Why I Liked Mad Max

Everybody liked Mad Max: Fury Road, and everybody wrote about it already. I’m not going to let that stop me, but I’ll keep it brief.

≻ I had forgotten that there’s nothing like real people doing real stunts. This movie is the child that points at green screen movies and says, “but they aren’t wearing any clothes!” Sure, there’s CGI aplenty, but it’s the garnish, not the steak.

≻ The star is a kick-ass disabled woman:

“I am turning 30 years old next week. I’ve been a fan of action film my entire life. And I have NEVER seen a physically disabled, kickass, female lead character in a Hollywood movie EVER – not once, until yesterday.”

(I am reminded how I felt watching How to Train Your Dragon and realizing that it ends with our hero maimed. If that isn’t unprecedented in a kid’s film, it sure is rare. A buddy of mine with a disabled daughter told me how much that meant to them.)

≻ The fact that I cared about these characters is like a magic trick that I don’t understand. I was sad when people died, but everyone is so (seemingly) minimally developed it’s like these emotions were conjured out of thin air. That said, I can absolutely see where this could break the other way for somebody. If you don’t care about the characters, that’s going to blunt the impact across the board.

≻ But the biggest magic trick is the fact that the movie got made at all. I mean really, how the hell did that happen?