Oh, what a lovely day! Or rather, days. To see Mad Max: Fury Road is to condemn yourself to watching it about five more times in the ensuing weeks, or so Twitter is to believed. The pandemic has been spread so much that the film - a sequel to a 1985 classic with an entirely different cast - has grossed $286.6 million at the box office to date. Coupled with an unprecedented 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Mad Max might be one of the most successful and critically acclaimed action films of our lifetime. Well, the most beloved and highest-grossing action film that doesn't take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, anyway. How did they do it? How did they manage to build up so much hype, goodwill, and critical acclaim with a film that's basically just one long action sequence? Nobody looks upon the Transformers films so charitably, and Taken is definitely more of a guilty pleasure. Somehow, Fury Road transcends all of those things. Well, it's down to a handful of very clever, very devious little schemes. A practical stunt here, a prominent feminist writer looking over the script there, a complete dismissal of the rest of the franchise on top. All that, and staggering stories of how the film was made, follow.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
