In the recent Spongebob film, Mister Krabs introduces the end of the world thus: "Welcome to the apocalypse. I hope you like leather". Mad Max likes leather. And cars, and explosions. And it's brilliant.
Combining the gleeful violence of Hotline Miami, the supersaturated blue and yellow grading of Bunraku, and the fascination with human difference of an early Die Antwoord video, Mad Max: Fury Road makes for an intense viewing. Bodies are smashed against things and thrown between things and thrown between things before being smashed against things, all against a lovely backdrop of mesas and buttes, vast ergs, and late-stage stone arches.
The plot, on the whole, fits rather well into the Mad Max canon. A captured Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself as a living transfusion for the warboy Nux (Nicolas Hoult), in pursuit of Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a soldier who's gone rogue, and stolen the leader's (Hugh Keays-Byrne) concubines. So, the film is essentially a classic chase-Western; moody protagonists seeking redemption, and to get the wagon train they're escorting to safety.
Beyond that fact, there's very little of the film that can be described as conventional. The protagonist, Max Rockatansky, is a man of few words, and fewer actions; spending a good deal of the first 20 minutes strapped to the front of a car. The most 'macho' character in the film is female - Imperator Furiosa who, much like Alien's Ripley, or Portal's Chell, takes whatever is thrown at her (and her massive thundering war-truck) in her leather-clad stride.
The creative team have had a field day. The world that they have built is not a pleasant one, but boy is it compelling. Child soldiers riddled with tumours hold skull-engraved steering wheels aloft while meaty women are milked like cows. Young warriors spray-paint their teeth chrome before going kamikaze, frenetically jumping from vehicle to vehicle as if someone had kidnapped the Cirque du Soleil and they were trying to pole-vault, flip, and tumble away to freedom. Cars with spikes battle cars with lances. It's a bit like Wacky Races, if all of the cars were driven by Dick Dastardly.
Where he appears, scenes are absolutely stolen by "The Doof Warrior", a red-clad musician with a double-necked guitar (which shoots flames when the whammy bar is used). He rides atop a stack of amps, backed by a small army of drums, and mounted on bungees. Played by the Australian musician iOTA, he steals not just the scene, but possibly the entire film. Quite how he does this, when flanked by a flotilla of war trucks - and two characters wearing a judge's wig made of bullets and a silver prosthetic nose respectively, is a bit of a mystery. But somehow, he manages.
It might be worth mentioning that George Miller's last foray into directing live-action was Babe, Pig in the City (1998).