[octothorp]

My review contains significant spoilers:

Spoiler!

Where to begin? Perhaps with the central setting for the movie - not the desert, but the war rig itself. Fantastic in its details - down to the shoe-measuring device for a gas pedal - and imposing in its entirety, this is like a frigate from a great sailing film: those on board are tied to its survival and its forward progress. Falling overboard is almost certain death, it must be mended on the fly, it must be protected from boarders at every angle. There's a certain swashbuckling quality to the action here, the verticality of the action, setting course into the perilous rising storm, the constant movement... but pushed up to a ridiculous speed. The movement of the war rig drives the pace of the movie almost literally. We spend so much time on the war rig that we The movie slows down only when the rig needs to cool, and yet even those moments are filled with an anxiousness to get moving again. Even the fight scene where the tethered Max and Nux struggle against Furiosa and the wives has that swashbuckling quality.
Yet while there is a captain-of-the-ship quality to Furiosa, these characters are clearly not swashbucklers. They seem to come out of a great western, each with a different drive to them, a different morality. Max holds an obvious comparison to Clint Eastwood's man with no name, with maybe a touch of Harmonica thrown in. These are not characters who have epiphanies; these are resolute representations of powerful forces. It's significant that Furiosa never asks Max for his help. Not because she's too proud, but because the stakes are such a knife's edge that anyone you need to ask for help isn't someone you can trust. Instead, the characters read each other, understand one another's motivations and trust one another not because of any agreement but because they each understand the sort of person the other is. And we can read them too... we don't need them to tell us what drives them, so it's a little refreshing that they don't. Max's survivalism is best stated when Furiosa asks what they should do if he doesn't go back. His answer to go on suggests that he cannot imagine anyone thinking there could be any other answer. He teaches Furiosa to put less in hope and more in herself.
But for me, Nux was an absolutely pivotal character. He began so eager to die for all the wrong reasons, found something to live for, and in the right moment was willing to die for all the right reasons. And like Furiosa and Max, nobody needed to convince him of why he needed to do the right thing, he reached that point largely on his own. In a story where the two main characters are so stoic and in their need for survival or redemption, you need someone looking for meaning. To the extent that Furiosa and Max change their world, that change is best shown in the change that Nux undergoes over the course of the film.
I'm surprised with how much I actually like the screenplay here, simply because it is just so stripped down. It's not that it's a shallow story, it's that nearly every unnecessary line or conversation has been stripped out, and in this instance it makes not only for great pacing, but really good characterizations.
Of course, the action is brilliant. The psychotic apocolyptic vision is brilliant. The cinematography is brilliant. But it's just so damn perfectly constructed. It is exactly what it wants to be. It is exactly what countless other action films have wanted to be but failed.