Could be, but I would have thought it could use a higher SPF rating. I dunno what “Immortan” is supposed to mean, but it’s definitely not “I’m more tan.”
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There’s been a lot of discussion of that point in the thread already. You might want to read through it.
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That was a great scene. Just when you thought, oh, now there is a stupid cliched beginnings-of-romance between Max and spunky girl slave… bam, she’s dead. That was the “we are not fucking around here” moment of the movie for me. It had my full attention.
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I think a lot of y’all are arguing with a strawman—sorry, strawperson—version of feminism that doesn’t really exist. “It can’t be feminist! Women wore skimpy clothes! A female character died!” I think, in your minds, that’s what you think feminists sound like, which is why you think it’s so easy to dismiss feminist arguments. If those were actual feminist arguments, you’d be right.
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Who got boners, however briefly? An R-rated movie that contains this little nudity or presentation of women as sex objects to be slavered over by the audience (as opposed to former sex objects newly escaped from their oppressor) is not going out of its way to satisfy the male gaze (well, it did go out of its way to satisfy my male gaze and its unabashed lust for vehicle porn, spinning tires, floored gas pedals, screaming superchargers, and very very large explosions, but nobody cares about the poor exploited cars, ha ha).
Yeah, he blinked. A lot. That moment struck him more deeply than anything else that happened in the movie. And “needing protection”? Do you remember Splendid hanging out the other door of the cab, shielding Max and Furiosa from Joe’s guns with her own unprotected body? That took more raw courage than anything Max did in the whole movie.
That’s really the point of that hosing-down scene that bothers you guys so much. Miller is showing us these five young, scantily-clad and beautiful women, and at first glance they do appear to be helpless and vulnerable sex objects, since that’s all Joe ever wanted or allowed them to be. And they escaped that. They spend the rest of the movie working toward their freedom, speaking their minds and never backing down from their opinions. Splendid shields her would-be rescuers with her own pregnant body. Capable shows no fear of Nux and helps him regain his humanity. Toast plays a key role in distracting Joe and allowing Furiosa to kill him. Max barely contributes, except for convincing them to turn around rather than just fleeing out over what I assume is the desiccated floor of a former ocean.
Would the achievements of the Wives have resonated so deeply if they had first been seen clad in burqas, or sensible outdoorwear? Nobody complains about the objectification of Charlize Theron, since she’s presented as pure no-nonsense badass from the beginning. Her arc is different from the wives, and she’s got nothing to prove, and nobody mistakes her for a sex kitten to be used and thrown away afterward. Joe made the mistake of assuming his Wives were that disposable.
And that was the last mistake he ever made.
How is that not a strongly feminist message?
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Spoiler tags please!
The movie came out less than a week ago.
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OK, it’s real time, who got the ‘polecats’ and cavefish references?
Does anyone in the movie ever eat anything? There’s the two-headed lizard at the beginning, Nux eats a spider, and the big guy has a sip of mother’s milk from a bottle. Other than that I don’t remember anyone else actually eating anything.
This is not a nitpick, I’m writing some sci-fi and I thought it was a good choice to not even address how all these people are so well fed in a desert environment. Attending to details like that can stifle a story, but I was wondering if anyone else was wondering how they all actually lived from day to day? Doesn’t matter?
For comparison, look at the enormous investment of resources each year at Burning Man. It’s a similar environment and demands a lot of stuff to be trucked in to support that many people. It’s amusing, to me, that the one shared resource are the latrines. (I’m an architect and dealing with shit is part of the job.) Nobody in Mad Max goes to the bathroom either, I think in part because it raises too many practical considerations.
I know, I know, the movies are magic. I get it. I like Indiana Jones riding a submarine, on the outside! And The Wolf crossing LA in half the time than is humanly possible. I’m just curious as to how far that can be pushed.
@beschizza, what on this dreadful planet did drive you to this statement:
You clearly aren’t easily triggered.
SPOILER
How "forcefully cutting a fetus out of a dying woman literally objectified as a “priced breeder” does not amount to rape is beyond me. This whole scene is intense and a bit off, even in the context of the rest of the film. This is a scene where some people looked away - I checked, left and right, quickly - and even the camera angle was trying to lure you to look “away”. Hell, the camera looked away, and I’m not just speaking of a so-called ‘dutch angle’ here. I don’t know if there are different versions for different markets, so I don’t know if other versions actually show the cut this ridiculously large knife which was ostentatiously ground in front of the camera makes. I doubt it, because the director/producers did a great job in all other instances not to indulge gore. But even so, this scene literally screamed in your face “THIS IS RAPE”.
/SPOILER
Also, there was romace. The look on the face of Capable (Riley Keough) was pure romance. And the kiss. It wasn’t totally over the top, and it was part of her characterisation, for sure.
