MAD MAX: Fury Road and Escaping the Ragged Claws within the Desert of the Real

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MAY 19, 2015

MAD MAX: Fury Road was an insane film to say the least.  Its premise is relatively simple, Max gets caught up in an escape plan orchestrated by this fearlessly strong woman named Furiosa.  As a consequence, the mad overload of this dystopic land, along with his brainwashed war-boys, chase down Furiosa along with a number of other females escaping the unrelenting servitude of their male insane counterparts.  Max is unfortunately caught up in the middle of this chase.

George Miller's 

Fury Road is a roller coaster ride of shear madness and atavism smashed together in this carpet of mass hybrid monstrous vehicles, storming across the blank desert searching to force-assign meaning in a now meaningless world.  The world as we know it has ended and all that it left is the aftermath of destruction.  Men, women and madness are what thinly populates this sandy decadent wasteland.  

At its core, the film is existential in nature.  It means to strip its audience of hope and belief and replaces inaction with reality. Its message is; if you are alive it is up to you to survive it.  There are no real gods in this world, just as there are no real gods in our own.  The film slaps its audience in the face repeatedly on this point much in the same way as Nietzsche did in his memorable book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  It wants us to wake up from our dreams of importance and celebration.  With a nudge from Existentialists like Sartre, Heidegger and Camus, the film wants us to face the fact that we are nothing to only than realize that's worth fighting for.  God or whatever else people believe in isn't going to help, reality in the world of Mad Max is how one is to survive.

Max himself is a man of few words, he's a drifter, a survivor, a road warrior, he's a man caught up in the madness of this post-apocalyptic hell but yet morally clings to his humanity.  Max is a realist, fantasies and illusions would have long sense abandoned him, leaving him with nightmares of people he didn't or couldn't save during the desperate attempt to survive when the world as we know it finally fell apart.
  

Fury Road showed a horrifying sense of realism of what could happen to humanity if we continue down our road of self-destruction.  Zombie movies and Alien invasions aside, Fury Road wants to oddly and maliciously celebrate our inevitable demise by making  the reality of it all, beautiful.  Here the film becomes like an old tragic Russian opera, where everything sounds and looks beautiful but yet the human failure to elevate is thinly veiled in lace. 

Among countless other cautionary tales, Mad Max: Fury Road is a warning of what's to come for humanity as we continue to waste the world away, naively thinking that there is no end to our growth and progress.  What's great and unique about this film is its teaching us a lesson about our potential, and some would say inevitable, future.  This film is saying we already fucked up and all our hope and faith was a lie, a distraction from the truth.  It was a holographic carrot most of us bought in to and then sold back to other people.  We believe we are invincible, we are infallible but we are not.  

Furiosa is forced to face the so-called existential dread of reality when she learns from her female family that the Green Place, which was the location she along with her Siren-like female cargo were heading, was no longer there due to drought.  This utopia or heaven-like place ended up not being real and Furiosa had to except that.  This was the true turning point in the film because it was the only real character arc.  Other than his tormenting past memories, Max certainly learned to trust but didn't change too much, he was passing through the madness where Furiosa needed to rise above it, not only for her but for the young girls she was protecting.  

The message in this high-octane, adrenaline rush of a modern masterpiece is: wake the fuck up.  The theatrical ballet of violence by the villainous stampede of the Freudian ID, otherwise seen as these crazy powdered skinned de-evolved acrobatic madmen, is a metaphorical violent push to all the dreamers out there that believe that some made up god will save them.  The point here is your life is your responsibility and it's up to you to live it to its highest potential.