Spoiler alert: this breakdown divulges information about the plot of the film.
Mad Max: Fury Road is nuttier than a fruitcake. It’s also the second best Action movie in history, behind Seven Samurai, which happens to be the best movie ever made. Fury Road doesn’t have anywhere near the scope or complexity of Seven Samurai. But its narrative drive (literally) is off the charts, with 120 minutes of almost non-stop, hand-to-hand combat on top of a speeding bullet.
When Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior came out in 1981, it marked a revolutionary jump of narrative speed, not just for Action movies but for popular film worldwide. Popular filmmaking would not look back. Given the nature of the cinematic medium and the mass market economic model by which film is made and sold, this jump in narrative speed dictated two major effects: popular film would be based primarily on the Myth and Action genres, and plot would become progressively more dense.
That is precisely what has happened and any screenwriter who wants to compete in today’s marketplace must accept this truth and excel in these two story areas.
So what is the deep pleasure of the Action form? Action, and Fury Road in particular, celebrates the warrior. Much as some of us, myself included, want to believe that the last thing we need to glorify right now is the warrior, when you see warriors with this kind of bravery and physical skill, you can’t help but feel pure awe.
A lot of the joy in watching these warriors comes from the brilliance by which George Miller directs the battle scenes. There has never been a director in the history of cinema with this ability to film action, especially hand-to-hand combat.
But the artistry of the Action form in Fury Road also comes from the script, which uses a modified Buddy Picture structure, in this case between a man and woman, Max and Furiosa. As in the classic Love Story, these characters begin their relationship with a fight, and it’s a really good one. We know going in that Max, as embodied by Tom Hardy, is a first class warrior. After this fight, we know Furiosa is too. And Charlize Theron is every bit as believable as Hardy.
Through necessity, Max and Furiosa create a partnership, not a friendship. Once that partnership takes form, the rest of the film is one frenzied dance where these two take on an army.
Buddy pictures, when wedded to the Action form (such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), are all about the action dance between the two friends. The dance is the key beat in the Love Story because it shows us love played out in action. The same is true in Action Buddy films. The Sundance Kid is a helluva warrior, and it’s great fun to see him shoot the bully’s gun across the floor in the opening card scene.
But the gold of their relationship, the sweet pleasure the audience takes from them, is when they dance, when they fight as a team. Then it takes the entire Bolivian army to bring them down.
Fury Road doesn’t use another element that’s crucial to the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the two leads are a comedy as well as an action team. Instead, Fury Road heightens the action dance between the buddies. If there is a better 2-person team of warriors in film history, I can’t think of them.
The fact that one of them is female just makes it better. Not because of the romantic or sexual possibilities between them, since there are none. The male-female distinction allows us to watch the mutual respect slowly unfold between them, and the payoff is sweet. The fact that, as a great warrior, Furiosa is fighting for women, who couldn’t be more abused in this animal hell, just makes her more complex and appealing.
For writers of the Action form, the question arises: is there one technique that makes all of this possible? Not surprisingly, it’s in the story structure.
Fury Road’s structure is simple and classic Action: a straight line run and back. And I do mean run. This simple spine is crucial to the power of the film, because it supports all the amazing action set pieces, the spectacular story world, and the slowly developing relationship between the leads (for all the techniques of great Action writing, see the Action Class).
One of the basic principles of story, true in every genre, is: the more you want to “hang” on the story, the simpler the structure must become. An element you hang on a story is anything that doesn’t move the story forward, that doesn’t contribute directly to the hero’s desire. Action set pieces, which are all about appreciating the warrior’s physical skills in the present, are a perfect example. So is exploring the story world, which has become one of the most important trends in worldwide popular storytelling in the last ten years.
But here’s the rub of simple structure. Because the structure is a straight line run, the plot is simple as well. Weak plot is probably the biggest flaw in most Action films. It’s not a problem here for a few reasons. First, the narrative drive is so intense the audience doesn’t have time to grow bored. Second, the writers excel in micro plot, coming up with infinitely new ways for the opponents to attack the heroes. Third, instead of the repetitive plot we often get with the classic Myth story, where the hero overcomes a succession of unconnected opponents on the path, here the plot develops organically because the heroes battle the same opponents in an accelerating punch-counterpunch.
