DVD movie commentary

It didn’t win best picture at tonight’s Academy Awards, but Mad Max Fury Road (2015, USA) took home six statuettes nevertheless, for technical achievements. It was also nominated for best picture and director. Is there more to this film than big budget special effects? What do viewers take with them, cerebrally, after watching this film? What is it about? It is about finding our better selves.

Fury Road is an action film that draws you in and takes you into this dog eats dog world. But taking a moment to detach is a natural response to the mayhem and graphic violence—and you got to ask, what are we being drawn into?

The graphic incidents are not worth repeating here, but suffice to say that Fury Road is a wild chase movie in the desert with a nihilistic worldview: no meaning or purpose in life and a rejection of morality, institutions and religion. It is doubtful a Citadel that keeps the water supplies for a select few is the exception.

There is no guiding philosophy, as if that was blown off the map, because philosophy and guiding principles had not worked in the pre-apocalyptic world.

However, when the old world fails, the world still becomes a place where people need to seek their ‘better selves’.

Even at the end of the world, when destruction should have obliterated goodness, finding a ‘better self’ is still present.

A better self goes deeper than a principle or guide. It goes to the very heart and soul and enables someone to live a better life.

This is the great need exposed in Fury Road.  In the Mad Max world, inner transformation is needed to solve the problems within one’s self.