If you want a vision of the future, at least from George Miller's perspective, picture a boot stamping on a human face for about two hours. Those in search of a bludgeoning good time will find it in his new scorched-earth action extravaganza, "Mad Max: Fury Road" — it's hard to remember the last time a summer tent-pole movie over-delivered in the ways this does.
In resurrecting the Australian post-apocalyptic road-movie series that made his name — and launched Mel Gibson's career — over three decades ago, Miller has skipped the salad and gone straight for the steak. Never mind that his last live-action feature was "Babe: Pig in the City" in 1998, "Fury Road" is a master-class in cinematic onslaught. It's as if the director had taken the climactic tanker-chase sequence from "Mad Max 2" and strung it out into an entire film. It's exhilarating, but also exhausting.
Working with cinematographer John Seale and editor Margaret Sixel (who is also Miller's wife), the 70-year-old director adopts an approach that could almost be called old-school, especially when compared to the weightless CGI that defines most big-budget action flicks nowadays. His set pieces — and this is a film that consists of little else — have a pleasing sense of gravity and physical heft to them, the product of bravura stunt work, judicious digital tweaking and lots of heavy metal colliding. There's real coherence in the way they're spliced together: The shots all connect, and only in the most frenzied moments does it become hard to parse what's going on.