For the last decade, prolific film director George Miller has been synonymous with one blockbuster franchise. Yes, I’m talking about Happy Feet! It’s hard to believe that the same mastermind behind the original Mad Max trilogy brought us a story about an adorable tap-dancing CGI penguin. But rejoice, Max fans, for those whimsical penguins are but a distant memory in the rear-view mirror. After 30 long years, George Miller has returned to the franchise that put him on the map. The Road Warrior, Max Rockatansky, is back!

Mad Max: Fury Road is a reboot to the original trilogy of films. The film’s story takes place a year after the events of the first Mad Max, with the tragic loss of Max’s wife and daughter. While originally conceived to be a film bridging the gap between Mad Max and Road Warrior, Millar opted to start Max’s story from scratch without re-doing the origin a second time. By doing this, the original films become a spiritual canon of sorts, which can still co-exist with this new addition to the franchise.

George Miller takes the best elements of his previous films and attempts to go bigger and better this time around. Fortunately for audiences, he succeeds where many tend to fail. Miller strove to accomplish two goals in his latest installment: to make his post-apocalyptic story oversaturated with bright colours, and to design a distinct and beautiful world amidst a hellish landscape.

This story’s exposition is told through its richly designed and often terrifying settings. This is  a world that has descended into chaos; a world where madness is not just a state of mind, but a norm. This is due to the fact that 80 per cent of the effects, make-up, and stunts for this film were done practically without CGI. Not only is it refreshing to see, but it adds another level of awe to the frightening spectacle.

The film goes from zero to 100 from the moment Max’s foot hits the pedal. It should be noted, a 3,500 panel storyboard was conceived for this film before even one word hit the page for a screenplay. Plot, needless to say, takes second fiddle to this film’s engrossing action sequences. While this might be a turn off for some viewers, the plot and characters are still very serviceable to the film.

Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) betrays her tyrannical despot Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) by stealing his prized sex slaves, or “breeders,” with the goal of reaching an elusive paradise known as “the green place.” Enraged by this act of betrayal, Joe unleashes his horde of War Boys to speed off across the tarnished Australian outback to intercept her. Recently captured, Max (Tom Hardy) is brought along to the rip-roaring fray as a “blood bag” for the sickly marauder, Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a man striving to make a name for himself amongst his fellow War Boys. From there a bloody and explosive spectacle of nonstop violence ensues.

Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Max strikes the right balance of paying homage to Mel Gibson’s rendition of the character while still making room for his own. Hardy, who has shown an amazing aptitude for bringing to life damaged characters, continues to showcase his talents. He succeeds in portraying a man pushed to the brink of madness, held only together by his compulsion to aid those around him.

The supporting cast of the film, not overburdened with an abundance of dialogue, serve the story well too. Each character brings a dimension to the maddened landscape and continues to build the mythology of this crazed world. While the main villain, Immortan Joe, does lack dimension, this is made up for by his horrific visage and unsettling voice.

Mad Max: Fury Road is the most viscerally terrifying piece of eye candy you might see this summer. While the story may leave something to be desired, this is a film that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s a mad spectacle of blood, guts, explosions, and one of the craziest chase scenes in the history of cinema.

There’s a moment in Timbuktu where a woman handling fish in a market with her bare hands is violently threatened by a Jihadist soldier. He demands that she wear thick leather gloves despite the blatant impracticality; it is indecent for a woman’s hands to be visible.

The point of this scene, and Timbuktu at large, is that the strict rules of Sharia law leave little room for common sense or forgiveness. In one of the film’s more interesting instances, the leader of this self-appointed militia secretly smokes a cigarette despite punishing others for doing the same.

On an allegorical level, the soldiers represent the evil of implementing such stiff ideology, yet they themselves demonstrate an essential flaw to their methods — we live in a fluid and fallen world where ethics created by a computer manual can lead to evil no matter what the choice. But the problem here has to do with the manual they’re using.

Almost every scene is a reiteration of this same point: an unmarried couple are stoned to death, a shepherd kills a fisherman in a fist fight which unintentionally escalates, and a woman is given 40 lashes for singing and playing music. In this scary world there is no room for personal expression or mistakes, one must conform or be punished.

The film is structured as a slice of life that depicts this small town’s transition. Often characters will be in one scene and not appear in the rest of the film. Timbuktu is more about the small insignificant town (hence the title) and the allegorical implications than any of the individuals.

There are a handful of characters that get some screen time, but even they are not developed to where we can imagine their existence beyond the frame of the movie. Thus, each sequence plays out almost like a self-contained vignette where we already know the outcome because we’ve seen it in a previous instance. Even the main storyline — the quarrel between the cattle owner and the fisherman — is just a longer and more drawn out redundancy.

It also doesn’t help that better films like A Separation and The Patience Stone — both about how Islamic fundamentalism effects and affects individuals — have already tackled this subject matter with deeper pathos and profounder stories.

For me, this film was like not getting invited to an event all your friends won’t shut up about. This Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film has gotten universal acclaim from critics and is currently sitting at 99 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Many are calling it a masterpiece. I think it is too simplistically superficial to merit such profound hyperbole.

Although Abderrahmane Sissako’s film has short instances of aesthetic poetry (one standout is where a group of kids play soccer without a ball because the game is forbidden) and a few powerful scenes, it is wildly uneven as a whole and far less than the sum of its parts.

Undoubtedly, the message is important and affecting, but the problem with Timbuktu’s articulation is the needless repetition and disjointed storytelling which only leads to the same thing we’ve seen before: more tragedy.