Heavy with metal, heavy with meaning
Douglas J. Ogurek’s excellent review of George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) reminded me that I’d been planning to review its sequel, Fury Road, ever since using it as an example in my short essay, The World Ecology of Climate Change Cinema, in 2023. So here it is, three (or eleven) years late…Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) is the fourth instalment in the Mad Max film franchise, following Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). All four of the films are directed by George Miller (the third in partnership with George Ogilvie), set in Australia, and follow the eponymous protagonist, Max Rockatansky (played by Mel Gibson in the first three and Tom Hardy in the fourth).
Mad Max introduces Max as a police officer in Victoria’s Main Force Patrol in a dystopian future ‘A FEW YEARS FROM NOW’ and pits him against a particularly vicious motorcycle gang. Mad Max 2, which was released as The Road Warrior in the US (after Max’s nom de guerre), opens with a narrated introduction that establishes the context of the original as the collapse of global civilisation in the aftermath of a Third World War in which nuclear weaponry was deployed. The sequel is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia in which isolated communities and marauding gangs compete for the remaining fossil fuel, the production of which was destroyed in the war. Although the police no longer exist, Max fulfils a similar function in Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome, highway patrol replaced by cross-country driving as he protects the weak from death and slavery at the hands of the marauders.
Fury Road also opens with a voiceover, which concludes with Max stating: ‘Once, I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause. As the world fell, each of us in our own way was broken. It was hard to know who was more crazy…me or everyone else.’ The voices interrupting Max suggest that the Earth can no longer support human life and that human life has become half-life, i.e. subject to radioactive decay, which is evinced by the majority of the characters in the narrative, who appear diseased, deformed, or disabled. The global ecological collapse is mirrored in Max as an individual, his psychological breakdown involving a paradoxical combination of obsession with those he failed to save and paranoia that everyone intends him harm. He is thus no longer the road warrior defending prey from predator, but a solitary scavenger haunted by failure.
Fury Road is 113 minutes from opening to closing credits and has the five-act structure characteristic of Hollywood blockbusters: exposition, complication, climax, crisis, and resolution. The exposition and resolution are brief (seventeen and seven minutes respectively) and the three acts that constitute the bulk of the film all involve an extended motor vehicle chase across the Wasteland, putting Fury Road very firmly in the action thriller genre. The exposition introduces Max, the despot Immortan Joe (played by Hugh Keays-Byrne), and Joe’s War Boys, the most capable of whom is Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron). The complication begins when Joe realises that Furiosa has rescued his Five Wives from sexual slavery in the Citadel and sets off in pursuit, with Max (who was captured earlier) being used as a living blood bag for Nux (played by Nicholas Hoult), an ailing War Boy. Furiosa and Max meet and flee together while remaining mutually hostile. The climax begins when the two join forces (48 minutes in to the film) and ends with Max convincing Furiosa that she must reverse the chase, charge the War Boys and their allies, and take control of the Citadel. The crisis is a prolonged battle between the two groups and the resolution depicts…well, I won’t spoil the ending just in case anyone reading this hasn’t seen it yet.
As such, the plot of Fury Road seems straightforward, moving from an inaugural condition in which Furiosa flees from the Citadel to her acceptance of Max as an ally to a retrospectively inevitable condition in which she and Max fight Joe and the War Boys. The superficial narrative is, however, enriched by an alternating focus on the two protagonists. The title of the film and its place in the Mad Max franchise suggest that it is primarily about Max, like the three prequels, and the exposition follows suit, concentrating on his capture, attempted escape, and enslavement as Nux’s blood bag. The complication changes direction, however, suggesting that the narrative’s exploration of women’s emancipation in the face of hegemonic masculinity is of much more significance. The clash between female liberation and male supremacism – represented by the conflict between Furiosa and the Wives on the one hand and Joe and the War Boys on the other – leaves little room for Max, who is neither female nor a War Boy. This exploration continues to take centre stage through the climax and it is not until the crisis, when Max leads a motley band of women against the combined forces of the Citadel, Gas Town, and the Bullet Farm, that his importance once again rivals Furiosa’s.
The narrative tension between Max and Furiosa, the question of whose story matters the most, is successfully resolved in the conclusion. Fury Road – or Furiosa’s road – is really about Furiosa and her struggle to free the oppressed in the Citadel. While Max’s role in the represented sequence of events is less significant than Furiosa’s, the role of those events in the franchise is crucial to Max in that it restores him to his former status of road warrior and, in so doing, facilitates a future continuation of the franchise. Screenwriter Nick Lathouris describes this development in thematic terms, as Fury Road being ‘about a man running away from his better self, and his better self catches up to him’. He’s right, of course, but only in part because if Furiosa is the first Mad Max film without Max (cameo appearance excepted), then Fury Road is the first Mad Max film where he is displaced as the protagonist. This is her story and that story is a perfect blend of high-speed action and abundant allegorical depth.****
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