Fury Road is a landmark movie for another reason: it’s the best depiction of dystopia in film history. That’s saying a lot. From Metropolis to Blade Runner, from Lord of the Rings to Hunger Games and so many more, there have been some great dystopian visions, which no medium can express as well as film can.
Like these other movies, Fury Road’s vision of hell shows the land, people and technology badly out of balance. Here, an arid wasteland is populated by human savages competing to the death for scarce resources like water and gas. A ruthless tyrant enslaves the masses. Women especially are degraded, used as “breeders.” All of this is beautifully realized, but we’ve seen it many times before.
So why is this vision of hell the best? Because Fury Road is 120 minutes of hell in your face. This is hell expressed through story, at top speed. Those other dystopian visions we can watch from the comfort of our seats. But in Fury Road, we’re living that hell ourselves. No escape. We are Max chained to the front of that vehicle in a war that never ends. The story is constantly demanding: tell me, how does it feel?
Everything about this movie is primal: the muscle-laden male warriors, the female “breeders,” the non-stop battles, the supermodels in the middle of the desert (including one played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), the war drummers on the back of the truck and the rock guitarist who hangs and plays from the front, the souped-up engines, the “green place,” the masses dying of thirst. The details are staggering, and they are clearly recognizable features of today’s world, which is one of the keys to good science fiction.
The primal intensity is multiplied by placing the story in the desert, an intensely sensual landscape that takes on geometric abstraction in the flatness of the never-ending sand. This is a massive field of play, death sport squared. While viewing it, the mind constantly flips back and forth between the extreme sensuality and detail of the battle moment and the epic scale and spectacle on which the battle is played.
As writers, it’s easy to be overcome by the amazing pyrotechnics of George Miller’s directing and so fail to see all the useful techniques of the screenwriting, and Action, craft. This apparently simple script accomplishes the first requirement of popular storytelling today, in all genres and all media forms: intense narrative drive. Study to see how that’s accomplished in the writing. It will give you lessons that will be useful in anything you write.
This film did not hit me the way Road Warrior did. Its heady onrush couldn’t disguise that fact. The return of Toecutter was its single, great redeeming feature amongst an empty cast who showed only just how iconic and charismatic Mel Gibson was in the original. I am saddened that Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce were not available to play the lovelies in the desert.
Mad Max was mind-numbing pyrotechnic stupidity, completely devoid of interesting or unique characters. It was one long chase scene that felt like it was repeating itself over and over again. The second best action film in cinematic history? Hell no. Let me know when and where the debate on that one is.
Absolutely the best action movie I have ever seen. No need for debate on this one.
Can’t argue with you, john. The myth elements here, and the clear thematic drive as well, lift this to another level.
I am surprised at John’s praise of this. I watched it last night at the cinema and got bored. I hadn’t seen any of the earlier Mad Max films and wondered whether you needed to see them to really appreciate this. I found it empty. One long chase. The story world was mildly interesting but that was all.
The second best action movie ever made, though? Really. What am I missing? Where do Face/Off and Die Hard fit in?
A captivating spectacle, an E-Ticket Ride, when once one hits the splash down, all I could say was, “This ain’t no ‘morrow ‘morrow land.” I was not watching a whitewashed symbolic ’60’s apocalyptic vision of Man-made and hell-bent “stupidity”, but the ironies of juxtaposition for one man’s harrowing survival quest in the midst of the primal and redemptive yearning to love beyond one’s own self, It was a symphony of Half-Life perdition, the lessons displayed but never learned Beyond Thunderdome, Was this another Boy and his Dog, an Island of Dr. Moreau, or even the slow fuzzy phantasies of Brazil that you could find in some Interstellar, off world theatrical debutante ball, I think not. For as we left Furiosa on the platform where we met her, and that poor Raggedy Man, drifting back into the midst of the degraded denizens, we await the cascade of those sweet addicting waters too. Certainly one could conjure up three more of these “devoid of character.” lovelies and beyond belief bankables’ from the Twilight Zone of the Hollywood Matrix. Now that, that will be the trick of it!
