What is Mad Max: Fury Road about?
The entire Mad Max franchise is a series of allegories. In Fury Road, George Miller explores where we put our belief, hope, and faith. That manifests in ideas of religious figures and the afterlife, wishful thinking that the grass will be greener elsewhere, and letting our past define our present. He also introduces the series’s first female protagonist to comment on the power of and need for gender equality.
Cast
- Mad Max Rockatansky – Tom hardy
- Imperator Furiosa – Charlize Theron
- Splendid – Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
- Toast – Zoë Kravitz
- Capable – Riley Keough
- Dag – Abbey Lee
- Cheedo – Courtney Eaton
- Nux – Nicholas Hoult
- Immortan Joe – Hugh Keays-Byrne
- Rictus Erectus – Nathan Jones
- Written by – George Miller | Brendan McCarthy | Nico Lathouris
- Directed by – George Miller
Fury Road is a parable about hope
Background
Every Mad Max film (Furiosa aside) has been allegorical. What does that mean? Think about the fable of the tortoise and the hare. They decide to race. The tortoise goes slow and steady, while the hare sprints so far ahead it decides it has time to nap. Once the hare wakes up, the tortoise has already won. Each character embodies a different way of being. The tortoise is humble and consistent. While the hare’s arrogance costs it the race. We all know people who are more tortoise than they are hare or more hare than tortoise. It’s a story that has a moral, where the characters represent ideas and concepts.
Miller uses the same allegorical structure for Mad Max, Road Warrior, Thunderdome, and Fury Road. He has a “hare” and a “tortoise”.
In the original film, it’s civilization versus anarchy, or order versus chaos. Chaos actually wins that one.
In Road Warrior, you have the same two forces, but now order is the underdog and eventual winner.
Beyond Thunderdome it’s art versus commerce, with parts of each actually coming together to form a stronger whole.
Establishing ideologies
Fury Road looks ostensibly at religion but more so at hope and belief. Immortan Joe is a cult leader who offers false hope in the form of his self-appointed divinity. We see this primarily with Nux and the other War Boys—they’re eager to sacrifice themselves for Joe because they believe in his promise of Valhalla.
Then you have Furiosa. She places her hope in something far more tangible—the Green Place, home to the Vuvalini of Many Mothers. It’s where she was born but was kidnapped so hasn’t been back for over 7000 days. She has spent most of her life dreaming of returning and she sells Joe’s wives on so many promises of what it will be like.
And there’s Max. He had promised to protect a mother and daughter (see the Fury Road prequel comic book series). His failure to do so now haunts him. So much so that it has seemingly shattered his spirit. He’s without hope.
In the script, Max asks Furiosa why she ran away with the wives. Her answer? “It came down to belief. Theirs was stronger than mine.” He asks what belief. She says “That things could be better.” He tells her the world is ending. So she asks what keeps him going, one day to the next. His answer? “Habit.” That dialogue codifies that Furiosa has belief/hope while Max has nothing more than habit.
So all of that is established in Fury Road’s first half.
The turn
Nux pivots when he meets Capable. She treats him like a person and it breaks the spell Joe had on the War Boy. Nux’s entire life had been about finding a moment to sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory to benefit Joe. But the time with Capable makes him realize there are things more important than Joe. He has something else to believe in.
When the Vuvalini inform the group that the ruined, crow-filled swamp is what’s left of the Green Place, destroyed by whatever black ooze poisoned the watershed, that hits Furiosa pretty hard. That was her Valhalla. And it ended up being a lie.
It’s important what happens next. The plan Furiosa and the others form is to cross the salt flat. Why? Because they hope that something meaningful is on the other side. Remember. Fury Road is an allegory. The whole thing has a moral. And at this point, the pattern starts to take shape. You have characters who keep believing in things they can’t see, placing hope in intangible ideas. Valhalla. The Green Place. And now whatever is over the salt flats.
This is why Max tells Furiosa “You know, hope is a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.” And that applies to him, as well. He doesn’t believe in a place but the ghosts of the people he couldn’t save. He had hoped he could make a difference, couldn’t, and now can’t fix it. Because of that, he’s been avoiding a serious commitment to Furiosa and the wives. What if he fails them, too?
