So, I’m reading the first review of Mad Max: Fury Road, and it’s being described in The Telegraph as a “….nitro-injected juggernaut of a film.”

What compounds the fun is Fury Road’s wholesale rejection of the generally accepted blockbuster code of conduct, which dictates that expensive films have to be marketable to teenagers but still watchable by eight-year-olds in order to maximise box-office returns. Whether or not Miller was aware of these unspoken conventions, he has ploughed a blazing petrol tanker right through the middle of them. Fury Road takes a Rabelaisian delight in grotesque bodies, and the various ways in which they can be made to splatter, burn and pop.

Enormous, naked women are milked like cattle, dwarfs are hoisted on palanquins, and men as pale and gaunt as Mlis aliens are knocked out, gnawed on, sawn up and catapulted through explosions. Imagine if Cirque du Soleil reenacted a Hieronymus Bosch painting and someone set the theatre on fire. This is more or less what Miller has come up with.

(emphasis mine)

Fury Road’s alpha male is, in fact, a woman: the rogue soldier Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, who masterminds the escape while Max rides shotgun. Furiosa is one of the toughest, most resilient action heroes in years, with a metal prosthetic arm that hints at past trauma and a steely gaze that sees more on the way. Like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien films, the character is informed by her sex but not defined by it, and Theron superbly embodies her stoicism, nerve and resolve.

Oh holy shit. That sounds great! I gotta see this one.

telegraph.co.uk