September 2, 2024

The Underappreciated Genius of George Miller

Perhaps I should have been a movie critic

“As you are dust, I am made of subtle fire.” George Miller

I like lists and rankings. It’s one of my guilty pleasures. In my younger days I probably spent entirely too much time compiliting and debating various lists and rankings - from top 100 novels1 of the 20th century to 20 best political songs to… a very in-depth ranking of over 350 male actors who were still performing at that time across all of the movie performances. The reason I bring this up is that if you were asked to name the greatest or most influential contemporary movie directors, you are not likely to name or hear the name of George Miller. I’ve looked through a number of different lists and rankings online, granted I did not spent too much time on this, and no list included his name. There are a lot of names on these lists who clearly belong, from (in no particular order) Paul Thomas and Wes Andersons (no relation) to Spike Lee to Richard Linklater to Christopher Nolan to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu to Kathryn Bigelow to Jane Campion… and the list can go on and on. I did not even mentions those who are universally admired at the greatest not only of our lifetimes but of all time, such as Martin Scorsese or Ridley Scott or James Cameron or Steven Spielberg. There’s a good reason for that - I don’t consider them, with all due respect to really be that great. I don’t want to get off on a tangent here, but if you look at the entire list of films they have directed, the picture is not all that great. For every Taxi Driver there’s a Kingdom of Crystal Skulls, for every Aliens there’s Napoleon2. That’s not to say that George Miller directed only great and highly influential movies, no, but compare to the names above and those on the rest of the lists, he arguable has the most range and the least amount of true “duds3.” Let’s take a look, shall we?

Miller became a director after he was a practicing physician in his native Australia and immediately became successful with the first movie he wrote and directed, Mad Max. If you are not a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic genres fan you may be forgiven if you haven’t seen the original classic but even though it obviously does not stand up to the test of time visually, it really did create a whole new genre of movies with a myriad of copycat attempts, most ranging from horrible to at best begrudgingly watchable: from Waterworld and The Postman to Mortal Engines and Dredd to Children of Men and Escape from New York. The latter two being the exceptions of being great movies of their own. That’s before we get to the myriad of movies trying to replicate Mad Max visuals of barren post-apocalyptic future, scary leather clad and very much S&M looking villains and their hordes of followers. That’s before we get to the car chases. Even the great James Cameron in the groundbreaking The Terminator pays homage to Mad Max with the low shot from behind when the killing machine from the future is struck by a semi and walks back dragging his leg.

Mad Max 2 or as it became known The Road Warrior, is a rare sequel that is actually better than the original and eventually became a cult classic. It would take a separate essay to discuss the movies that attempted to either imitate or build on the success of The Road Warrior. Of course, none came close. The follow-up Beyond Thunderdome was a commercial success but is the weakest of the saga and arguable the weakest of Miller’s entire filmography.

However, after a career built on a single series of movies4 that was a quintessential Outback Western car chase after the end of the world, Miller took a very drastic turn with The Witches of Eastwick5 and then an autobiographical Lorenzo’s Oil. He now worked with the likes of Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson. We may actually owe Nicholson a lot of gratitude as he talked Miller into completing the film: "I quit the film twice and Jack held me in there," said Miller. "He said, 'Just sit down, lose your emotion, and have a look at the work. If you think the work is good, stick with the film.' And he was a great man. I learnt more from him than anybody else I’ve worked with - he was extraordinary." His work on the screenplay for Lorenzo’s Oil was recognized with a nomination for an Academy Award, his first6 of many. For the next two decades Miller took another turn and wrote and directed Babe7, Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two. More acclaim, box office success and awards followed.

Then, about ten years ago, George Miller went back to his roots and redefined how movies and especially action movies should be filmed with Mad Max Fury Road. Ever since I saw the movie for the first time, I firmly believe that it is one of the defining and best movies of this century8, the greatest action movie of all time, and arguably one of the three greatest visual achievements in moviemaking history along with Citizen Kane and Stalker9. This feat is so much more impressive when you consider that the movie is essentially a two hour long car chase with no plot and barely any dialogue. I completely agree with this review of the movie:

I am filled with an almost religious certainty, a glowing and transcendent gnosis, the absolute spiritual certitude that George Miller’s 2015 film is the single greatest action movie ever made. Sitting in that full theater, the light from the screen enveloping a few hundred faces, all of us tense and involved in every moment, made clear to me that this movie is the apotheosis of what action filmmaking is and can be.

In the age of movie series with predictable and oftentimes boring and/or outright bad sequels - Transformers, Planet of Apes, Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic Universe and even the old classics like Aliens and Terminator - Mad Max stands practically alone by being able to reinvent itself after a three decade hiatus and do so while staying true to the franchise cannon, improving on literally everything (thanks to a hefty budget and new technology) and even pushing the series protagonist, the iconic Max Rockatansky, perfectly recast and somewhat reimagined, to the background with a new character that instantly became even more iconic10. I mentioned that The Road Warrior became a cult classic and inspired countless attempts to recreate Miller’s genius: “Every post-apocalyptic movie that came out after The Road Warrior took at least a few ideas or images from it. Plenty just ripped it off wholesale. The Road Warrior gave what might be the greatest pro-wrestling tag team of all time its name and its aesthetic. It probably gave the Friday The 13th series producers the idea to put Jason Voorhees in a hockey mask.” It should take a lot to nudge the film from the pedestal of the greatest car chase action post apocalypse movie, and yet Fury Road makes it an afterthought.

