There was a guy on Twitter assigning "Mad Max" names the week after Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, directed by George Miller) opened. I missed out on that, because I'm sure he got swamped almost immediately. Fury Road is an instant cult classic of a sort that hasn't been seen in many a long year, so it's inevitable that its devotees will want to commune with it. Like its predecessors back in the day Fury Road has some unusually splendid names. I doubt the Twitter guy was able to improve on them, even as people lined up to get one. I mean, how does one improve upon names like Rictus Erectus or Cheedo the Fragile or Corpus Colossus? To say nothing of Imperator Furiosa.
Mad Max: Fury Road is the kind of film where incoherent babbling is almost a reasonable response to what one has just seen. When I got out of the theater, I muttered, "Well, that's the goddamnedest thing." It's been a long while since I walked out after a movie ready to turn around and walk right back in to see it again. I almost wish that I had before sitting down to write about it, because it's a film of such baroque imagining that I'm sure that I missed countless offhand details. The first experience of the film is overwhelming. It's a film designed to overwhelm, but unlike many other films similarly conceived, this is a film that manages to accomplish this aim and then some. I suspect that, like its predecessors, it's a film that will generously repay repeat viewings.