Was the script longer than 20 pages? There certainly wasn’t more than 20 pages of dialogue and how many pages would it have taken for the screenwriters to have written “He punches the Road Warrior in the face and leaps from the front seat just as the vehicle flips end over end and explodes in a ball of flame.” That pretty much sums it up for me.
I am surprised by this review.
Is there a difference between a storyless string of stunts and a story elevated by them? As John once said, stunts don’t develop, story does. Yet this stunt spectacle is highly praised on imdb, rottentomatoes, and most surprisingly, here. Sure, there’s the slight buddying with a superficially-novel duo, and the stunning but equally superficial impression of a dystopian world, but in terms of story? As sparse as the wasteland itself. Yes, I get that the stunts were creative, and that the movie may be unique for being one huge chase scene, but I thought story was the criteria that earned a good movie its merit? Remove many of the repeated stunts and immediately there would’ve been space for story development, particularly between the buddies, and perhaps even explore Max’s undeveloped ghost. I don’t count the handful of exchanged looks and cliched trust-building situations between Max and Furiosa as anything noteworthy, so why does this movie shoot up above other stunt movies?
One thing I think makes this movie work is the way that Miller uses what I think you could call a ‘ship’ setting. As with a sailing ship or starship, you’ve got a pocket of habitability moving through a vast, mortally inhospitable expanse. The ship must be kept functioning and moving forward (often repairs must be made on the fly), it must be protected from boarders. Falling overboard seems certain death (or at least a perilous situation), because you can’t survive the world beyond the ship. A ship is large enough that there are different areas within it: a below-decks, riggings, bow and stern; large enough that characters in one part of the ship aren’t aware of what’s going on in other parts of the ship. Large enough that there are different positions that must be manned, so the characters aren’t always bunched up but must at times spread out, out of contact with one-another.
Control of the helm is vital, and usually the captain of the ship has issues with giving up control of the helm until realizing that there’s more important things for them to be doing than steering the ship (and learning to trust their companions). The ship has rules and a chain of command, and those are made a necessity because of the thin margin of survivability.
Chases are at times neck-and-neck, at times horizon-to-horizon between hunter and quarry. The pace of the film is linked to both the speed of the ship and the distance between the ship and its pursuers, but with pursuers almost always at least on the horizon, even the relative down-time has a tension to it.
You can find classic plot points like the ship being abandoned when the goal is seemingly reached, only to become vital for one last voyage, the ship ultimately being sacrificed, the captain steering the ship into a perilous storm in an effort to lose pursuers. The swashbuckling quality of the action (especially the chain fight or the polecats), seem like they would be just as at home on the open seas as in the desert. Movies that use this setting tend to be much more sentimental towards their ship than Fury Road is, but sentimentality would have been out of place here, and we can appreciate the beauty in the details of the war rig, even if for the characters, these details are more about functionality than beauty.
This setting might be a small element of the film and overshadowed by the larger setting, but Miller uses it expertly to control changes in pacing of the film and to anchor the set-pieces.
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Very surprised that John rates this movie so highly. I watched it yesterday and nothing really sticks with me: no character I rooted for, no story to hold on to, not even a set piece I still think of in awe.
The sheer amount of “stunning set pieces” became so inflationary, that at last nothing really impressed me, perhaps with the exception of the tortured and self-torturing rock singer. The stunts were so absurd that they didn’t grab me. I kept asking myself why would anybody fight so fiercely for survival in a world like that. One would be better off dead than living in this testosterone-addicted hell. Even Furiosa is so “male” that she’s not even enough of a contrast to those muscle-packed warriors and war lords. Sometimes Max has a streak of melancholy. But this isn’t further explored and thus becomes vain. This is a female perspective on the movie. I noticed I was almost the only woman in the audience.
Gob smacked.
I went to see this because of the review.
I have great respect for John so was expecting something special.
It’s not.
Mediocre story. Mediocre script. Some great stunts. Some banal stunts. Poor studio (honest we’re in a desert) lighting. Lazy soundtrack. Some embarrassing dialogue. Poor lead male performance wirh little screen presence that in mind relegated him to 5th or 6th character. Charlize is in a different class and shone. The women stole the show big time, though the delightful breeders were incredibly under developed character wise missing out on some potential great fun.