The ghost of the little girl, Glory, essentially provokes Max into doing the right thing. Instead of letting the women and Nux try to cross the salt flat, Max chases them down and proposes his plan. Take the Citadel.
Max is essentially saying “We all need to stop looking for something we may never find and fix what we already have.”
Reversing the structure
One style of narrative structure is to have a character experience something from a perspective of innocence then experience it again from a place of experience. The Lion King is an example of this. The first half culminates with Simba naively falling prey to Scar’s manipulations. The result is the death of Mufasa, Simba’s banishment, and Scar’s ascendancy to king. The second half sees adult Simba return to Pride Rock to confront Scar. This time, he withstands the manipulations and defeats his uncle. Simba takes his place as the ruler.
Fury Road does something similar. When you zoom out, the film is two parts. Part one, everyone heads away from the Citadel and is at their most innocent. What happens along the way challenges their beliefs. Part two, they return to the Citadel with new perspectives on the world. This style of story allows makes the contrast between “before” and “after” or “innocence” then “experience” all the more obvious. For example, look at Nux. His desire to sacrifice himself for Joe was presented in a hyperbolic, performative way that showed how empty it was. Nux was one of many brainwashed young men. In the second part, he still sacrifices himself. But now it’s meaningful. He does it out of a genuine desire to save these people he formed a legitimate bond with. The only ones who ever treated him with any dignity and humanity.
It’s the same with Max. In that first part, his guilt is so immense that it’s driven him insane. He failed to help Glory and her mother. But that changes as he protects Furiosa and the wives. He can’t fix the past, but he can help now. He’s no longer letting what happened rule his present, nor acting only out of a habit of self-preservation. He is, once again, choosing to help solve problems because it’s what a decent person does. Thus, he regains his humanity. The moment that happens is when he finally tells Furiosa his name.
And for Furiosa, she had tried to escape to an ideal. A magical somewhere of abundance where everything will be okay. Except that place doesn’t exist, not anymore. What’s left is the Citadel. Sure, the people there have allowed themselves to be artificially limited by Joe and the belief system he installed. But it has promise. Vegetation. Water. A community willing to get along well enough to survive.
With her naivete gone, Furiosa is ready to commit to the Citadel and put in the work to change it for the better. We see how happy everyone is that Joe’s gone. They cheer, they celebrate. A group turns the water on. What had been scarce is now abundant. It is, you hope, a sign of what’s to come.
So to recap
The allegory of the tortoise and the hare challenges people to check their behavior. Are you rushing? Are you arrogantly taking success for granted? Are you wasting time rather than completing a task?
There’s also the one about the goose who looked normal but every day laid a golden egg. The farmer and his wife decided to cut the bird open to see how much gold was inside. Of course, there was none. If the couple had been happy with one gold egg a day, they would have, slowly but surely, made a fortune. But their greed cost them everything.
Mad Max: Fury Road wants us to focus on what’s tangible. Instead of believing in false idols, or hoping the grass will be greener somewhere else, or fixating on the past. Those things can blind us, lead us away from where we should actually focus our time and attention. We can fix problems rather than run (physically, emotionally, existentially) from them.
But we also have that final epigraph from “The First History Man”. Quote: Where must we go…we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?
So part of having Max continue in the Wasteland is that he’s still looking for his better self. And because Max is this existential figure, his search for a better self represents humanity’s struggle to go beyond mere survival and rediscover the better angels of our nature.
Women and Men
While I spent a lot of words talking about the allegory around hope and realism, Miller also uses Fury Road to say a lot about gender dynamics. Immortan Joe is essentially Harvey Weinstein as a post-apocalyptic cult leader. His society is so heavily masculine and sexist. Furiosa’s escape with the wives becomes a rejection of that kind of culture and that kind of man.
That’s made most apparent early on when Joe goes to the vault (a vault!) where he keeps his wives and discovers they’re missing. Before leaving, the women had written, on the walls and floor, things like “Our babies will not be warlords.” And “Who killed the world?” (Men). And “We are not things.” Their caretaker, the History Woman, Miss Giddy, waits with a shotgun and yells at Joe “They are not your property. You cannot own a human being. Sooner or later, someone pushes back.”
