No one can say that this movie doesn’t look good, but…
Mad Max: Fury Road was one of those action films that I missed over the summer, mainly because I thought I would have to see the original three before I went into the theater. Since then, I have learned that it was a movie that was designed for newcomers because George Miller never really assigned any sort of continuity to the series. I still haven’t seen the originals, but I saw Fury Road today because I was interested in the concept and it was a movie that attracted a little bit of controversy. So, what did I think?
Oh, dear. Do I have a lot to say about this wreck.
The Plot
Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself drawn into the escape of five sex slaves that are led away from Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). There, I just saved you two hours of your life by giving you one sentence.
The Characters
What characters? The film that I saw had one-dimensional cardboard cutouts in the place of characters from the protagonist on down. Max has PTSD based upon his experiences in the wasteland. Furiosa is seeking redemption for no explained reason. The sex slaves are there to act as a mouthpiece for the screenwriters. Immortan Joe and the War Boys are insane and evil because plot.
In case you were wondering, that is bad for a number of reasons. Thankfully, much of it can be explained by our next topic.
The Action
The movie moves at a breakneck pace from beginning to end, which is a bad thing because we never really get to know the characters. While it is certainly nice to see practical effects with trucks and cars flipping over in the desert, why should anyone care? If you are not invested in the action, you cannot really feel bad when something goes wrong for them. All the dust storms, heavy metal guitar players, and exploding spears in the world cannot save a movie that fails to make an emotional connection with its’ audience.
Was There A Feminist Agenda In This Movie?
Who are these people again?
There was a small controversy surrounding the release of this movie when Aaron Clarey, a blogger and economist in the manosphere, said that he felt that it was a bad idea to see the movie because it would dupe men into seeing a piece of feminist propaganda that is cloaked in fire tornadoes and truck crashes. I don’t think he was right to judge the movie before he saw it and he was certainly wrong about a lot of details (Mad Max is American?! WTF?), but there were a lot of serious problems with the movie that can snap some people out of the story and lend credence to his idea (however misguided it was). A prime example of the strange attempt at a moral behind this movie is shown in two phrases that appear:
- Who killed the world?
- Women are not things.
Let me get this straight, movie. Are you implying that men ruin the world and would mostly become psychotic basket cases that subjugate women without the rule of law to stop them? That’s a really bleak and nasty commentary on human nature even for a movie as poorly explained as this one.
Even if the filmmakers were only directing that at people like Immortan Joe, there is no sense of contrast that can point out the difference between his way of doing things and another competent way of surviving in the wasteland. The Vuvalini don’t do any better than the War Boys because the mythical “green place” that is a part of their tribe’s development has turned into nothing more than a desolate swamp where no men exist alongside the women in a cohesive society. Apparently, no one even tried to hold on to how our world operated before the fall, which would incidentally allow us to be invested in the characters because they would be fighting for something that we recognize. Namely, the fact that we (at least in westernized nations) tend to treat women and men equally under the law, which would certainly fit the context of the film.
How would I have written it to be more interesting in terms of theme? I would have made Furiosa an undercover cop from a nearby settlement that likes to go rogue when she sees something horribly wrong with the world, even though it might have gotten people killed in the past. It would be a good way to create a strong, take no prisoners female, justify her redemption story, build up her relationship with Max, and add to the western aesthetic that the movie seems to be going for.
The Ending
What is power? How could one wield it in a setting like this?
In spite of the controversy and the boredom of the movie, the ending was the thing that irked me the most. Apparently, there are no other settlements in the local area and the only way for the cast to survive is to head right back to their starting point. Now, we all know what happens to a villain at the end of a movie like this, but what happens after raises even more questions. For example, why did the women who were being farmed for breast milk just unleash the water supply for everyone to take? There was no mention of rain or any other weather events that could replenish it, so Furiosa and the rest of the cast would immediately have to stop that unless they wanted the settlement to starve.
I also understand that all of the War Boys are pretty much dead or abandoned in the middle of the desert, but that raises even more issues. As we all know, power abhors a vacuum, so that leads to the question of whether or not the settlement is saved or if it will be ripped in half. They all know and love Furiosa, so does that mean that she’ll take over? If so, what makes anyone think that she can’t become corrupted by power other than because plot?
Nope, these questions are never answered. Everyone just accepts that Joe is dead, the water is turned on, and no one fights over the giant power vacuum that was created. Hooray for plot conveniences?
Conclusion
Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie filled with mindless action and morally questionable lessons on the nature of the human race that may bore you to tears. At the very least, we still have SPECTRE, The Martian, and Star Wars: Episode VII to look forward to this year. Save your money for those movies.
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