SPOILER ALERT. But let’s be honest–I wrote this for the geeks.

Update: Read the follow-up posts about Max and Furiosa.

Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action movie I’ve seen in years, and my favorite blockbuster in forever. It reminded me what it feels like to truly geek out about something, in the most delightful, over-the-top, childlike way. It’s not a stretch to say it reminded me what pop culture, and film in particular, is for: to produce intense, collective emotional experiences.

The movie is a perfect example of what action should be in so many ways. Its premise is as simple as an 8-bit video game: a bunch of people drive through the desert while various other people try to kill them. That exceedingly simple frame allows for a story that can unfold basically without dialogue, told through pure gonzo action, and in almost constant movement. From the moment the War Rig, the film’s hero vehicle, leaves the Citadel, everyone is riding or driving unless their vehicles are stuck or broken. It’s essentially a two-hour car chase of non-stop, increasingly bananas set pieces involving various combinations of wacked-out cars, fights and explosions, and it’s awesome.

In a genre where the visually unintelligible “chaos cinema” style has become ubiquitous, Fury Road stands out for its ability to maintain visual coherence at insane speeds. (The reliance on practical effects–all the vehicles, explosions and crashes were real and occurred in a real world with gravity, instead of a computer–certainly helped.) The film has 2,700 cuts, and yet we never lose the thread of the action–who is doing what to whom where. This has to do with both the cinematography (particularly the heavy use of center framing) and the editing, by George Miller’s wife Margaret Sixel, who had never cut an action movie before and thus didn’t cut it like everyone else. Sixel pared 480 hours of footage down into 120 minutes of unrelenting intensity. The film is able to make use of monumental wide shots and long, sweeping camera moves through dozens of vehicles where the camera skims along just feet from the ground, and yet the camerawork never feels distracting or like it’s being done for show.

If, like me, you have only a passing familiarity with the post-apocalyptic desert universe of Mad Max, you may spend about the first twenty minutes of the movie going, “What the shit is this crazy world?” That’s okay. The film will not attempt much more explanation than you get in Max’s opening voiceover. The elaborately-designed, exceedingly detailed world will sail right by you without trying to justify its existence, and by the time the action kicks into high gear you will just accept that this is a world where people build altars out of steering wheels and have names like The Splendid Angharad and go to war with a guy playing a guitar that shoots flames.

Fury Road is in a curious place in the franchise landscape. Although Tom Hardy has (handily) replaced Mel Gibson in the titular role, it’s not a complete reboot–more of a fourth installment with a 30 year gap, with the same director, George Miller, the same production designer and even the same stunt coordinator. But that we’re doing something new is made clear from the film’s opening moments, in which Max’s iconic Interceptor gets violently destroyed in short order. (The car’s body later returns, zombie-like, as part of a vehicle driven by Max’s enemies.)

If the original Mad Max movies were part of cementing the trope of the lone male action hero, Fury Road undermines it from its first moments. It’s common for action movies to open with a sequence unrelated to the main plot, but that demonstrates the hero’s particular badassery. But the opening of Fury Road demonstrates Max’s loneliness, vulnerability and brokenness. He’s been in the desert, alone, for who knows how long. He’s mute and basically feral–”a man reduced to a single instinct–survive,” as he describes himself. He reacts like an animal–see a threat and fight or run. He has audacious fighting and driving skills but not much of a plan, and certainly no expectations of help.

The limits of this strategy are demonstrated before the opening credits roll, as Max is run down, captured and enslaved by a bunch of War Boys, fighters in the service of warlord Immortan Joe. He then attempts a daring escape that totally fails, partially because he’s distracted by visions of his dead loved ones. Many movies would end the sequence with Max jumping onto the giant winch and sailing to freedom. In Fury Road, he swings right back into a tunnel full of War Boys and is dragged back to his fate as a human blood transfusion producer. This is your first clue that the movie is up to something interesting in the way it interacts with standard action tropes.

We’re conditioned to see Max as the protagonist of the movie, because we see him first and because the movie is called Mad Max. Yet for most of the first half hour, he’s literally dragged around on a leash through other people’s action, a steel muzzle over his face and an IV pumping his blood into someone else’s body.

