A metal behemoth rattles and roars through a nihilistic landscape—bleak, empty, and hungry for life—charging forth as a last remaining beacon of hope and redemption. The behemoth isn’t just the War-Tanker central to the plot, it’s also Mad Max: Fury Road itself; and the setting is more than the scorched sands of a doomed Earth, it’s the barren wasteland of 2015 Hollywood. This is the antidote. The cure. Fury Road is shock therapy for the tired cinemagoer who’s seen the 100th CGI battle and nearly fallen asleep. I know you’ve been there. I have too. From the first frame Fury Road is a throttling engine of insane action, filled front to back with death defying stunts 90% of which were done for real. The stunt men that make these crazy sequences possible are athletes or come from Cirque De Soleil, and they leap, flip and fall from racing vehicle to racing vehicle in what looks like some of the most dangerous close-call stunts in the history of movies. Our imaginations are once again filled with the real world dirt, dust and danger that’s been largely missing in movies since Harrison Ford climbed under a speeding truck in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Few films beg to be called an instant classic in just its first weekend of release, but this is one of them. Fury Road is pure movie magic.

Our wizard is visionary writer and director George Miller, back with a spiritual sequel of his beloved post-apolcalyptic game-changers Mad Max, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, casting an arresting spell of powerful social allegory via action movie bliss, executed with some the boldest stylistic choices in decades. The bare-bones plot is more poetically minimalist than weak or hollow, rich with subtext that’s destined to be examined and written about. This largely non-verbal film marries film history to the technologically savvy present, combining the visual literacy of silent film—and the Citadel that opens Fury Road proudly homages Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to clue you in as to what it’s doing—with state of the art tech that opens up Miller to manic editing and stuntwork that’s unprecedented. Buying a ticket to Fury Road is the promise of something you haven’t seen before, a Greatest Show on Earth of electrifying R-rated action that’s forceful without being mean spirited.

Like silent movies, the plot is driven by what characters do rather than by what they say. Carefully constructed images, like one of Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) hanging upside down as blood is siphoned from his weakened body, guide us through the story. Relationships form through lingering glances and subliminal emotion, left to the viewer to infer. We aren’t stupid, and Miller knows it. After a brief opening voiceover recounting the fall of the world, the plot itself, as has been advertised, is one extended and surprisingly varied chase sequence. Suffice it to say Max is captured, leaving Hardy in a metal mask for much of the film. He becomes entangled with one Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a driver of a War-Rig (a kind of militarized semi-truck that carries gas) who, on a gas run, suddenly goes off-route and makes an escape carrying secret cargo: she makes herself a surrogate mother by freeing a group of sex slaves.