It’s fitting then that Furiosa’s trying to take the wives to a society ruled by women. But that no longer exists. All that’s left are the seven remaining Vuvalini. As much as Miller initially emphasizes the tension between men and women, he also shows the benefits of mutual respect and equality. Furiosa and Max come to trust one another, rely on one another, and it’s by working together that they defeat Joe. If each had been on their own, they never make it as far as they do when united. A similar power occurs when Capable befriends Nux.
Miller did the same thing in Beyond Thunderdome. He established a polarity between art and commerce before ultimately mixing the two together. Society needs art and commerce, right? Each plays an important role. If one subjugates the other or removes the other completely—things are worse off. It’s the same with women and men.
Why does Max leave?
Max is kind of a figure of myth rather than a traditional character. At this point, he’s a tool Miller uses to explore these various stories in the wasteland. We follow Max, Max meets these people, plays a role in an allegory, then moves on to the next story. That’s probably the reason why the script for Fury Road referred to him as The Road Warrior rather than Max. Using a title rather than a name emphasizes him as a figure, a legend.
He leaves because it gives Miller the opportunity to have him appear wherever for the next story. It’s the same reason why the monsters in horror movies tend to live or be immortal.
Why were they taking Max’s blood? What was Nux’s sickness?
So, sometime in the 15 years (in story) between The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, a whole nuclear war happened. That means a lot of radiation woes. It’s why vegetation won’t grow, why watersheds go to hell, and why people like Nux are getting cancer. Those things on his neck/shoulder are tumors. It seems the medic believes in blood transfusions as a treatment. So because Max is a universal blood donor (Type O), he gets hooked up to Nux.
What are Gast Town and the Bullet Farm?
They’re only briefly mentioned as nearby places that trade with the Citadel. Obviously, Gas Town specializes in “guzzoline” and Bullet Farm in ammunition. They don’t seem to be under Joe’s direct control but part of an uneasy alliance. Furiosa’s job was driving the War Rig to each location to trade supplies that she’d bring back to the Citadel. Supplies that scavengers would often try to rob.
How does Fury Road connect to Furiosa?
Neatly! The very end of Furiosa happens a few minutes or hours before the start of Fury Road. But there is a bit of a time jump in Furiosa. The main part of its story takes place 15 years after Furiosa’s original kidnapping. Which is about 5,475 days. In Fury Road, she tells the Vuvalini it’s been 7000 days. Which is a little over 19 years. So about 4 years pass between Furiosa and Fury Road.
Did Max have visions of the future?
Weird, right? After finding out the Green Place is no more, Max is going to go off on his own. Except his vision of Glory starts yelling at him. There’s a jump cut where Glory reaches out towards Max. For the briefest half-second, we flash to the image of one of Joe’s men, then we see Max reach his hand to his forehead for no reason. A few scenes later, during the big final fight sequence, one of Joe’s men shoots an arrow at Max. He throws his hand up and that stops it from piercing his skull.
So…yeah…he saw the future. Which has all kinds of supernatural implications that the movie doesn’t really dive into. We did talk about how the major theme is belief and hope. That definitely ties into the realm of the spiritual. So you could argue that Max isn’t merely haunted by the ghosts of his guilt. He could actually be protected by the spirit of Glory. Which is a cool idea. And opens up a lot of talking points. But I’m not sure it’s as fully fleshed out as other concepts in the film.
Is Tom Hardy the same Max as Mel Gibson? Is Fury Road a sequel or reboot?
This has become a bit of a debate. It’s the same character name, first and last. And the same background. And Miller had thought up Fury Road back in the 90s. In the 2000s, it went into pre-production, with Gibson attached to star. A bunch of stuff happened and years passed and Gibson became too old for the role. So, yeah, all signs point to it still being Gibson’s Max.
The thing that really threw people for a loop though is that Thunderdome was essentially 18 years after Mad Max. But Furiosa seemed born after the fall of the world. And she’s around 30 years old. Max was 23 in the original film. So if it was 30 years, minimum, he’d be 53. But Hardy wasn’t playing someone in his 50s. It seems, then, that Fury Road retcons a bit of the timeline.
People have tried to justify this by saying that the Mad Max movies are essentially legends being told. So details change because these are subjectivities stories rather than a look at what objectively happened. It’s a cool idea. And does fit with the frame narrative that several of the films have had. But, also, does feel like trying to make sense of something that George Miller might have simply overlooked.