The film’s other protagonist, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), has a much more traditional introduction. An elite driver in a world where driving is a religion, we meet her as she’s setting out on what seems to be a simple trading mission. We soon learn that her true mission is to liberate Joe’s five sex slave “wives,” whom she smuggles out of the city in her truck. Of course, Joe soon finds out too, starting the chase-battle that takes up the rest of the movie.

With her shaved head and axle-grease face paint, Furiosa is instantly iconic. She is stoic and silent in a way usually reserved for male heroes like Max, but not unfeeling. She has erased most outward signs of her femininity, but it’s undeniable that Joe’s treatment of women (and, perhaps, in some way that’s never exactly spelled out, her own complicity in it) is what motivates her actions. She’s not simply a woman playing a man’s part–her gender is part of her identity. Yet she’s never sexualized in the way of so many latex-clad hair-flipping action heroines. She is dirty, gritty, raw functional violence and power in a world defined by those qualities.

Furiosa is missing half her left arm, a fact that’s not once remarked upon within the script, but just accepted as the way she is. She has a prosthesis made of repurposed tools, but she’s not wearing it in the scene where she first meets Max. She fights him one-handed, holding him down with her arm stump at one point. He only wins the fight with help from a guy who was literally bred for war.

In the essential skills of this world–fighting and driving–Furiosa is just as competent as Max or more so. She drives a big rig through a monster sandstorm. She avoids tire-slashing devices and puts out an engine fire with sand while driving. She holds on to Max hanging upside down outside the rig with one hand while driving. She makes repairs hanging off the undercarriage of the speeding vehicle. She climbs on trucks after being stabbed in the side. She’s an ace with a sniper rifle. (More on that later.)

In a genre where power and agency is defined by your competence at violence, is showing a woman who’s just as good at fighting as all the men around her a feminist act? Yes. I’m gonna go with yes on that one.

But Furiosa is more than a good fighter. She’s grown up in a world where brute strength is not enough. Joe has legions of minions at his command; he can’t simply be overpowered in a fight. So she’s learned to plot and plan and think, to strategize, to be patient, to keep a cool head and have a good poker face. She’s also learned that alliances increase your chance of success.

Max enters her story not as a savior, but as an obstacle and an antagonist. He steals her truck and shoots at the people she’s trying to protect, because he can think only of his own survival. Her strategy is to get him on her side. While he’s waving a gun around and taking away all her weapons, her response is, “Want to get that thing off your face?” She understands his value as part of a team–but she’s still going to keep a knife in the gearshift lever, just in case.

In fact, this is how Furiosa treats everyone who enters the War Rig. She builds a team. Everyone participates in keeping the truck moving and the enemies at bay. This includes the Five Wives, who look like supermodels (some are) and are dressed in outfits impractical for fighting. But fight they do.

The Five Wives are young, thin, femmy, scantily clad, improbably well-groomed and mostly white, and when Max meets them they’re apparently in the middle of a wet t-shirt contest. Their adherence to traditional beauty standards has been highlighted as a reason the movie can’t possibly be feminist. Laurie Penny suggests an alternate reading that I find compelling–that their presence in a movie that also has 78-year-old biker chicks who do their own stunts is a deliberate challenge to our expectations.

The Wives may not be as strong or as skilled as Furiosa and Max, but they’re far from helpless or passive. The first image we see of any of them is of The Splendid Angharad, in her white tulle dress and pregnant, crawling from the tanker to the cab of the fast-moving rig.

Throughout the movie, the Wives serve as lookouts, learn to reload weapons, and help maintain the truck that keeps them all alive. They learn to compensate for their lack of physical strength by teaming up, as in this shot of Capable and The Dag cutting a cable that has harpooned the rig.

They even save lives–when Max almost falls off the rig during a fight, it’s Capable, Dag and Furiosa keeping him from getting smushed under the truck’s wheels together.

Sure, it takes two of them to do what Furiosa can do with one hand while driving. But Max would be dead without all of them.

