7. It Has The Best Editing
Fury Road's editing process wound up being a painfully long endeavour. By the time Miller finished shooting, his wife and editor, Margaret Sixel (this years Best Editing nominee), had to parse through 480 hours of film. It took her three months to just watch the footage in its entirety before she even began to edit. Her arduous undertaking resulted in one of the best edited features of the decade. Fury Road doesnt suffer from the rapid-fire editing of most modern action movies where visual clarity is treated as an afterthought. Sixel and Miller employed a variety of techniques to make Fury Road visually complex yet easy to follow. According to
VishiVisuals, Miller employed Crosshair Framing to ensure the most important action took center stage in the frame; this way viewers wouldnt have to shift their focus to different parts of the frame after each cut. This technique allowed Fury Road to remain visually coherent through its 2,700 cuts despite the onscreen mayhem. The film's fellow Best Editing nominees, The Revenant and The Force Awakens, contain stellar editing work, but they pale in comparison to the complexity and clarity of Fury Roads editing. In fact, few films from any year can rival it.