It's the coolest thing ever, and every time I see it it feels exactly like watching Road Warrior as a not quite jaded pre-teen. (Road Warrior was of course the coolest thing ever before Fury Road usurped its place). If you like action cinema at all and somehow haven't seen it, go see it. It's mandatory.
If you want to read a cogent dissection of what makes it so great I'd point you to OutlawVern's epic, factually and objectively 100% correct review. I feel anything I could say has already been said better there and in a hundred other places.
Instead, I'll mention that this last time I saw it with someone who hasn't seen a lot of movies, especially not action movies.
A guy my age, who liked the look of the trailer and was curious about it.
He liked it (or at least was polite enough to say some nice things about it), but the movie is so relentless, so manic that he had trouble following the plot and missed a ton of stuff.
For example, he was surprised when they show Immortan Joe's corpse at the end; He'd completely missed his death earlier on, which, to be fair, is awesome but pretty anticlimactic. He did not get why they were using Max as a blood bag and other worldbuilding details. The movie overwhelmed him, it was literally too much too fast for him to absorb.
He's a really intelligent dude in his forties, and doesn't normally have issues following twisty movies (although talking to him I did notice he has trouble when things get a bit meta. For example, he liked Knives Out a lot, but had trouble with the meta elements of See How They Run, which is a much simpler movie.)
Got me thinking that it goes to show watching a movie is also a skill that needs to be trained, and that different genres come with their on very particular set of skills. I think of Fury Road as the apex of crystal clear action cinematography, but it's an evolution that incorporates lots of disparate elements over hundreds of movies, and that most of us have internalized because we grew up with the genre. It's a very specialized machine that we've come to understand over time. I used to think Fury Road was... if not universally appealing, at least a movie any person who liked action cinema would at least enjoy. But this guy likes Die Hard, Ronin, Bond movies and, ahem, Stranger Things, and he couldn't really get into this one, beyond the imagery.
Maybe spare a thought for those that watch Fury Road and only see a clanking, bewildering monstrosity.
Now excuse me, I'm going to see if I can convince him to watch Road Warrior.
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