After what feels like a zillion years in pre-production (somewhere around 2009 or 2011, depending on how you look at it), “Mad Max: Fury Road” is beginning to take shape. The redo/reboot/reimagining by director George Miller took over 120 days to shoot spread over two years. Not due til spring 2015, it’s post-production will have been almost two years as well. It’s made Warner Bros. a little nervous, but the recently released Comic-Con trailer—intense, savagely visceral and explosive— suggests it’ll be worth the wait.
The movie is starting to coalesce too. Miller has already said it’s closer to “Mad Max: The Road Warrior” in tone then any other film and he’s not kidding. In fact, based on what the director said at Comic-Con and what we’ve seen, ‘Fury Road’ appears to be part of the ‘Road Warrior’ continuity— to an extent. It appears as though ‘Fury Road’ starts somewhere near the beginning of ‘Road Warrior’— Mad Max being chased across the wasteland by wild marauders— but then takes a totally different turn into a new story and never-seen-before history.
It’s an interesting concept to use your own series, but then take a bend in the chronology for the sake for reinvention. Considering how good the trailer looks we won’t argue. ‘Fury Road’ was shot without a script and is said to be one-long chase movie. We’ll see how long that holds, but it sounds intriguing. And by the way, the sequel is already written.
“Mad Max: Fury Road” stars Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Riley Keough, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Nathan Jones and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. And three new images have arrived which you can see below. If Hardy was being tortured in the trailer, well, it looks if he’s about to get even now. The movie arrives in theaters on May 15, 2015.
