| My rating | IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Critics | Audience | Critics | Audience | |
| 7/10 | 89/100 | 8.7/10 | 98% | 91% |
I had been reading great reviews about “Mad Max: Fury Road” and was really intrigued to see if it actually “reinvented action movies” or was worth having groups of men complaining about it for being “too feminist”. After watching, I think it’s neither here nor there.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world, it tells the story of Max (Tom Hardy), a man who has lost everything and wants to run away from where he’s being kept prisoner, and Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron, the best thing in the movie), a woman who is trying to go back to her home and take with her other women who were also prisoners of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). So it’s basically two hours of car chasing in the desert, which would represent the 3 days of their escape.
It is visually impressive, since it was shot entirely in the desert and the soundtrack is also exhilarating (I liked the fact that they actually put a guy playing electric guitar on top of one of the cars during the chase). The movie overall, however, was not that great for me. It felt a bit exhausting, to be honest. When I was leaving the theater, I heard a guy saying to his girlfriend behind me “I’m sorry you had to sit through that”. The fact that “Pitch Perfect 2” won the box office during opening weekend also shows that the audience is more interested in singing girls than in car chasing.
Finally, about the feminist argument: I didn’t see it that much in the movie. I saw half-naked models running away from a bad guy who exploited them. Yes, Charlize Theron’s character appears a lot in the movie, maybe as much as Tom Hardy, but that doesn’t make the movie feminist per se. To think that this movie is that feminist is a proof that there still aren’t many movies with strong leading female characters, but we’ll get there.
