The reviewers are raving for George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road

EVERYTHING you’ve heard so far is true: Aussie director George Miller really has created an extraordinary movie in Mad Max: Fury Road.

SOMETHING strange happened when they were shooting Mad Max: Fury Road. They remembered what making movies is all about.

That can be the only reason that a film with such a limited plot, so few words and set almost entirely within the cockpits of besieged vehicles hurtling through a desert has attracted such unanimous reviewer acclaim.

The world’s critics have become fans, and focus on three strengths of the film: the simple “realism” of the storyline and imagery; the brilliant chases and crashes; and the fact that Tom Hardy (Max) and Charlize Theron (Furiosa) are gender-equal heroes.

Equals ... Tom Hardy as Max and Charlize as Furiosa in Mad Max:Fury Road. Picture: Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.

It is as though Australian director George Miller has seen Interstellar, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky and Inception, all of which require complex unraveling (if you ever unravel them) and decided it is all too much.

There are no subplots in Fury Road. It’s a straight road-warrior movie, as advertised.

CNET calls it a “jawdroppingly beautifully painted demolition derby”. Christianity Today says: “Pure cinema.” Top Gear says it’s a “psychedelic, brain-bashing car-orgy”.

The story is simply this: truck driver (Furiosa) smuggles out a group of women who are being used on a breeder program by an evil warlord in a road train. She and Max team up to fight the bad guys in a 120-minute chase back and forth through the badlands.

It’s already being called one of the best action films ever made. Because there is nothing but action.

Non-stop action ... Riley Keough as Capable and Nicholas Hoult as Nux in a scene from film Mad Max: Fury Road

Character development occurs at the same time as the nitrous tanks are switched on, but as India’s FirstPost Bollywood site notes: “You care about Max, Furiosa and the other women”.

Tom Hardy is British, Charlize Theron is American (but born in South Africa). Most of the rest of the cast are Aussies.

There is no cringing attempt to conceal their accents and, if anything, Hardy and Theron downplay their own to meet the cast.

The New York Times’ chief reviewer, AO Scott, can be hard to please, but not this time: “It’s all great fun, and quite rousing as well — a large-scale genre movie that is at once unpretentious and unafraid to bring home a message.”

Not sure what the message is, unless it’s that we’re tired of seeing future life depicted as white-panelled spacecraft with lots of buttons landing on inhospitable planets.

This is our own planet, gone bad.

Incredible action sequences ... on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road in Namibia during filming of the movie’s ‘metronome’ pole car-hopping sequence.

“In sharp contrast to the shiny, CG-enabled visions of so many other sci-fi action films, it’s a world of the punishingly real, made up of equal parts dust, metal and blood,” says the Los Angeles Times.

There are computer graphics in Fury Road, but Mr Miller has put equal love and art into the magnificently controlled stunt collisions and a slogging scene known to many Australians: getting bogged in mud.

Except this time it’s a road train and there’s a whole tribe of chrome-sniffing warrior slaves on your tail.

A reviewer on rogerebert.com had his socks knocked off. “Fury Road is a challenge to a whole generation of action filmmakers, urging them to follow its audacious path into the genre’s future and, like Miller, try their hardest to create something new,” he says.

He’s so hot right now ... Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Rolling Stone calls it a “brutal and brilliant cinematic fireball”. The ever-reluctant BBC loved it, saying: “Miller has taken Mad Max to the max.”

Polygon talks of how even with a big budget, it still looks like an independent release with “an energy, ferocity and fearlessness that this kind of film so rarely sees”.

Giving it five stars, our own Leigh Paatsch calls it a “modern masterpiece” and “an absolute game-changer for action cinema”.

Mr Miller has changed the game by going back to things we know and love. That includes the unashamed use of recognisable old car bodies and even – most astonishing of all – old people.

There’s an argument running around that Mr Miller has made some kind of feminist flick, because it’s got a strong and silent female co-lead with short hair.

Better off ignoring that and note what Vox says: “Fury Road is action movie perfection.”

Originally published as The reviewers are raving for George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road