Movies

Peter Suderman | 5.23.2024 7:30 AM

The last time filmmaker George Miller dipped into the Mad Max universe, in 2015, he gave us Fury Road, a roaring, rumbling, rowdy epic of vehicular mayhem that wasn't just the best action movie of the 2010s but the best movie of that decade, period.

Yes, there are other contenders, but no other picture released during that span matched Fury Road's combination of ambition, originality, exuberance, and thematic heft. There was a silent-film purity to its story, which was essentially just a chase scene extended and elaborated to feature length. And there was a frantic intensity to its cascading setpieces: The non-stop action sequences and stuntwork seemed almost impossible, even as you watched them on screen, prompting other filmmakers to wonder just how the hell it was made. Two years after the movie came out, Steven Soderbergh looked back on the film with awe: "I don't understand how [George Miller] does that," he told The Playlist. "I really don't, and it's my job to understand it. I don't understand two things: I don't understand how they're not still shooting that film and I don't understand how hundreds of people aren't dead." George Miller, who was 70 when the movie came out, was obviously insane, and so was Fury Road.

If nothing else, it was the only movie of that decade—or any, for that matter—to prominently feature a blind guy suspended by wires from a speaker-packed semi-truck playing a guitar that was also a flamethrower. The guitar guy wasn't just an exercise in post-apocalyptic absurdity,........

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