In 2015, George Miller released his rendition of the Mad Max franchise. His masterpiece involved countless practical effects, incredible costumes, custom vehicles, and magnificent landscape shots of the Namibian desert; but one element stands out above the rest, their Oscar-winning sound design. Mad Max: Fury Road uses sound to create a connection between machines and life, and the difference between living vehicles and ones that are simply objects. This is shown through the use of animal noises to personify the sounds of the hulking War Rig, by using the sound of nitromethane being pumped when Max gives Nux a blood transfusion, and when the metallic sounds of a tank track are applied over the silence of a dead baby’s heart rate.
During the very beginning of the film, Max is captured and is enslaved as a blood bank to a war boy named Nux. From then on, the two are tied together - quite literally, as Max’s blood is being transfused to Nux for the first quarter of the film. When Nux is called to battle, he takes Max and rigs him up as the figurehead of his dune buggy. While Nux drives, he pumps his engine with nitro, a fluid that allows gasoline to explode faster, causing the pistons in the engine to rev more and give the car an extra boost. He turns a nozzle to do this, and the liquid is injected into the intake - the sound of which overtakes the rest of the scene. The same sound is used when Nux gets hooked up to Max’s bloodstream. It represents the energy that Max gives him and the power to fight in the hopes of reaching Valhalla. Furthermore, once Max stops the blood transfusion, the same sound is played once again, and Max becomes reinvigorated.
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| Max as the figurehead of Nux's dune buggy. |
Later on in the film, after the Immortan Joe inadvertently kills his favorite wife by running her over in his car, he asks his doctor, in reality just a man with a knife, to give her a c-section. The doctor then checks to see if the baby’s heart is still beating, and holds an archaic stethoscope up the dead wife’s stomach. The sounds of the world drown away, creating suspense to hear that one beat which would hint at the life still living in the dead woman’s stomach. Instead, the metallic sounds of tank tracks of The Bullet Farmer’s Peacemaker are heard. The Bullet Farmer later goes blind when Furiosa shoots the spotlight at the front of his car. The mechanical sounds of tracks, therefore, represent the concept of being blind, or unable to do anything in the world of Mad Max, for Bullet Farmer becomes completely unable to do any major task, and all of his aspirations are instantly destroyed. Then, since the baby’s non-existant heartrate is portrayed by the sound of the tracks, it gives the audience an early look at the doctor’s reaction: “It’s gone awfully quiet in there.”
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| The Peacemaker |
The War Rig is as close to a metallic beast as you can get. Based on the Tatra T815 manufactured by the soviet union, The War Rig is a 78 foot 18 wheeler [2]. Its hulking mass can be seen from hundreds of feet in the air, and, as George Miller says “Apart from the actors, this is the thing we're most going to be looking at in the movie, so let's make it as beautiful, in its own way, as it can possibly be.” And it really is beautiful, but its sounds are magnificent. During the final scene with The War Rig, it flips onto its side as Nux valiantly destroys it to let Max, Furiosa, and the Immortan Joe’s wives escape. As it flips and rams into a pile of boulders, it screeches, quite literally, as if it were an animal. In fact, the sounds it makes are a mixture of an extensive library of animal calls. “We wanted to give the sense that the war rig was living,” said Mark Mangini in an interview with the Hollywood reporter. They used whale songs and bear growls [1], and the effect is absolutely horrifying, as it sounds like the true last call of the personified War Rig.
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| The War Rig |
The sound design uses the juxtapositioning of machines and humans in a multitude of fashions. From hearing the sounds of nitromethane to imply energy being restored, to showing the death of a stillborn through the sound of lifeless tank tracks, to animating the War Rig with the sounds of live animals, it’s difficult to place what exactly these comparisons are trying to symbolize. One thing is certain though, there is an apparent difference between the things that are alive and dead. Max and Nux are examples of living people who are strengthened by their mechanical values, but the baby and the Peacemaker are examples of things that are obviously not alive and their mechanical values reflect that.
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