Dear George,
I wanted to begin by congratulating you on a wonderful film. I went with a group of my friends to watch Mad Max: Fury Road, I was expecting the film to be one long chase movie and I wasn't disappointed!
But the reason I am writing this is not to praise you solely for managing to maintain a great level of action for over a 2 hour period - a very impressive feat. Rather for the way you portrayed the characters, especially the female ones. What I mean by this is that we are all entirely used to the gender norms and roles in movies, but Fury Road manages to abandon these stereotypes and Charlize's Theron's Furiosa is likely to be seen by many as the actual lead in the film. It is refreshing to see a strong female lead who genuinely looks as though she could take care of herself and kick some ass. The number of times we see these skinny female 'leads', who we are expected to believe can take out a room of trained soldiers and not get hurt is usually tiresome.
However on the Fury Road women are treated just like men. They can pack a punch! they're willing to kill and they get hurt and killed just like the men do. You don't assume that none of them will get hurt because 'they're women' and that added a great deal of drama once the action kicked in and we realised no one was safe (except for Max).
I love Mad Max but I'm entirely happy to have him in a film where he is not necessarily the frontrunner. In fact the real leaders of the film are the 5 women who are on the run and Max is really just along for the ride. The only real disappointment was the fact that the 4 other 'actresses' (largely led by models) didn't really have the acting chops to carry off their roles very well...particularly the blonde one who I found when she spoke it really took me out of the whole experience. I don't want that to seem to harsh, but we're all used to having the supermodel in a movie to give it a bit more sex appeal.
Regardless of this their lines were few and far enough in-between that it didn't ruin the film for me. The only thing I'd love to see from future films is that we delve more into Max's madness. The only one of the original trilogy that ever felt a bit crazy was Thunderdome. I'm sure you are also excited at the possibility of exploring a bit more of the madness that living in a wasteland could create.
Fury Road is a trip in the cinema that I thoroughly enjoyed and visually I was blown away by the style and physicality of all the scenes. When I went in I wasn't expecting to see so many strong characters and a deviation from the norm of female roles, but it is one that added extra depth to the film and I'm sure it was a pleasant surprise to many cinema-goer.
Keep up the splendid work!
Jason
