The damn kids from Beyond Thunderdome are not in the film.

Mad Max: Fury Road is not a balanced movie.

But that's not what you wanted, is it?

Seriously. Remember those 6-8 minutes of The Road Warrior where the combat centers around the rig? Okay, maybe 10-12 minutes of actual action. Remember that? You do? Did you like it?

I hope so, because Fury Road is basically nothing but that for maybe 2-2.25 hours.

As mentioned above, an unusual bout of rain disrupted the planned filming in Australia. Originally planned to be filmed near Broken Hill, the production was postponed when a large rainfall season ended up blanketing the desert in wildflowers. While gorgeous, it just really doesn't scream 'WASTELAND' and thus the whole thing was packed up and shipped to Namibia. Where, of course, it turns out there is a fragile lichen-based dune ecosystem which the production is now accused of running roughshod over with their chariots of fire and destruction.

What chariots.

I won't even bother recapping the plot. The trailer should give you clues. If it doesn't, I'll tell you that it doesn't matter. It's Mad Max. The opening voice-over has him telling us how life has narrowed down to one and only one goal: survive. If there's anything upsetting about the movie, it's that we watch 'the last of the big-block V8s' get taken and destroyed. But in return, we get a War Rig.

There has been much discussion of the feminist plot of this movie. I dunno, I wasn't paying attention. Things were blowing up. Real good. To the point where, as a red-blooded American male, I found the sudden presence of scantily-clad beauties washing themselves with a hose to be...distracting. No, really, it got in the way. Mad Max isn't about titties, it's about explosions and harpoons and cables and blood and death and nitrous and spikes and shotguns.

This movie passes the Bechdel test, okay? That's all you need to know. But really, you shouldn't care. If you're going to see this movie for anything other than gasoline-fueled insanity, you're wasting your money.

Hot damn, that was probably the best car chase I've seen in five or ten years, and unlike Ronin this one went on for two hours.

When I do actually think about this movie, I have to reflect that it's like a call from the past. It's a uniquely 1980s post-apocalypse. It's (as someone else online said, can't remember who) a scream from a nightmare you had in 1983. When the oil and water ran out and the nukes flew, what would happen after? That's what Mad Max is about. What happens after. And there's a lot of actual information and extrapolation in this flick, hidden behind the walls of steel and death. Names like 'The Bullet Farmer' and 'Gas Town' and 'The Organic Mechanic' tell you all you need to know, no other explanations required. Deserts of salt and sand 160 days across? Sure, it could be Australia, but with distances like that, you begin to wonder if in fact the oceans themselves are gone. They might be. Who knows?

Nobody knows. And it's not relevant.

Who has the guzzle-ene, and who's got the cars, and who's got the rest of the beat-down population scared enough to do their bidding? Someone other than Max Rockatansky.

And it's going to go hard for them when they lay hands on him.

I may have gotten outside of three or six martinis before seeing this movie.