Furiosa Road

More is certainly not better. With just that line I could end the commentary to George Miller’s fourth installment of his Mad Max series: Mad Max, Fury Road. I’m drawn to writing more, however, because so many critics have praised the movie (98% average critics reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) and some have even gone as far as to praise it for its “feminist” slant. This I cannot abide. 

There are so many things wrong with Fury Road that make it, in my opinion, the least of George Miller’s four takes on the Mad Max character. How women are treated in this installment is a big part of what’s wrong. Many –including some sexist male groups- seem to have concentrated on Charlize Theron’s character, Imperator Furiosa, to claim –or protest- the “feminist” angle. Yes, Theron’s character is a smart, strong woman fighting to get back to the home she was taken from as a child and, in doing so, freeing and taking with her the young and beautiful brides held captive by Immortan Joe, the depraved and cruel leader of their post-apocalyptic world. Throughout most of the movie, Theron’s character is the one battling Immortan Joe’s men, carrying Mad Max, played rather mutely by Tom Hardy, rather like an albatross around her neck. The fact that the movie is called Mad Max, Fury Road and not Imperator Furiosa, Fury Road kind of does away with the centrality of her character and, through most of the final half of the movie, Max pretty much takes back his hero stance, shoving Theron into assistant role.

Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa

It’s serves to remember that women were not absent from Miller’s previous Mad Max installments. The character known as Warrior Woman (actress Virginia Hey) is central to Max’s escape in Road Warrior and, what’s more, the community of survivors in that movie was led by Big Rebecca, an older, wise woman who, by the way, was not fat. In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, installment three of the series, it is a woman who reigns over Bartertown, the last outpost of “civilization”, she was the villain to Mel Gibson’s Max: Aunty Entity played magnificently by Tina Turner.

Virginia Hey as Warrior Woman in Road Warrior

Tina Turner as Aunty Entity in Thunderdome

In Fury Road, what does provoke considerable fury is that there is a group of very fat women, also held captive by the cult leader, who are literally milked, like cows! It is a grotesque scene that totally dehumanizes and reduces women to chattel. Strangely, these much abused women who are the actual mothers in the film (they are the producers of what is called “mother’s milk”) are not the ones rescued by Theron or Hardy. The ones who take up screen time as the damsels in distress are the Victoria’s Secret-like models that the cult leader and all his men are sent chasing to retrieve. Even the plot line is debased this way. In Road Warrior, it was gasoline everyone was after. Here, it’s the pretty women. Even the gray haired women who have survived for years in the desert –though it’s not even hinted how- end up giving up their lives for the beauties.

The early Mad Max movies were made in the eighties. Maybe it’s a sign of our modern times so plagued by misogynist images in violent video games, an explosion of internet pornography that is redefining sex, to the detriment of women, and a continued absence of smart, strong, female lead characters in the movies that makes some people feel that Fury Road is somehow a “feminist” take.

Even beyond that, nothing much works in Fury Road, besides the sometimes overbearing display of CGI.  While some may find the acrobatics and pyrotechnics neat to watch, they also serve to detract from any realism in this film. Road Warrior felt plausible, it had a gritty realism that made that post-apocalyptic world feel real. The story there was also simple and didn’t have the gaping loose ends of Fury Road. Like, for example, the gasoline and bullet reserve town where Furiosa was originally headed but that is never mentioned again. (Who kept manufacturing all the bullets? In Road Warrior, bullets were a scarcity, Max had two). There is no background to Immortar Joe’s cult, to his control over the water, the weird boys, all the people that survive on sand; everything is mixed together and borrowed, very “willy-nilly”, from the previous Mad Max movies. You can tell the producers are betting on viewers being distracted by the visuals and the noise.

And Max. The only thing this movie retains of the original Mad Max character is the title. This movie really should have been called Imperator Furiosa, Fury Road because Mad Max, who is literally mad in it, plagued by hallucinations and terrors, is but a ghost of his former screen self. Tom Hardy may look tough, but he comes off as not only very quiet but also rather unintelligent.

Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy as Mad Max

We don’t really know if Mad Max served to create Mel Gibson’s screen persona or the other way around, but Mel’s Max was a rounded out character. He would never have narrated his own story! He was the legend. He spoke more, to be certain, and, while he appeared ruthless and focused on his own survival, through playing off the Feral Kid and his dog named Dog, we got that he was the unsung hero (until Thunderdome). And even though the Road Warrior was a brutal film -because less can many times be more- Gibson’s Max was still able to convey some humor, completely lost in Hardy’s.

So, yeah, Fury Road is a bigger, louder, better tech movie, with a whopping $150 million dollar budget, compared to Road Warrior’s $3.5 million, but more is certainly not better.

And Imperator Furiosa is still light years away from being Ellen Ripley.