Fury Road picked as "...best film of the year...".

[Dread Not]

You could say it about tons of chase films.

"Harrison Ford runs, and runs, and runs. Tommy Lee Jones pursues, and pursues, and pursues. Ford ducks into a bathroom and shaves his beard and then runs some more. Jones pursues some more. Ford jumps off a dam, etc. etc. etc."

"You think the bus having to maintain speed to prevent a bomb detonation will be the first third of the movie, but then it becomes the whole movie."

Furthermore, Fury Road is a two hour movie, and less than 45 minutes of that is action, and some of the most critical plot points occur during the action sequences. Saying it can be condensed to 43 minutes while losing none of the plot is a load of nonsensical, vacuous hyperbole.

[amigocabal]

One thing to remember on the whole 'oceans drying up thing' is that it would be very easy to get turned around and confused about that. Here in Australia we're already having immense issues with salinity, so the development of great salt flats as part of the environmental disasters that unfolded alongside the economic and nuclear exchanges is not that unreasonable. Easy enough to see that and assume it has to be the remains of the oceans - but it doesn't necessarily follow. It's something that I think reads very differently to non-Australians simply because you guys don't have the cultural exposure - extreme salination actually features in quite a lot of our homegrown post-apocalyptic media or apocalyptic media; e.g. the novel Salt.

Well, one could argue simply that a wizard did it, similar to I'll Always Know What You did Last Summer.
Spoiler

Where the "Fisherman" was actually a magically animated corpse

I have noticed that the movies give very little detail about the rest of the world, except for the implication that none of the nearby nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc.) are able or willing to send enough manpower to colonize Australia and obtain its pitchblende reserves.

(I wonder if an attempt to colonize Australia could be the setting of a sequel.)

[loomer]

For something like that (and more of Australia proving we know how to do post-apocalyptic media), give The Rover a look. It's closer to the first film in the degree of societal collapse, but the presence of Chinese business exploiting the collapse of the economy and political structure is constant in that film.

[Grumman]

I bought it on DVD this weekend, and watched it for the first time.

I liked it. It's not perfect* but apart from that one complaint it's simply a good movie that does what it sets out to do.
Spoiler

When the bosses of Gastown and Bullet Farm joined up with the war party I was expecting and hoping we'd see all three settlements distinctly represented by their own sections of the war party, the same way the spikey raiders and the biker-grenadiers were instantly recognisable. The boss of Bullet Farm had that going for him with his customised tank, but the resolution of that subplot with him firing blindly into the fog like a dumbass and then getting killed off-screen wasn't what I was hoping for.