The first I heard about Mad Max: Fury Road was on Twitter: apparently this film had mens' right activists kicking up a stink about how it was degrading to men or misandrist or somesuch. The general consensus was that a lot of men was simply upset that the film featured strong female characters who weren't just there for gratuitous T&A. Still, I felt that pissing off the militantly misogynist moron brigade was as good a reason as any for seeing this film.

I suspect the reason for all this gender-based controversy probably stems from the fact that despite his name being half the title, Max himself is essentially a supporting character to the real hero, Imperator Furiosa. Indeed, for half the film he's the only male protagonist at all. Is this a bad thing? No, of course not. Popular media could certainly use more strong female leads, and Charlize Theron plays the kind of unmitigated badass that does the cause no harm at all.

Anyway, as to the film itself: it's a very efficient movie. Its approach to exposition is quite minimalist - rarely do characters announce necessary details in "as you know" fashion, and much is left unspoken. The cinematography picks up the slack in this department and communicates all we need to know with visual clues from scenery and body language, allowing us to infer what we need to know without bogging things down with explanation. It says little but tells much - show don't tell in a nutshell.
The relative paucity of dialogue leaves more room for action of course, and my word there is a lot of action. As you can probably guess from the name "Fury Road", this film is packed to the gills with insane vehicle-based action and explosions a-plenty. We're treated to insane stunts with insane combatants on insane cars - rusted-up, cobbled-together junkers that look as though Victor Frankenstein survived the apocalypse and got a job in a body shop - and from what I gather, the stunts that take place on this fleet of road warriors were done with minimal CGI, if any. Buster Keaton would be proud.

All in all, this is a tidy little film that seems to know exactly what it wants to do. It delivers a metric tonne of action with a deft sprinkling of plot and character. Good stuff, and quite recommended!