Haunted by those he couldn’t save, and driven, by his own reckoning, only by the urge to survive, he seems emptied out. For the first time in the series, Max seems like he might live up to his name. Now played by Tom Hardy, taking over the role from Mel Gibson, Max begins the film staring out across a desert plain, chewing on a two-headed lizard as he contemplates what’s become of the Earth after, as we learn in news snippets played over the film’s opening credits, it’s laid to waste by wars for oil and water, and all but finished off by a thermonuclear skirmish. The fourth entry in Miller’s post-apocalyptic series, and the first since Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, Fury Road pushes its title character further from anything resembling civilization than any of its predecessors. If Fury Road were only interested in action, it would still be a stunning achievement, but the film has more on its mind. It’s as if director George Miller, who’s mostly spent the past few decades directing and producing family-friendly efforts like the Babe and Happy Feet films, got tired of waiting for everyone else to catch up with the action movies inside his head, and decided to show everyone how it’s done once more. Accomplished largely through practical effects-though the digital touch-ups are both easy to spot and part of the film’s aesthetic- Fury Road’s action plays more like visions from the future than like throwbacks. And it uses these images to construct action scenes edited with a dancer’s sense of rhythm. Fury Road keeps producing one astonishing image after another: sedan frames set atop tank treads, warriors on poles, bikers dropping bombs as they jump over moving cars, a mutant guitarist on a bungee cord providing a martial soundtrack of metal riffs with a flame-spitting guitar while riding atop a vehicle outfitted with a towering wall of amps and an expansive percussion section. Accompanying this din: images of brutal choreography that, in scene after scene, set the standard by which future action films are destined to be judged. It expands into a symphony of combustion, burning nitro, rolling tires, crunching metal, explosions, and the occasional whirring chainsaw. And the noise only occasionally lets up before the closing credits roll. The engines start revving before the first image appears in Mad Max: Fury Road.