Warner Bros Pictures
Furious 7 may have been the summer’s action movie box office champ, but there was another action movie that was infinitely more exciting to watch and that was Mad Max Fury Road. Click on the title link to see my original review from May. Both MMFR and F7 had similar audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (88% to 85%), but MMFR edged out F7 with the critics by 16 points, 97% to 81%. It’s not often you see a balls to the wall action movie score that high with critics who often feel they’re above such things.
But Mad Max Fury Road, which picked up the story of Max Rockatansky thirty years after the last Mad Max movie hit the big screen (although the same amount of time has apparently not passed in the film’s mythology with Tom Hardy stepping into the leathers of Mel Gibson … and there has been much debate as to whether Hardy was actually playing Max or possibly the Feral Kid from The Road Warrior all grown up and taking the name), had one major thing going for it: original director George Miller was back behind the camera.
Miller visualized the entire movie before a single frame was shot, he had every single vehicle seen in the film assembled and functioning to minimize the CGI (unlike a lot of the car stunts you see in action movies today), he had an entire world constructed from every day items, and he cast Hardy and Charlize Theron as the film’s leads (and there has also been much debate over who the actual star of the movie is). In fact, he was lucky to have the two actors in the film at all with all of the delays the film incurred due to the economic collapse and uncooperative weather in Australia which forced the production to move to Namibia … but Miller still managed to construct one heart-pounding thrill ride with a minimum of dialog (he says the character speak only when they need to) but a whole lot of heart.
While Mad Max Fury Road made just over $374 million worldwide (to Furious 7‘s $1.5 billion), fans are hoping that this is enough for Warner Bros. and Miller to continue the saga of Max Rockatansky. The film’s success on home video will play a huge part in making that happen. Happily, the film has arrived for home viewing and it is a spectacular presentation.
The Blu-ray’s stunning 1080p/AVC video is breathtaking, keeping Miller’s monotone desert color scheme vibrantly saturated without overdoing it. Miller has said that he prefers the film in black and white — and many of the early publicity photos were heavily desaturated — but he uses the limited desert color palette to great advantage, reminiscent of silent films that used color tinting for different scenes. Seeing the behind-the-scenes footage, you can understand how much Miller juiced up the color. The film is also presented in 3D, and the home version — which can be a bit disorienting only because of the film’s action and rapid editing — looks even better than it did on the big screen. If you have a 3D set-up at home, this is a film you will want to add to your collection.
The audio presentation on the Blu-ray is also demo quality with a Dolby Atmos mix (or Dolby TrueHD 7.1 surround) that will give your system a real workout, from the thundering score to the revving engines to the clearly front and center dialog, this is one audio track that does not disappoint.
Recent home video releases have been a bit disappointing in the Special Features section, but the folks at Warner Bros Home Entertainment (which generously provided Hotchka with a review copy) have shown the film a lot of respect with over an hour of very informative behind-the-scenes featurettes (my one nitpick — no director’s commentary). Included on the Blu-ray are:
- Maximum Fury: Filming Fury Road (28:38) – An excellent, in-depth look at the production of the film covering everything from pre-production and the 3500 storyboard frames which served as the “script” for the film, to the creation of the stunts and crashes. Most impressive is the segment about the “polecats.” It’s also interesting to see the filming of the very real chase scenes and the CGI that was added as scenery.
- Mad Max: Fury on Four Wheels (22:37) – A look at the design and construction of the real, functioning vehicles used in the movie.
- The Road Warriors: Max and Furiosa (11:18) – George Miller, Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron discuss the personalities and motivations of Max and Furiosa. The actors also discuss the challenges of filming, the toll it took on their relationship, and the emotions that came with the end of filming.
- The Tools of the Wasteland (14:26) – Production designers use repurposed objects to fulfill Miller’s edict that just because it’s the wasteland, it doesn’t have to look like trash with everything from old phone dials to garden rakes used in new and different ways.
- The Five Wives: So Shiny, So Chrome (11:11) – Miller and the five actresses discuss the development of their characters and the relationships formed during filming, and the often brutal conditions they endured during the shoot.
- Fury Road: Crash and Smash (4:02) – A collection of test and raw footage of the stunt work not enhanced with CGI.
- Deleted Scenes – “I Am a Milker,” “Turn Every Grain of Sand!”, “Let’s Do It”
If, for some reason, you skipped seeing Mad Max Fury Road in theaters, now is your chance to see the best action movie of the year at home. If you’re already a fan, you will want to add the video to your collection because this is a movie that can be seen over and over again and never get old. Warner Bros Home Entertainment has done an exemplary job in bringing the movie to home video with great care and attention to detail, and it is not to be missed. The movie is available in a 3-disk 3D Blu-ray/Blu-ray/DVD package (special features are on the 2D Blu-ray disk), a Blu-ray/DVD Combo, and a 2-disk DVD set with the special features on the second disk, freeing up room on the movie disk for the best possible presentation that you can get on DVD.
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