Mad Max: Fury Road is spectacular. I have never seen anything like Fury Road's opening scene: rivers of boys screaming across the red desert in mutant vehicles, roaring at each other in thick Australian accents to "fang it" as they inhale silver spray paint, their eyes bright with the knowledge they have nothing to live for but death and glory. George Miller's apocalyptic desert is a vicious salute to the dream of a red-hot Australian summer set alight by the ageless, testosterone-fuelled fantasies of youth and young manhood. It is beautiful. It is insane. It is the most fun I've ever had in a cinema.
The fourth instalment in the Mad Max franchise, Fury Road follows Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) as he teams up with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to rescue five beautiful concubines desperate to escape the clutches of a grotesque, tyrannical warlord and his army of crazed War Boys. Mad Max's publicity machine has made a huge effort to attract female viewers by presenting Theron as the new benchmark for heroines in action movies and emphasising the number of female characters. The female-centric casting has earned the ire of men's rights groups (not a thing, guys), with the truly loathsome blog, Return of the Kings, accusing Fury Road of being nothing other than "feminist propaganda posing as a guy flick." Unfortunately, men's rights groups needn't have gotten their panties in a twist.
There's no question that Theron's Imperator Furiosa is an absolute baller. She pulls and takes punches. She drives and mends war rigs. Her idea of makeup is smearing axle grease across her forehead. Although she's the ultimate warrior, she's not one-dimensional – there are moments in the film where her sense of duty to her young dependants results in palpable emotional frustration. She gets wrecked, not just physically, but aesthetically. Furiosa ends Fury Road covered in dirt, one eye swollen shut, the stump of her amputated arm exposed, standing exhausted in front of the young women she fought so desperately to protect.
In comparison to Furiosa, these former concubines are in bizarrely pristine condition. They've driven through nuclear dust storms, and not one hair on their head is out of place. They glow with good health. Their white dresses are spotless. Standing next to them, Furiosa looks like Mad Eye Moody on ice. The thing is, in that final scene, the woman you respect, admire and relate to is the woman caked in filth. The woman you root for and care about is the woman who kicked ass. The young concubines are superfluous – and that's a problem.
With very minor plot tweaks, Fury Road could have been made without the five young women, and been better for it. They spend most of the time sitting in the back of the rig, occasionally loading guns but mainly looking terrified or going into labour. Never take a girl on an adventure – she'll just give birth. At one point, when faced with enemy fire, one of the concubines stands stock-still and asks her panicked companion, "Do you think they know they're shooting at us?" Admittedly, the guy holding the gun may have just had his eyes blown out, but really?! That's your response to a hailstorm of bullets? In another bizarre incident, a crazed War Boy is completely transformed by five minutes alone with a sympathetic woman. The transformative power of female understanding? Or the exploitation of a gender stereotype for the sake of a plot twist? Time and time again, these concubines fail to excite or excel. Because their sole purpose within the film is to be protected, they are reduced to vehicles for Furiosa's escapades.
Besides Furiosa, the one notable female warrior is Valkyrie, played by Megan Gale (and even she had to spend some screen time naked before earning her right to party with the War Boys). Valkyrie rides with an all-female tribe of gypsy geriatrics called the Vuvalini. These women are brilliant – utterly bloodthirsty and thrilling for battle. Miller treated these older women with respect and good humour. They are capable and sassy, endearing but not sentimentalised. In contrast to his treatment of his beautiful young female cast, he's not afraid to get the Vuvalini dirty, or hurt – probably because their faces are already pretty battered.
To some extent, the concubines' behaviour can be explained by their backgrounds – they were sheltered and enslaved, raised to be subservient breeders. Leaving the overlord's Citadel was undoubtedly an act of bravery. However, throughout the film the young runaways are protected by strong older female characters – they are never really allowed to be or become strong women. Although they become incrementally more involved in the action, they constantly need rescuing. When Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's character takes initiative and performs an independent act of extreme bravery, Miller rewards her for her efforts by flinging her from the war rig, an event that kills both her and her unborn child. The warlord finds her body and orders a caesarean to remove the child. I was surprised that I didn't find the caesarean itself particularly shocking – it was contextualised by the brutalising, misogynistic, male-centric, apocalyptic performative space. What was disconcerting was the pitifulness of the short-lived attempt to disguise Huntington-Whiteley's character as a heroine, when she was destined to simply present another covert example of why young girls shouldn't play outside their comfort zone.
Mad Max: Fury Road is fantastic to look at. It's the best action movie I've ever seen. That said, the attempt to market the film as a feminist statement is misguided. Although Imperator Furiosa ranks among the top blockbuster heroes of the cinematic age, Fury Road largely stereotypes young women as annoyingly hopeless and in need of rescue. It's not enough to simply hire many young female cast members – you have to put real meat on their characters' bones to make them something other than pretty-faced, skeletal dead weight. Defined by physical beauty rather than actual capabilities, Fury Road's young female cast aren't given enough significant screen time or space to truly develop. They end up being a drag, rather than a driving force behind the high-speed chase through Miller's apocalyptic wasteland.
Let the girls get dirty, Hollywood. Furiosa and her gang of gore-loving grandmas have shown that women can play with the boys.
Mad Max: Fury Road is now showing.
Tedi Bills is a freelance writer and an English Literature PhD student at the Australian National University.
