Mad Max: Fury Road – The Car’s the Star

When you think of a movie full of automotive action, you think of Pretty Woman. No, wait, sorry, you think of the Mad Max series. Though Pretty Woman does have a pretty sweet Lotus Esprit in it, which is cool. But we digress. George Miller’s Mad Max. That’s where it’s at. A cinematic universe set in an arid, post-apocalyptic world. One where petrol is the most valuable commodity, where laws are no longer present and where – despite fuel being so valuable and scarce – the V8 is king. Silly really, as a little 1.0 Micra would make far more sense. But that wouldn’t look as good on screen.

Here, we’re looking at Miller’s most recent offering, 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. In it, Tom Hardy mumbles, Charlize Theron has one arm and Nicholas Hoult spray paints his teeth silver. Oh, and there are some cars. Though saying that, ‘cars’ is a bit of a stretch. They were cars once, but in the world of Max, they have become something else. Rolling battle wagons, petrol-powered works of art, and each one is more wonderful and fascinating than the next. And thanks to Miller’s drive (pun intended) for realism, every car in Fury Road was physical. As in, they all worked in the way they should. The Cadillac Coupe de Ville with two engines? Yeah, they both worked and powered the monster. These cars were not props. They were authentic to, ironically, the fictional world in which they would inhabit. Excellent.

You’d think, what with this being Mad Max, that the Ford Falcon XB driven by Max would be the star of the show, but that’s not the case. We see it in the opening of the film, in all its moody matt black glory, but then it is almost instantly destroyed in a pretty vicious barrel roll. Again, a physical stunt. You might think it strange to destroy the XB so soon, but this act serves as a metaphor for the film. It symbolises a new era in Max movies. Or something like that. Furthermore, the XB does come back later in the film, this time with the body taken down to bare metal and with not one, but apparently two superchargers. It’s not Max’s car anymore though, and is instead being driving by the War Boys.

So if the Falcon isn’t the wheeled hero of Mad Max: Fury Road what is? The War Rig, that’s what. The War Rig, driven by Furiosa, Charlize Theron’s character, looks like some sort of American unit. A Kenworth or a Peterbuilt or something along those lines. It’s not though. It is actually a Tatra T 815, which is in fact a cab-over design. However, for the film they moved the cab back and gave it that long-nosed American truck aesthetic, amongst other modifications. The War Rig is the hero vehicle of the movie, surviving most of it. However, its not transporting fuel, but is instead transporting Immortan Joe’s wives to safety.

Then of course there is every other vehicle featured within the film, each one more bonkers than the next. There’s the ‘People Eater’s’ W123 Mercedes-Benz limousine, which sits atop a truck chassis. There is the Dodge monster truck, which is brilliantly ironic given monster trucks get about 5 gallons to the mile (yes, that way around). The hot rods, the Jaguar MkVII with no roof, the ’32 Ford, the Plymouth Barracuda, the… you get the idea. It never ends.

Of course, films like this present an issue for enthusiasts like us, in that it hurts to see these great old cars get destroyed. However, unlike other movies, these cars were all pretty much at the end of their lives before the production team got their hands on them. In fact, a great many would never have seen the road again no matter what. That didn’t matter to the Mad Max team though. They needed the art of the cars, the shapes and the lines. They didn’t need functional cars, because the function would come about in exciting, mad, unusual ways. In a way, this film saved these cars or at least gave them an explosive journey to the crusher. And as the old saying goes, it’s better to burn out than fade away…