I’m sure this film ticked many of John’s story telling boxes which excited him and maybe blinded him?
To me this proves that theory is for post film analysis and although great to know, is not a bedrock foundation for all future scripts. Story comes from the heart and we should trust our instincts (and previous knowledge through mentors like John) and dare move forwards Into the unknown with our creativity.
The more I think about it the main problem is with the male lead. The antagonists all had more persona and presence. The bad guy accountant had more on screen delight. The subplot love story had more heart than the main two heros. This is a bad sign?
I think the film should be called “Missing Max” or maybe more succinctly “Minimal Max – welcome to the thunderous droning”
The
Well said.
I agree, there’s a lurking danger of a film’s being filtered through theory if it potentially trumps a more reflexive and intuitive impression, and this review just doesn’t seem to square with the high standards John has set in all other reviews on here. While I’m continually astounded by the symmetry-finding and engineering ingenuity of John’s method, I’ve been wondering too what its limits are. Your comment points to the nub. Story is about the heart. Theory provides the framework to best express and/or analyze a story, but a mediocre story is STILL a mediocre story, regardless of quirky or novel techniques. I maintain that John’s method is currently the most sophisticated tool to build and fine-tune stories, I just wish the standards by which these reviews are judged would stay consistently high and demanding!
To clarify my comment (intended as a reply to Marki P), I think story is about the heart, and the limit with John’s method as well as all other theoretical story frameworks is the potential trap of distorting an otherwise pure, framework-free, unbiased opinion.
I have to agree with the majority of views here: surprised John has rated the film so highly.
‘The best depiction of dystopia in film history’ when I read that sentence I was waiting for the punchline…second only to ‘WATERWORLD’ and as the punchline didn’t come the only logical conclusion I have come to is that John was high when he watched the film, and fair play to him if he was. I would say CHILDREN OF MEN is a far more interesting and insightful depiction of dystopia. Of all the story forms, ‘the chase’ is by far the easiest to write, so if we mix ‘a chase’ with ‘dystopia’ for my money nothing touches the horror of APOCALYPTO. I may start an online forum ‘what was J.T. smoking before Mad Max?’ Only kidding John, we still love ya.
Children of Men was good, but it’s not an action movie
I was talking about Dystopian stories bro, not action. But as you mentioned it, Children of men has a heroic storyframe, which is basically the same as an action story anyway.
Interesting that this film did not begin as a script, Miller worked with artist Brendan McCarthy to create the film as a storyboard in visual form.
After a conventional script was produced for technical reasons.
I find writing Action in script for to be very difficult, action sequences described with words is a challenge and I run out of verbs quickly. Miller starting with a visual form to create an Action movie was a great tool.
As an artist I find that very interesting. I have a lot of respect for George Miller as a director/producer.
I guess even the truly wonderful John Truby can have an off day — and I’m as surprised by that statement as anyone else. But as so many others have pointed out, the review is just wrong. Mad Max: Fury Road doesn’t even make the top five all-time greatest Action movies, let alone top it. It’s dystopian vision is shallow and antiquated, one that we’ve seen countless times before, and the characters laughably adolescent in their total lack of moral complexity when compared to even a decent but minor sci-fi movie like District 9. To even mention it in the same breath as Blade Runner is tantamount to sacrilege.
Sorry John, but either you’re overworked and/or (as I suspect) you let someone else pen this review for you. Mad Max: Fury Road is a relentless bore of a movie, all sound and fury signifying nothing, with no complexity or ambiguity, no characters to root for, and subsequently no character development whatsoever. It’s stuffed with hackneyed cliches, the dialogue is atrocious, and Tom Hardy is woefully mis-directed and ultimately wasted. To reduce such a wonderfully volatile actor to such ham-fisted grunting truly takes a remarkably shallow and smug talent, and the ‘legendary’ George Miller has proved himself fit for the job.
