For the next few weeks, we will be counting down our 25 favorite blockbusters! Read all of the entries here.

3. Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller, 2015)

by Matthew Crump, Staff Writer

5/22/2015, 12:31 AM

“Hey guys, I'm really sorry but there has been some family stuff going on today and I don't think I will be able to get together”

Exactly one week earlier, the 30 year drought on the Mad Max franchise finally ended when its highly anticipated fourth installment opened up in theaters. In the week since I had been home from college, the talk around Mad Max: Fury Road had dominated every social media app, TV commercial slot, and real-life conversation to a degree that only a true Hollywood blockbuster could. Meanwhile, I'd never even heard of Max Rockatansky.

Fury Road opens up in a desert wasteland with our titular character biting the head off of a two-headed lizard that, more likely than not, is radioactive. The ground gives a soft rumble and Max hops into his souped up war machine, kicking up a cloud of yellow dust in his tracks. Hot on his trail are a caravan of pasty white “war boys” who use an explosive spear to flip Max’s rig right into the camera. He crawls out from underneath and claws his way across the sand while seeing visions of the people in his life that he wasn’t able to save. A war boy kicks him with the boot of his heel and puts a shotgun against his skull. 

“WHAT?” was the general reaction I remember receiving from the few people I was naive enough to admit my ignorance to. “You’ve never seen Mad Max?” My best friend’s brother, who typically considered me a worthy adversary in the ring for the title of movie buff, was particularly appalled. Thanks to the community organizing of our mutual friend Anna, I wound up with a movie ticket and a plan to binge-watch the whole franchise beforehand with Cool Older Brother & Co. on the following Friday. 

I had no idea that day would be the most surreal 24 hours of my life.

When Max wakes up he is bound and gagged while a steampunk doctor tattoos medical info across his back against his will. When a red hot iron prod approaches Max’s face, he lurches and breaks free from his chains. As he navigates the labyrinth of the underground desert colony with war boys nipping at his heels, the visions of all the people whose blood is on his hands return. He manages to get to a door that opens up to a cliff drop off. Max tries escaping on a swinging hook but it’s a futile effort. On the third swing the war boys pull him back into the desert mountain and the doors shut on his desperate screams.

I finally rolled out of bed around noon on that Friday feeling groggy, uncertain, and still ignorant to any inkling of why Max is so mad in the first place. I woke up to a call giving me the day off from my new summer job at a pizza place in my hometown. Then I saw a few messages of disappointment that I’d backed out of our Mad Max marathon, their tone also tinged with a bit of worry and concern. From there, I don’t exactly remember what I did but I’m sure I was just going through the motions. Those motions came to a screeching halt when Anna’s own beat-up war machine came skidding down my family’s dirt road. She leaned across and popped open her broken passenger side door for me. I’m sure I hesitated, but then I realized there was nothing I could do for myself or anyone else if I stayed home. I hopped in, pulled the door shut, and let myself be swept away.

One aspect of Mad Max: Fury Road that really sets it apart from other entries in the franchise can be summed up in one word: Furiosa. Charlize Theron plays a captain for the evil dictator Immortan Joe who goes rogue on a mission and attempts to smuggle five concubines, or “breeders,” out of Citadel. After a chaotic, action-packed road war across the Wasteland, Max and Furiosa are forced into an allyship born out of survival and the race against Immortan Joe’s ever-approaching suicidal caravan.

Time was also working against us on that fateful Friday. With our 8 o’clock screening at the local marquee fast approaching, we had just enough time to cram the three original films. Anna’s own souped up rig sped us across town. During the first film my mind was wandering, unsure if I should even be with my friends at a time like this, checking my phone incessantly for a text that I was sure would be demanding I come back home. Once Road Warrior kicked off though, I felt myself beginning to fall deep into the Mad Max universe, forgetting to wait on a message that wasn't coming. By the time the sun started to set and Tina Turner’s chain link dress swished across the Thunderdome floor I was fully mesmerized with my phone buried somewhere deep into a couch cushion. A little more than halfway through the movie, we realized we were late for the theater.

There’s a moment in Fury Road where Furiosa’s inertia is brought to a sudden standstill. The “green place” from her childhood, the place where she’s delivering the women to as refugees, is revealed to have dried up. The few survivors of her colony deliver the devastating news and with it you see the last drop of Furiosa’s dream evaporate. She takes the day to reroute her plan, then, when she invites Max to continue along with them, he turns her down, saying, “Hope is a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken you’ll go insane.”

Somehow we managed to make it to the theater, even more miraculous was the fact that Anna and I were able to find two open seats together among the crowded aisles. Once the lights went down and the chaos of Fury Road began unravelling before me is when I really lost hold of reality. How had I never seen any of this before today? Are these movies about revenge redemption? Max’s resolve, his hardened, hopeless exterior— why did that feel so familiar? Sure, he’s survived biker gangs, crazed marauders, and gladiatorial death matches, but how was he going to survive himself? The movie felt like it was watching me instead of the other way around. Immortan Joe’s gaggle of war boys made their counter attack and I gripped my armrest a little tighter.

Our brains are finely attuned to maximize our chances of survival. Perhaps Max captures this best in his opening monologue, "So I exist in this Wasteland. A man reduced to a single instinct: Survive." The catch is that as our brain works overtime to find a route back to our internal green place, the trauma we kick up in the dust continues floating around deep in our psyche. Even when we think everything has settled, all those feelings still remain lurking somewhere deep in the sand. One common getaway our brain devises is to lean into a distraction, and sometimes a blockbuster franchise is the perfect avenue towards survival.

After the theater lights came back on I was in a daze that continued on even once Cool Older Brother & Co. popped across the street to grab a quick drink. Still underage, I sat outside alone on a stoop somewhere in my childhood town square. A large part of me was still waiting to wake up, doubting if anything I'd seen that day had even been real. Maybe Max was just a character cooked up by my subconscious as a kind of warning. No matter how much I thought about the films to try and ground myself in reality, my mind kept drifting back to the reality I was facing a mere 24 hours earlier:

Just a few blocks away, I am camped out with my grandma in the waiting room of the hospital where I was born. Family members dip in and out of the elevator doors, most of them avoid my empty gaze as they walk past to go say their goodbyes. Eventually I find the courage to stand up and make my own way down the hallway toward the room where my alcoholic father will take his last breath. 

Towards the end of the film, before Max and Furiosa actually go their separate ways, he approaches her with a new plan: to turn around. It’s a whole hell of a lot more scary but ultimately offers a much better chance at survival. As the small caravan of misfits that Furiosa has acquired over the course of the film mull it over, they all look to their token war boy, Nux, who’s gone from a stowaway enemy to a reformed refugee on the run. “Feels like hope,” he says. Max and Furiosa exchange a knowing look before they join together to take on whatever lies on the road behind them.

Anna appeared at my side and joined me on the stoop. I’m not sure how much she knew, if anything, but she knew for certain that we had unfinished business. We still had to go back and finish what we started; the last 30 minutes of Beyond Thunderdome were waiting for us.