Retrospective: Mad Max: Fury Road (Patreon)

I saw Fury Road for the first time about an hour north of Phoenix, Arizona. I was living with my grandparents while my birth mother was working abroad in England. That was the worst summer of my life. I was 16, had a minimal support system, and suicidally depressed every second I was awake. The Arizona desert was beautiful, but did little to assuage my depression.

My grandfather suggested we go to the movies, specifically to see Mad Max: Fury Road. I said that sounded like a good idea -- all of my friends and seemingly all of the press were hyping it up. So I saw Fury Road on the big screen with my octogenarian grandparents.

Perhaps needless to say, my grandparents did not love Fury Road.

"That movie stunk," Grandma said. "It was horrifying! A waste of Charlize Theron."

My Economist-reading retired civil engineer grandfather, who would throw me to the floor and throttle me a few weeks later, expressed his distaste for the movie in his usual condescending way.

"I give it a C minus."

(A few years later, my grandfather approached my girlfriend at the time, who was an art history major, threw a newspaper on the table in front of her, pointed to an arts article, and told her to give her opinion about it.)

And even in that environment, without anybody around me giving the movie the time of day, and with a barely functioning brain, I was pretty much bowled the fuck over by Fury Road. I hadn't seen a movie convey so much drama and information with such intensity and speed. It had depth and it was fucking cool. It was pulp with a budget and ideas: George Miller showed us you could put a guy playing an electric guitar shooting flames in the same movie as a woman realizing that her childhood home, the last patch of green in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, was gone.

Nine years later, I'm a television producer and a woman, but my feelings about Fury Road haven't changed so much as my observations have. Like the Planet of the Apes reboot, Fury Road repurposes pulp mythology for a story about the demise of the Anthropocene. And Miller does this while doing a feminist remake of Stagecoach where human bodies are commodified fuel sources. This got fucking made, and now it has a prequel. Jesus Christ.

Janet did not see Fury Road when it came out. A couple days ago, she saw it for the first time. And she was speechless as I was the first time I saw it. My god. George Miller cracked the secret to Hollywood: John Ford with explosions is a recipe for an all-time classic.