On George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) as the best action film made in the 21st century.

Mad Max: Fury Road is a film that George Miller conceived in the 1980s, storyboarded, and then was unable to make for thirty years because the technology available at each attempted production date was not what he needed. The film he eventually made was worth the wait.

Fury Road's formal achievement is the coherence of its spatial logic. Every action sequence in the film is comprehensible — you always know where everyone is, what they want, and why the geography matters. This is extremely rare in contemporary action cinema, where the editing convention of showing everything quickly creates a spatial confusion that functions as excitement.

The film also makes a formal argument about female agency in action cinema that is never announced: Furiosa is the protagonist, not Max. Max is the point-of-view character through whom the audience enters the film's world, but Furiosa is the one with the plan, the history, and the moral center. The film is structured around her and it never treats this as a political statement. It simply does it.