In a moment that must certainly win Most Metal Thing You’ve Seen a Pregnant Woman Do on Screen, Angharad leans out of the cab and uses her fetus as a human shield to stop Furiosa from getting shot. She knows Joe only sees her as an object, but he values the potential heir she carries.

What’s so striking about these stills, which may be lost among the film’s relentless speed, is the looks on the Wives’ faces. They don’t look like scared victims or helpless objects. They look defiant, fierce, focused and alive.

The final member of the ensemble is Nux, a War Boy who starts out hunting the team in the War Rig and ends up fighting alongside them. Nux’s storyline is a perfect screenwriting example of a character who gets exactly what he wants, but not in the way that you expect it. Let’s just say that building a death cult can have unintended consequences.

Fury Road is a true two-hander. It’s not just Max’s movie, nor is it Furiosa’s story told through Max’s eyes. Furiosa’s actions are what set the main plot in motion far more than anything Max does. But Max has a journey to go on that is of value to the plot. For him, the story is about re-learning trust and solidarity in a world full of peril, and becoming able to take the risk of caring about someone again in a world full of violent death. It’s not only the case that he can’t survive alone–it’s that he starts to not want to.

(I think it’s worth asking why Max appears ready to leave the Citadel at the end of the film. Is he afraid that the bond between the two of them won’t last off the road? Scared he doesn’t know how to be a person in society anymore, a society Furiosa is now in charge of running? The film never tells us, but I think there are more interesting possibilities than the classic hero-riding-into-the-sunset idea.)

Other than yelling instructions at each other during battle, Max and Furiosa exchange hardly a word over the course of the movie. They don’t need to. The cautious, halting progress of their trust for each other is expressed entirely in functional plot points. After a meet-cute in which they try to kill each other, Furiosa showing Max the secret code to start her rig feels like a first kiss would in any other movie.

Then there’s this beautiful, wordless moment involving a sniper rifle that we know has a limited number of bullets. Max takes a shot and misses, pauses for a moment, then wordlessly hand the gun over to Furiosa crouching behind him. There is one bullet left and they both know she’s the better shot. She lines up the shot, using his shoulder to steady the weapon.

It’s interesting how many people, independent of each other, have identified this moment as romantic. And it is. It’s not a tension-free moment–there are no tension-free moments in this movie–but it’s quiet and extremely intimate. Of course in this world trust and respect would be symbolized by handing someone a loaded gun and letting them balance it next to your face.

This scene also encapsulates the theme of the film. The message of Fury Road is not that Furiosa could have necessarily done everything without Max or replaced him as the lone hero. She is as capable as anyone in this world, but she’s still outnumbered and outgunned. So is he. The only way to survive is to survive together.

Max and Furiosa never kiss or have sex, and it’s not clear whether they ever want to (although we may want them to). They hardly even touch each other outside of practical combat situations. Their relationship is completely revealed through action and it is incredibly compelling. When Max is desperately trying to save Furiosa’s life in the back of the cab at the end of the film, you can tell that he truly cares about her. If you never thought that stabbing someone to un-collapse their lung could be an expression of tenderness, you haven’t seen this film.

Max’s coming up with the plan that launches the third act must be viewed in the context of his evolving relationship with Furiosa and the rest of the team. On the surface, it’s a classic male-action-hero moment: dude rides up on a bike with a solution. But Max is not really much of a planner, is he? He wouldn’t think about whether they were making a wise decision, riding off into the salt flats, if he didn’t care about them. Not only has he adopted a more deliberate, Furiosa-like mode of thinking, but he arrives not commanding but asking for help–no, asking to help. Max can’t simply charge off and do the plan himself–he needs the skills of everyone he’s met in the movie so far, and he has to convince them. He could have easily left them at this point, but he doesn’t. He makes a choice to risk his life when he doesn’t have to, seemingly only for his own emotional salvation.

Furiosa starts the movie planning to take the Wives to the Green Place, a utopia she remembers from childhood. But this turns out to be a world in which there’s no magical escape hatch. There is no utopia to run away to–the only chance at survival is to fight for the one shitty world we have. In the end, what the characters need is not escape, but revolution, and they will achieve it together or not at all.