This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

What is there left to say about Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)? George Miller’s magnum opus is the best chase movie of all time, and one of the very best movies of the 21st century so far, let alone within the action genre. If you love this movie, I highly recommend Kyle Buchanan’s oral history Blood, Sweat, and Chrome, which gives extensive insight into the seventeen years it took from Miller’s conception of the movie to release. It is maybe the most accessible book on blockbuster production since The Jaws Log, and includes a wide breadth of voices on all aspects of the film. Any quotes in this article will be from that book, as it is an invaluable resource to better understand the decisions behind Fury Road. 

So rather than try to capture in my own words the incredible work by the people who built all the vehicles, the truly deep connections felt by the massive stunt team, or the absolutely bananas in-shot-order production schedule, I am going to focus on two aspects of the film that stand out to me whenever I watch it. First, Miller’s incredible shot composition and, secondly, the sound design and score by Tom Holkenberg (a.k.a Junkie XL). Both of these are vitally important to how resonant the film is and are keys to its lasting impact. 

Ever since Paul Greengrass made The Bourne Supremacy, action filmmaking has been dominated by quick cutting. Shorter and shorter shots that create a sense of excitement–and if not used well, confusion–for audiences. The average shot length in Fury Road is 2.6 seconds, which as an average is a whole second less than Spielberg’s shortest, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and about a half second shorter than Michael Bay or Chris Nolan’s averages. But Fury Road is the exact opposite of disorienting. 

While filming, Miller instructed cinematographer John Seale to keep the focus of each shot on the center of the frame. While many individual shots within Mad Max: Fury Road are beautiful, and the wide aspect ratio offers a ton of action and detail, everything essential to watching the film is centered in the frame. When shots are rushing by at an average of 2.6 seconds, your eye doesn’t need to refocus every time a shot changes. You can follow everything happening because Miller, Seale, and editor Margaret Sixel have designed every single shot of the movie to have all of the needed story information right in the center. In Fury Road, the camera moves a lot more often and in highly unusual ways, in order to make this kind of editing possible while retaining audience engagement.

The musical score works in a similar way, helping the viewer parse and follow the action. Tom Holkenberg rose to prominence within film scoring through Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions, providing “additional music” to scores like Madagascar (2005), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), working with Zimmer on The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Man of Steel (2013). I first noticed his name (then credited as Junkie XL) on the score for YA adaptation of Divergent in 2014, because that score is an excellent example of a musician going way harder than they needed to and actually elevating the final output as a result. Holkenberg had a much longer time to work on Fury Road score than composers often get and even had the score mostly complete by the time the actors were called into the studio to do ADR (automated dialogue replacement) long after principle photography had wrapped.

I have a deep love of the music of the entire Mad Max franchise, and I actually own all five of the scores on vinyl. While Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is a bit of an outlier–Tina Turner’s music and Maurice Jarre’s work just give off a different vibe–Holkenberg’s take is evocative of the Brian May (no, not the guy from Queen) scores for the first two films in the franchise. Both May and Holkenberg are inspired by the work of legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann, who was known for his collaborations with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Herrmann was known for trying to make a break from the tradition established by 1930s Hollywood composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, and instead took an approach to music that was entirely focused on how it worked in the final film. Herrmann would alter the makeup of the orchestra itself to achieve a certain sound, which he did for his first score, Citizen Kane. He was also an early adopter of electronic instruments, treating theramins as a new section of the orchestra for his work on The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951. 

Relevant for this discussion, one thing that defines Hermann’s approach to film scoring is the use of short repeating patterns–ostinato rhythms–rather than elaborate leitmotifs associated with characters or themes. That approach is reflected in Brian May’s scores for Mad Max and Mad Max 2 but also shows in Tom Holkenberg’s score for Fury Road. Especially when the drums and electric guitars–including the one played by the Doof Warrior (iOTA) himself–are at the forefront of the score, Holkenberg uses these repeated rhythms to great effect, often matching the momentum of the action on screen or emphasizing the tension as the characters race through the desert on their hodgepodge vehicles. Holkenberg deploys a satisfying blend of rock and orchestral music throughout Fury Road, but it reaches its apex in the storm sequence.

As the characters approach the storm–Furiosa (Charlize Theron) driving the War Rig and Nux (Nicholas Holt) driving his car with Max (Tom Hardy) still chained to his wrist–a churning ostinato rhythm comes in from the score. Swirling colors of dust envelope the action on screen, obscuring the landscape and destroying any sense of geography. But with Miller’s framing technique, everything important to follow those three characters remains centered in each shot, and, by this point in the runtime, he has taught you how to watch it. All of this is working to minimize the viewer’s disorientation and maximize their sense of wonder and awe at the maelstrom on screen. Holkenberg keeps pushing, adding in epic horns on top of the pounding drums, layering in more and more as the lighting and tornadoes encroach. When the storm hits its climax, the music turns serene, emphasizing the beauty of the storm, juxtaposed against its violent nature. In this way, the storm literalizes the idea of Fury Road itself: that thundering, pulsing feeling that you are experiencing is something downright historic, its characters charging headfirst into their destinies.

I could write an entire book breaking down all of the incredible elements of Mad Mad: Fury Road, but these two key elements are what earned it a place near the top of MovieJawn’s Action Movie Countdown. Without the shot compositions and music, the vehicular mayhem, polecats, War Boys, and grenade spears would amount to a mess of noise and might have even obscured the characters and their arcs. Instead, everything here is a symphony, and the action sings its part with resounding clarity.