I have to agree with Sharkio. I think people are confusing great action and special effects with story as if they have been blinded by adrenalin in the same way that people think they feel good after drinking a litre of coke, when in fact all they have just consumed is sugar laden fizzy pop. Maybe John and the fans were drinking too much coke whilst watching the movie? The film rightly won editing, design and the things that made the film so slick and fun. However if these posts, idolising Mad Max, were in a consumer movie mag I’d stay quiet but when one of the most respected screenwriting gurus joins the ‘sugar rush’ adrenalin frenzy – it worries me. The film to me is absent in story and fails in what John’s lecture’s teach. Terminator, Robocop, Total recall: all excellent sci-fi stories that embody wisdom and an Owellian forewarning of a future we should avoid, within populist mass entertaining films. Mad Max? Sorry guys but to me it was all sugar and zero nutrients and worse zero story. And to repeat my joke from the previous post – the title was even miss-selling as due to the lack of the main protagonists influence and presence within the film it should have been renamed ‘Minimal Max.’
PS Still adore and respect John’s work!
Mad Max Fury Road is good, but needs the first 3 to really ‘get’ it. A good one among many. Also: Terminator where a mild waitress evolves into the general of an army: Sarah Connor!
This is a bit late but had to share it with you guys… and of course you John!
Someone’s made an alternative trailer and its spot on!
http://youtu.be/0RXhcqdewf0
As I suspected, love honest trailer, but those guys could do this to the Godfather.
John comments that this movie was so great because of the strong narrative drive that came from the writing in the script. There was no script for this movie. They used a story board and only had one written up because warner bros demanded it after but it wasn’t used for shooting. I’m a huge fan but its a little disappointing to know he praised a script that doesn’t exist.
I have a high respect for John, and this review only cements my belief that this guy knows storytelling. This was a great movie, and if it doesn’t win best picture at the Oscars, after they missed out on Dark Knight, I don’t know what will win. 20 pages of script? 100 pages of subtext. This is a great movie, guys. This isn’t Transformers. This isn’t Hunger Games. Great movie. You can’t always escape to somewhere else, sometimes where you are at is where you need to be. Furiosa found hers and Mad Max though he assisted with her finding that place, he needs to find his. It was great. What Fast and Furious? Avengers?
In the immortal words of South Park, “No, Michael Bay that’s just and explosion. No, M. Night that’s just a twist. Say what you want about Mel Gibson that son-of-a-gun sure does understand STORY STRUCTURE.”
Mad Max: Fury Road Oscar Best Picture
George Miller was robbed, dammit! And I can’t believe it didn’t win visual effects and cinematography, either.
I probably didn’t stand a chance to win Best Picture but damn, thought it had at least one of those three in the bag.
The storyboard created by Miller became, in a sense, a graphic novel, so it’s still very much a script.
I agree with most of John’s comments. But I would also add that the film is a classic, slow burn love story also between Max and Furiosa conveyed with minimal dialog.
Like the best films, it creates a complete world and populates it with characters who desire much, and are united by lofty goals.
For me, Miller’s film is complex, emotionally engaging, and maintains absolute focus on its characters ’til the very end. Hands-down the best film of 2015. Pure cinema.
I do admit that I am a “disciple” of John Truby’s way of story, where the character drives the story and act structure, rather than artificial curtain calls. That said, Mad Max: Fury Road ran at breakneck speed and would have ripped through any contrived curtains at knot. I could hardly feel my face. I also am a fan of the female myth which does not take away from or limit one to gender, but updates Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces. Remember, Campbell held Shakyamuni Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) as the ultimate hero, especially as he faced and thwarted inner and outer battles yet remained unmoved and seated under that Bodhi tree – his goal being ultimate enlightenment — freedom over the oft thought limitations of birth, sickness, old age, and death. But even Shakyamuni in his later Sutras declared that women were indeed the stability and hope for our future, just as depicted in Mad Max, Fury Road. Not only did Charlize Theron hold tight to her goal, using a fantastic Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky to help her accomplish it, but she was willing to spin her battlewheels around and drive straight into danger to accomplish a goal that would save humanity! I loved it! George Miller did an excellent job of rethinking his own ideas and in my humble opinion, he won! Even Mel Gibson was in jaw-dropped awe!