After an absurdly-long hiatus (in which I finished off my
master’s degree in English and found a job teaching college English), another
post! Seriously, it’s been a year and two days since my last post in this film
blog, though I’ve watched numerous films. I even taught a film class this past
semester! Thus, it seems apt that I restart this project of mine.
Mad Max: Fury Road
Director: George
Miller
Stars: Tom Hardy,
Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult
What I originally thought was a reboot, Mad Max: Fury Road begins with our hero, Max Rockatansky (Hardy),
being taken prisoner. He’s taken in chains to the Citadel, a stronghold that’s
built into the side of a group of mesas in the post-apocalyptic world. The
Citadel is the property of Immortan Joe, a warlord whose face is always covered
by a razor-toothed respirator. In a flurry of action, Max escapes the Citadel
with Furiosa (Theron) on the “War Rig”—a souped-up, double-engined semi-truck
covered with as many pointy thing as there are hairs in my beard. Max discovers
that Furiosa is attempting to smuggle Immortan Joe’s slave-wives—what he calls
his “breeders”—away from the Citadel to a safe place called the Green Land. High-octane, stylized violence in a desert wasteland? It’s
going to be a bumpy ride. (Don’t forget your seatbelts, kids!)
The first thing I want to address is the film’s focus, which
doesn’t necessarily lie with its title character. Rather, the story focuses
more so on Furiosa’s quest to get Immortan Joe’s slave-wives to freedom. On a
recent forum, I read one person who griped that the movie was called “Mad Max,”
not “Mad Max and Furiosa.” Another
person complained that the story isn’t even about
Max, and that he’s simply thrust into Furiosa’s story. This seems like a
misunderstanding of Mad Max’s character, however, since Max is essentially
nomadic. If we think back to the original Mad
Max: The Road Warrior, Mel Gibson’s character was set up to not belong anywhere. Even the name “the
Road Warrior” suggests a level of transitoriness—Max is always on the move, and
that can be seen in the opening of Fury
Road, as Max stands alone next to
his car. That’s basically what his character does—he tags along and helps in
other people’s stories, and that kind of character can mean a lot of sequels, since writers can
treat the character episodically. As soon as Max finishes helping Furiosa, he
can be back on the road and looking for another adventure in which to partake.
The biggest item on the agenda of Fury Road is gender—and it seems like some people are getting hung
up on it. Take, for example, this interviewer who asks Tom Hardy if this is
supposed to be a “man’s movie”:
On the surface, Fury
Road may be just that—a “man’s movie”—but the film implies that this
post-apocalyptic wasteland is the result of hypermasculinity. Visually,
Immortan Joe is a hypermasculine character: between his hair and his body, he
seems far larger than nearly all of his followers, and his muscles are
highlighted by his clear, plastic armor plastered with various medals and
ribbons from military triumphs. The other two warlords we see in the film are
also portrayed as hypermasculine: “the Bullet Farmer” wears a coif made of
gun-belts, again bring his military conquests to the forefront; “the People
Eater” portrays his hypermasculinity through wealth, as he adorns himself with gold
chains and drives a Cadillac-bodied semi-truck. Three of the most
socially-powerful characters in the film achieved their position via
hypermasculine practices, it seems.
Looking specifically at Immortan Joe, his treatment of those he deems as his inferiors—men, women, and children—shows him as hypermasculine. Joe controls
the flow of water throughout the Citadel, and the unwashed masses who live in
the dirt below the stronghold are only alive because of his gracious dispensing
of the water…by dumping it on them. To Joe, these people are his property, and this is exactly how he treats
his wives—especially how he keeps his wives locked up in a vault to use at his
disposal. In addition to being locked in vault, their sexuality is also under
lock and key, as each of the wives wears a metal chastity belt—a belt with
spikes where any mate (besides Joe, of course) would get his member stuck in a
very gruesome way. Joe’s feels the need to protect these women, but not because
they’re people, no. They’re his property,
and Joe’s only reason for keeping them is because they can carry on his perfect,
patriarchal, patrilineal family.
There are plenty of strong feminist characters in Fury Road, and that made me really
happy. (If you look back at my post about 2014’s Godzilla, it really was a breath of fresh air to have so many
strong female characters. Where Immortan Joe see his “breeders” as little more
than incubators for his potentially-patrilineal offspring, these women explore
a newfound freedom as soon as they’re clear of the Citadel (and as soon as those
clunky chastity belts are off). If I understood the movie correctly, it was
actually one of the brides who first planned the escape with Furiosa. As the
women scream at Joe during one of several visually-stimulating car chase
scenes, “We are not property.” I
found it interesting that the production team brought on a writer from The Vagina Monologues as a consultant,
just to make sure that the female characters were portrayed well; I’ve never
heard of another movie doing that, and I thought it was a nice touch. On the
topic of strong feminist characters, do I even need to talk about Furiosa, the
badass War Rig driver with the mechanical arm?
Overall, this was a hell of a movie. It’s full of action,
car chases, and fight scenes, and the pacing of the movie feels good—it doesn’t
seem like it drags out or rushes through anything. Visually, this is a stunning
movie; I read on IMDb that director George Miller wanted the cinematography to
be as colorful as possible to set Fury
Road apart from other apocalyptic movies where the colors are all washed
out (see The Road, and you’ll
understand). The acting is all on-point, and it was engaging all the way
through. I would highly recommend this one. Seeing a Valiant Charger mounted on
tank treads is all fine and good, but having a movie with this much depth makes
for a great experience.
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