every object had to be repurposed, every object had to work, and every object had to have aesthetic value.
So a bedpan became the body of Coma Doof Warrior’s flame thrower guitar (as did part of a Datsun 1600) (and yes, the guitar worked). Max’s muzzle was an upside down garden fork, and Immortan Joe’s mask is partly taken from a Russian gas mask. The steering wheels (over fifty of which are seen on the altar at the beginning) are all individually and intricately designed – and functional.
- The Five Wives: So Shiny, So Chrome (11 minutes)
This was perhaps the least interesting of the documentaries. It could have been otherwise, had it focussed on how the actors prepared for being escaped sex slaves, including for example, how George Miller asked prominent feminist Eva Ensler (who wrote the Vagina Monologues) to come to the set to explain how women react to such trauma.
Unfortunately, this was skirted over in favour of five models talking about how hot it was and how much sand they got in their hair and how long it took for the sand to get out and how they personalised the muslin wraps they were wearing.
A wasted opportunity.
- Fury Road: Crash and Smash (4 minutes)
This shows the raw footage of the crashes, some of which were already covered in part one: Filming Fury Road. But still, you are reminded just how little CGI was used during filming and how goddam spectacular and dangerous the stunts were.
And the explosions! I mean, these were some serious bloody explosions, and not one of them CGI. And flamethrowers! They were using actual flamethrowers on each other. Nux’s car spinning around and driving backwards – that’s real. The pole cats – real performers on real swinging poles, counter-balanced by engine blocks.
Only four minutes’ worth, but all eye-opening, heart-stopping stuff.
Sometime in amongst watching the boxed set, I looked up – for reasons I can only ascribed to masochism – some sections of Star Wars prequels (I to III) on YouTube. It’s quite remarkable, really, to reflect on that triptych of an abomination spawned from the money-grubbing mind of the creator of Jar-Jar Binks, George Lucas.
Now look: I’m not denying Star Wars I – III were anything other than atrocious, and that this fact has been somehow hidden until now. We all know this. Rather, I’m saying that I, II and III look even worse now. I was watching scenes that I recall not hating – mainly the lightsabre duels – and was surprised how terribly they’ve aged. The Obi-Wan – Anakin final duel in Star Wars 3 is singularly uninteresting – I skipped several minutes in the middle because it was so dull (it’s a 9-minute duel), and found myself laughing at the climax. Obi-Wan cuts off Anakin’s legs and arm (“I have the high ground!”), then leaves him to burn to death slowly in molten lava. Wow, cold-blooded, there, dude who isn’t on the dark side. And the CGI – there is so much I felt like I was watching a poorly written children’s cartoon (ironically, the Clone Wars cartoons are far superior to the movies).
But that sums up the Star Wars prequels: cartoonish cartoons that can only sit in the same room as Mad Max with deep embarrassment. Fury Road is a film for adults, meticulously shot and crafted, with some of the finest action scenes ever witnessed. Star Wars is a marketing vehicle targeting the lowest-common denominator, and conclusive evidence that Star Wars IV and V were made great by talented writers not named George Lucas.
If they really wanted to reinvigorate the Star Wars franchise, there’s a guy called George Miller they should call. Just saying.