The big issue with so many sci fi films of today is that much of the production design drives story development whether the ‘world’ makes sense or not. This is because many contemporary illustrators don’t have the pragmatic technical background of say guys like Syd Mead (Blade Runner) or Ralph McQuarrie (Star Wars) who came into their disciplines from a more industrial design context. Second, the early MM films were basically a commentary on the cold war (and had small budgets) whereas Fury Road is pure visual carnival. Ok, fine.
No, that wouldn’t be saying much, since it’s such a low bar to clear, but Fury Road is miles more feminist than most action flicks. And a great deal of it is because it’s so unexpected, since the movie doesn’t go out of its way to trumpet itself as The Feminist Action Movie. All it does is treat its female characters as just as competent and badass as its male characters (and even more so, since most of the villain-killin’ is performed by Furiosa), which is a pretty neutral position to take on paper, but one which nearly every other movie ever made fails to take in reality.
Who’s “silent Joe”? Immortan Joe is the bad guy. Do you mean Max? By the time he gets loose after the sandstorm, Furiosa and the girls have already escaped from Joe’s forces. Max just slows them down by forcing a confrontation with Furiosa, whom he only (eventually) beats because she’s missing an arm. Nux slows them down as well since Max left him behind still able to tamper with the brakes on the fuel pod. There’s a good chance Furiosa would have gotten the rig past the bottleneck without “three war parties” hot on her ass if Max hadn’t slowed them down. When the Bullet Farmer is chasing them down through the mud bogs, Max wasted two bullets trying to shoot him before letting Furiosa take her shot with the last bullet. Eventually Max and Nux become useful to the women, but only after slowing them down. And they’d gotten away clean by the time Max convinces them to turn around. That was really his only solid contribution to the cause; otherwise he was just trying to keep his own cracked ass alive.
Again, all this movie does is treat its women as equals to the men in terms of competence and courage, and that’s all. But that’s a huge improvement over most other movies.
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There was an blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene where Joe is seen pacing through a hydroponic farm. It makes sense that his outfit would be the source of food, as it’s the source of water.
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I was referring to rape as an assault whose objective is sexual intercourse, as often used in hollywood movies such as this as a storytelling trope (or simply to please the proverbial male gaze).
The forced cesarean scene was horrifying and visceral, but so much so that it didn’t register to me as that. But you have certainly convinced me that it is a form of rape. I wonder what a better way to express appreciation for the lack of “standard-issue Hollywood sexual assaults” might be, then, without negating the impact and horror of this very unstandard (and, IMO, more artistically defensible) one
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This was supposed to be to beschizza about my question about what they ate, but I screwed up the link.
Cool, I’d already decided to see it again this weekend so now I have homework too!
Haven’t watched the movie, but is that detail really so mind-boggling? You might as well ask why risk sending a soldier into battle carrying a big goofy flag around and waste additional resources keeping him from dying (hands full and all). Or why bother with Wagner since a bunch of combat helicopters are already loud and impressive on their own. They’re symbols.
The “meet the vehicles” promo compares this thing to a cavalry bugle, only, you know, totally extreme to the max.
(starting at about 2:30)
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I like the idea that the Doof Warrior is just this guy who just turns up whenever something’s going down and plays for tips.
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I have watched it, and no, it’s not mind-boggling… it’s awesome!!!
Remember the earlier part of my quote:
That starts with a very big IF.
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Violent and just-plain-weird as it was, it never occurred to me (the privileged white cis male to whom things don’t occur, of course) that this might have been a form of rape. I took it as a literal cesarean, trying to save the unborn infant by cutting it out of its dying mother’s body. The emergency room is a stacked pair of '59 Cadillacs on a monster truck chassis, the surgeon is a diseased punk mechanic with horrible hygiene, and the anxious father is an over-the-top homicidal freakshow, but the goal of the operation was to save the child if it were possible. There were a zillion things “wrong” with that scene on every surface level, but it contained unexpected pathos and drama, to the point that you have a musclebound oaf named Rictus Erectus yelling with pathetic pride that his stillborn brother was “perfect in every way,” and that brings a tear to the eye nearly as readily as when Max repeats that “she went under the wheels” and you know that Splendid ain’t coming back.
The movie has some masterful moments in unexpected places, if you ask me.
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well, it did go out of its way to satisfy my male gaze and its unabashed lust for
Elephantitis of the feet/pseudo-avian stilt-walkers.
Now we’re mainstream, baby - we ain’t Nevah going back in the closet!
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One that stuck in my mind was the sacrifice of the injured war boy atop the war rig. He’s clearly a deranged, manipulated, psychopathic murderer but god damn if a sense of their solidarity didn’t shine through in that moment. Underlining the commitment they have for one another, even if that commitment was to a fascist and controlling ideology.
It spoke volumes about their culture in a few brief moments. A window into the soul of the white nightmare.
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