Mad Max: Fury Road is the best new action movie that I have seen in years.  If you care about action movies, go see it now!

I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much going in.  I assumed it would be yet another cynical cash-grab reboot of an old series. I figured it was made not because someone had a good story to tell, but simply because it was something people had heard of and the studio could bank on the affection for the original without having to bother developing a good movie that people want to see in itself.

I was debating whether to see it in theaters or wait for Netflix, when I saw that it had a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  At first I thought that was a typo.  But it isn’t.  The movie really is that good.

It is a spectacle movie.  There isn’t much in the way of character development, and no plot beyond “Good guys try to get away from bad guys.”  It’s just one long chase scene.  But what a chase!  It features amazing action, stunts, and vehicular madness that you’ve never seen before.  It’s done mostly with practical effects, which gives the movie a sense of physics and immediacy that you don’t see with CGI.  Now that anyone can put any fake-looking fake thing on the screen that they can imagine, our brains have stopped being impressed by CGI, and seeing something done for real makes a huge difference.

Fury Road is a rare reboot that is significantly better than the original.  But I’d go beyond that.  The action in Fury Road is so amazing, that I would say it completely negates the need to watch the original Mad Max series.  Everything in the original trilogy is just a lesser version of Fury Road.

Fury Road is awesome and you should definitely see it.