Only minutes into Mad Max: Fury Road I knew this post-apocalyptic journey was something truly special.

Director George Miller was unleashing an astonishing frenzy of relentless car-chase action across the desert wasteland, delivered with a visual acumen and screen-stretching scope that reminded me of the visionary sci-fi Blade Runner. This was a thrilling and inspired summer spectacle rarely seen onscreen.

And by the time Fury Road’s credits made their way across the screen, two hours after I’d been transported into this imaginative hell on earth and left battered, drained, and spent by the nearly continuous vehicle chase that followed, I was certain that I experienced not only one of the best films of the year, but a profound moment in modern cinema.

Mad Max: Fury Road changes everything. It’s a masterpiece of moviemaking by a director returning to the post-apocalyptic action-adventure genre he created, defined, and abandoned, and now, exactly three decades later, triumphantly reclaims.

Fury Road, as with the three previous Mad Max films, is set in a violent future of high-octane metal monsters racing and battling across an ocean of burning sand. It’s populated with the unenviable remnants of humanity, many deformed and diseased, as survivors of an unknown war, plague, or global catastrophe that wiped clean all but the vestiges of our modern world.

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In this post-apocalypse setting there are armies of weapon-toting gangs to maintain order, the beleaguered souls who serve them, and those few who live by their own code such as Max (Tom Hardy), a family man-turned loner driven nearly insane from his failures to save those he loved most.

As originally played by Mel Gibson in the first three films, Max was an antihero whose priority was self-preservation and gas for his souped-up car, until he was drawn into a noble cause that recast him as a savior.

Miller toys with the messianic theme again, opening to a shot of a bearded and long-haired Max looking like a leather-clad Jesus on a three-month bender as he scours the desert for trouble. Moments later and he finds it in a futile car chase that ends with his capture by the albino-colored followers of the cultish leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne, who, in a nice nod to the original Mad Max, also played the chief villain Toecutter).

Max is shorn of his long locks and beard and locked away — so much for being a messiah — until he’s tied to the front of a car that’s part of a convoy in furious pursuit of an 18-wheeler carrying Immortan Joe’s impregnated women to safety.

Driving the rig is Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a gritty, one-armed warrior determined to help these women escape their fate as mothers to Immortan Joe’s children.

It’s not even 20 minutes into the film that Furiosa is racing through the desert and roughly 10 minutes after that that Max, having survived a crash during a towering sandstorm straight out of the book of Revelations and then subduing the car’s driver Nux (Nicholas Hoult), has reluctantly joined them.

As their journey progresses, Max and Furiosa grow from uneasy allies to partners on a mission of redemption. But before that, they must survive the wrath of Immortan Joe, heavily armed rival gangs on bikes barreling down on them, the perils of the desert, and an unwanted stowaway in Nux.

Unplugged from his emotions and staggering across the wasteland like a zombie, Max is tormented by the ghostly visions of his daughter, who begs to understand why she died while he is consumed by the guilt that he couldn’t prevent it.

As with the Gibson trilogy of Mad Max films, Hardy’s Max is unmoved by anyone’s plight but his own, until those traces of humanity that remain compel him to perform acts of courage and sacrifice. And even then, these deeds are less about heroism as they are a rational response of self-preservation in an otherwise insane world.

As with Gibson, there’s something equally appealing about Hardy’s dark, devastated hero. While less chatty and more grim in this outing, Fury Road Max is the quintessential conflicted man of action in these unconventional times.

Furiosa is Max in a female body and under different circumstances; at one point she even echoes his famous line from The Road Warrior with her own version of “You want out of here? You talk to me.”

Like Max, Furiosa is both crippled by guilt and struggling to make peace with her sins. Only she maintains a sense of hope, while he believes hope only leads to bitter disappointment.

In Furiosa, Max has an equal partner, with Theron delivering a strong and empowered female protagonist not unlike Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien films. Hardy and Theron make an inspired team of wounded warriors battling for their survival and their souls.

As with all of Miller’s Mad Max films, Fury Road doesn’t lack for memorable villains. Immortan Joe has long blonde hair, and sports a metal breathing mask shaped like the bottom half of a skull and painted with rabbit-size teeth, and see-thru body armor that covers his pale and diseased skin. Joe’s son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) is a towering muscled beast who is as vengeful as his father. All they need is a superhero like Batman to launch their careers as super villains.

There’s also the assortment of other strange characters in Miller’s world with names like Slit, Cheedo the Fragile, The People Eater, and The Bullet Farmer.

It’s truly a mad, mad, mad world Miller has concocted, one with little dialogue and more doing. And, as with almost everything about the film, Fury Road elevates the 3D presentation. Even at high speeds the images are smooth and natural; the 3D is organic to the film.

Miller and Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seale (The English Patient) have created a new cinematic language for their action film that tells the story through visual cues, speed manipulation, and brain-melting real-life stunts that defy logic and reason because they are part of our world and not digital creations. At this point, all the Fast & Furious movies and their CGI stretches of reality seem silly in comparison to what Miller and Co. have accomplished.

There’s never been anything like Mad Max: Fury Road, a film as revolutionary as it is entertaining. And that’s been Miller’s pattern for the most part with his franchise.

In 1979 with Mad Max and again in 1981 with The Road Warrior, Miller blazed a new path for the action-adventure film. In Mad Max: Fury Road, he’s done it again.

And once more, everyone else will have to catch up.

Contact Kirk Baird at kbaird@theblade.com or 419-724-6734.

First Published May 15, 2015, 4:00 a.m.