An early morning jaunt to the Sydney Opera House resulted in spending the next hour pouring obsessively over the mechanical monstrosities of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Bobble heads littered the dash, dismembered dolls stared blankly, mashups of metal and bone screamed in silence and mutilated Carlton kegs gleamed in the morning sun. It was truly what the end of the world must look like. These messed up machines barely resemble the proud vehicles that they had once been. The wasteland had even chewed up the Interceptor, spitting it back out as a beaten silver demon, a singular screeching skull adorning the hood.
Even though at the time I was there you weren’t able to get too close to a lot of them, it was easy to spend 15-20 minutes checking out one car and realising there were details that I hadn’t noticed yet. Twin gear shifters, a metal surfboard, french horns, harpoons and what may or may not have been Milo tins were sculpted together into a form of post-apocalyptic art.
There were a few guys chatting with one of the media reps, pressing her for answers on Immortan Joe’s chariot of the damned – The Gigahorse. Featuring the bodies of two Cadillac Coupe de Villes on a custom chassis, it draws its power from twin V8 engines and represents the ultimate power in the wasteland – in a place where no one has one of anything, Immortan has two. We learnt that the engineers on the film developed a system to link the two engines, allowing for a maximum speed of close to 100km/h.
I went back up at lunch for the live show, it was as much as you could expect in an area where they couldn’t actually drive the cars around. The warboys and stuntmen put on a great show of leaping all over the cars, swinging around on the poles and battling iOTA’s Doof Warrior.
There was something there for everyone and the extreme attention-to-detail on the cars was really something. Even if these details were something that is easily missed amongst relentless chaos of the film, you definitely would have felt its absence had it not been there.
Mad Max: Fury Road stars Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult and Hugh Keays-Byrne. In cinemas now.
