Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road is an explosive and wild, action-filled follow up the previous trilogy, Mad Max, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. George Miller directs, and is similarly the director of the previous Mad Max trilogy. It’s a movie filled with excitement, explosion filled chase scenes, and gunfights. And yet, somewhere along the way, Mad Max: Fury Road manages to establish surprisingly deep characterization, intricate lore, and tells an impressively feminist tale of women escaping oppression in a toxic, male-dominated society and finding their personhood. Max (Tom Hardy), a lone drifter in a desolate Australian wasteland, is captured and taken to the Citadel, an oasis ruled by a tyrannical dictator named Immortan

She comes, originally, from a matriarchal culture of initiate mothers and female role models. “I am one of the Vuvalini, of the many mothers. My initiate mother was Katie Concannon. I am the daughter of Mary Jo-Bassa.” This attitude of women helping women carries through to Furiosa’s treatment of the wives, for whom she becomes a sort of initiate mother. The chasm between caring, compassionate femininity and harsh, toxic masculinity underlies much of the film. When the Citadel is reclaimed, the Milking Mothers throw off their captivity to give water (that Joe had denied) to the masses below (another of the cyclical events in this film). Joe is shown lacking value for women and motherhood, treating his wives and children as property and only valuing birth-giving itself, which is brutally displayed by the gruesome caesarean section he forces on his dying

As stated previously, almost all Action Heroines will have at least one titular, lingering body shot. And yet, in Mad Max: fury Road, where half the cast wears nothing but cheese cloth, the camera treats each of them as if they were each as fully clothed as Max is himself. Even in the scene which focuses on a completely naked woman, not once does the shot pause or zoom on any part of