Mad Max: Fury Road was very good. The actions sequences were second to none, comparable to Whedon at his best and made more impressive by the lack of CGI. It's an all time top ten action movie, for sure, and highlights my previous observations that we are in a Golden Age of action movies; that this will be a era that, over the long term, is considered that apex of the craft of making action films.
That said, it's been awfully overrated as a piece of drama with many serious movie review sites calling it the best movie of the year (2015). If it is, then the quality of other sorts of movies must have dropped like a stone. As compelling as it is to watch, there is no theme or plot pattern that hasn't been ground into the dirt a thousand times over. The characters and their arcs and motivations aren't anything new or particularly complicated.
A good deal of praise has been given in the name of feminism. The plot revolves around a great female warrior rescuing a trio of enslaved female concubines by removing them from a sadistic patriarchal post-apocalypse to a sanctuary run by a tribe of brave and wise females. There are two males on the side of good, one is there due to common cause the other an enemy who defects; in time both come to see the virtue and nobility of the females and devote themselves to their cause. If you are the sort of person who needs a righteous socio-political backdrop to your entertainment, then it will give you chills. But all that means little to me -- it's just plot and casting choices that could have been made any number of other ways with little or no difference to quality.
A movie can focus on human drama; try to illuminate our lives and struggles in some new or interesting way. These movies are rare and when they achieve this they become art. The great bulk of movies do not. They follow well worn paths looking for different ways to push buttons. Horror films push the fright button, rom-coms push the romance button, action films push the tension button, etc. Films that do this are not art, they are craft. (I can't immediately think of any films that do both, but I can think of a number of TV series that do, although they have a lot more time to do it in.) For the record, craft is not "lower" than art; apple and oranges. Craft is exceedingly difficult to master at the level it was done for Mad Max: Fury Road. Craft at this level can inspire awe.
So perhaps from the point of view of craft, Mad Max: Fury Road is the best film of the 2015. I don't know, I haven't seen that many new releases. Whatever the case, it's wonderfully entertaining and not to be missed.
