Thirty-three years later, “Fury Road” puts Tom Hardy’s near-mute Max in the title, but the movie belongs to Theron’s Furiosa. It’s funny you lamented Theron’s lack of recognition. My wife, watching the movie with me, asked during one of Furiosa’s many great, gut-wrenching moments: “Charlize was nominated for this, right?” Nope. Apparently spending nine months in the desert playing a one-armed, badass warrior doesn’t rate.
Miller doesn’t stop with Furiosa in his foregrounding of women. There are Immortan Joe’s five “wives” who are, in fact, the warlord’s sex slave breeders, captives in a post-apocalyptic world in which value has been reduced to elemental function. There’s also the tough, resilient band of matriarchs, the Many Mothers, we meet toward the end of the film.
Riley Keough, left, Zoe Kravitz, Courtney Eaton, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Tom Hardy and Abbey Lee in “Mad Max: Fury Road.”I imagine that journey will continue, Glenn, with the long-anticipated next movie in the ongoing saga, which will be a Furiosa-centered prequel, as Miller recently confirmedwith the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan. Presumably we’ll learn more about her relationship with her mother, her kidnapping, her years of service to Immortan Joe and the battle that cost her her arm.
Everything that happens in this movie is believable. How astonishing is that? Colin Gibson’s production design and Jenny Beavan’s costumes — all those blood banks and breast pumps and skull heads and kinky breathing masks — are fabulously grotesque. They also feel like the authentic handiwork of a civilization ruled by barbarism. Ditto the weapons, the Buzzards’ porcupine-like attack cars, the great big honking War Rig, the characters driving and wielding this massive artillery.
And to your point about the deep, trenchant feminism of “Fury Road”: It is as fully felt and fully realized an element of this universe as anything else.
The answer is yes, and the follow up question is where the F is my Mad Max 2?