Instead of bleak and almost devoid of color desert in the previous three movies, we see a complete 180 with visually striking, extremely vivid and at times almost overwhelming backgrounds and sets of the desert11. “Miller famously tried to use as little CGI as possible in Fury Road. Instead, he got people to make the freaky, impossible cars he’d envisioned—the spike-covered scavenger-mobiles, the monster-truck hot rod, the enormous War Rig that really serves as a main character in itself—into functional vehicles. And then he crashed the fuck out of those vehicles. He hired Cirque Du Soleil acrobats and Olympians as stunt performers. He found ways to film fiery, elaborate car-wrecks, keeping everything visually clear and beautiful without killing or even seriously injuring anyone. On a sheer technical level, the movie is a marvel.” The fact that Miller - for the first time ever - decided that ALL action must take place directly in the middle of the screen through the entire movie - should not have been groundbreaking, yet it was and it elevated the movie to an even higher level of marvel.

Subscribe now

For a movie that as I mentioned is devoid of a plot and really is a two-hour long car chase, Fury Road actually packs a ton of meaning and essence. From an incredibly nuanced climate change warnings to the Trumpian depiction in Immortan Joe that was clearly meant as a warning to the almost perfect feminist theme underlining the entire movie, highlighted by perfect performance from Charlize Theron.

Really, it’s not just Fury Road, most if not all Miller movies, at least the ones that he he wrote, are deeply meaningful, each in it’s own way and all are connected with the theme of empathy, humanity and survival. If the Planet Of The Apes for example, either the original or the remake series, continuously circles the apocalypse, only occasionally resorting to setting it off, the Mad Max series blurs and extends the line between apocalypse and post-apocalypse, where the victims of social collapse never really have the chance to reset and rebuild a new status quo. Whenever characters make it out to a better corner of the world, as implied by the endings of the second and third movies in particular, we get only a glimpse or a few lines of narration before the next movie goes back to the Wasteland—because even in a hellscape, there’s still space for the world to get incrementally worse.

Fury Road was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and deservingly won six. It should have beat out Ex Machina for the Best Visual Effects; it should have beat The Revenant for the Best Cinematography; Charlize should have won for the Best Actress (she was not even nominated!!) and since I did call the movie one of the defining films of the century, it really should have won Best Picture and Best Director12, alas...

While everyone anticipated that Miller would follow up with the announced sequels and prequels to Fury Road, he, instead surprised everyone with a visually striking, incredibly melancholic, beautiful grown-up fairy tale for adults styled after the One Thousand and One Nights with Three Thousand Years of Longing. The movie was a critical success and a box office disaster, likely because your average moviegoer simply did not understand the film. Yes, as much as it is Miller’s trademark, the movie is a visual feast and both Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton are near perfect in their respective roles through the growing shared intimacy and eventually understanding, attachment and love.

“Fury Road was of course very personal as well as colossally successful at the box office: but Three Thousand Years of Longing is such an intensely personal passion project, spectacular yet fey, it would get any other director thrown out of the pitch meeting and beaten up. It’s the movie equivalent of an illuminated manuscript in medieval Latin kept in a safe and allowed to be consulted only by accredited scholars making notes in 8H pencil. And yet at the same time it has the innocent, colourful if weirdly defanged exuberance you’d see in the kind of family movies shown on Christmas TV 30 or 40 years ago.” Yet, it’s not just a love story or a lavish fantasy, it’s a deeply meaningful and yet again a very strong feminist film with a lot of political and social undertones. In retrospect, I think I wish that Miller would’ve directed Dune13.

Finally, there’s his latest, Furiosa. I watched it last night, after postponing for weeks and months. I’ll admit that I was afraid to watch Charlize-less Furiosa for fear of a letdown and disappointment. Casting choice of Chris Hemsworth as the main villain, did not help my raving anxiety. I was wrong. I should have watched it on the big screen. It was not as brilliant and iconic as Fury Road, but it was still an incredible film in it’s own right. It’s an origin story for one of the most iconic female action heroes ever created and Anya Taylor-Joy (albeit after an hour of film) is, indeed, perfect to depict younger Furiosa trying to survive, looking for revenge and redemption. Hemsworth was a true revelation in arguably his best ever performance as a chaos-drunk antagonist leader of the nomadic biker gang with an uncrecognizeable accent .

The movie is near perfect, with a completely unexpected cameo from Mad Max and the Interceptor, the same vivid color and absolutely stunning effects. Every detail, just like in Fury Road, was well thought and practically perfect - for example, think of the car chase where Furiosa helps defend the War Rig, the music starts only when Furiosa joins the action, allowing the sound of the chase and action build the crescendo of suspense. I wish I could go back in time and make myself drive to somewhere that has an IMAX theater or at least a really good Dolby Digital experience and watch this the way god intended, on the biggest screen possible with the best sound possible.

I can’t make the case that Furiosa is "better" than either The Road Warrior or Fury Road. But what Miller achieves? The scope of his vision? The sheer epic size of it all? I'm dumbfounded. This prequel is a master class in storytelling and directorial vision that evokes Greek mythology, the spaghetti Western, grindhouse postapocalypse drive-in extravaganzas, old-school Hollywood melodrama, and classic film noir, all of it confidently pulverized into a breathtakingly eye-popping mélange of cinematic bravado that left me speechless. If this is your 3rd best action movie? WOW!

Dementus asks Furiosa, “The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?” George Miller most certainly can make his movies epic, while also redefining or creating entire genres while connecting to his sentimentality, empathy, and humanity AND making us, the viewers feel it just as much as I am sure he did when creating his movies.

“That’s do pig, that’ll do.”

If it was not clear yet, yes, he should be recognized as a genius filmmaker, one of the greatest of our time.

Subscribe now