There’s something end-times Roman Empire about Mad Max: Fury Road.

It’s not a new idea that the decadence of the Romans’ entertainments said as much about the people who enjoyed them as it did about the entertainments themselves. Fury Road is the kind of over-the-top orgy of blood and violence and inhumanity and mayhem that an ancient Roman can only dream about.

Times may change, but people don’t.

Read as commentary, Fury Road is all our excesses – love of violence, celebrity culture, braggadocio, flaunting vulgarity – drawn out to a logical conclusion. The dystopian world of Mad Max combines the brutality of ISIS throwing gays off a building as a crowd cheers with the “hey, look-at-me” vulgarity of the Kardashians.

The villain’s skull face mask and motorcycle-sprocket codpiece are as much his personal brand as his costume. It’s not a stretch to think of Donald Trump, freed of his last constraints of good taste, dubbing himself Rictus Erectus and riding around in a Mercedes E-class mounted on a monster truck chassis.

I suspect the production designers and people who came up with the cars had an absolute blast making this movie. One can imagine the production meetings:

“What if the attack force were led by a giant truck with rows of taiko drummers and a mutated guy playing power chords in front of a towering stack of amps?”

“I doubt audiences would like that. So, we also need to also make the guitar a flame thrower to be sure.”

High fives.

Humanity seems to be constantly at war between its good and evil natures. If history – or current events, actually – is any indication, evil nature wins as often as good.

One of the movie’s memorable moments comes when Nux, a young, naive War Boy – his head filled with dreams of glory, barreling across the desert, surrounded by carnage – plunges into an apocalyptic sandstorm shouting “Oh, what a day. What a lovely day!”

Exiting the theater, I overheard someone comment that Nux symbolized a Taliban fighter. Possibly, but I think he’s us at our very worst, heedlessly storming ahead into the unknown and danger, reveling in the spectacle of it all and not caring what it means.

It’s not a stretch to say a culture that lines up for iPhones or Air Jordans would, if driven to the brink, kill for food.

“Mad Max” walks a fine line. It shows our worst cultural excesses while reveling in them in beautiful, poetic, glorious fashion. All while wearing a shit-eating grin.

And I loved it. What a movie.