Wahhh! Get out of our treehouse! Who wants to see a film about dungarees and mooncups?

It helps to remember that feminism is about equal opportunities for both genders, and not about “girls are better than boys”. That’s why it was possible for George Miller to *accidentally* make a feminist film. To paraphrase Geena Davis of http://seejane.org/, all you need to do is make sure that around half the lead characters and half of all the bit-parts are female. That doesn’t mean adding extra girlfriends and hairdressers – it means sharing out the interesting roles equally, in a way that reflects real life. Just by his casting choices, George Miller has created a feminist-friendly film. It’s that simple. It happens so rarely that there are myriad little ways in which this film has surprised and delighted women – moments that will probably pass a male viewer by. Finally we can see ourselves on a big screen in a blockbuster action movie. Some of us welled up with emotion, like so many henchmen did when they saw themselves represented in AUSTIN POWERS: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY as real, independent people with their own feelings and their own stories.

Not just a woman getting to fight, shoot and drive – even something so simple as a female rescuee on a screen who has dialogue other than the hero’s first name (“Indy!” “Doctor!” “Superman!” “Leon!”) and even indulges in the odd ideological rant; who knows her way around an engine and a toolbox, has maybe used some of those tools to carve her own arms up and leave those scars; who snarls “SCHLANGER” out of a car window; who knows that there are better ways of helping out in a fight than smashing a vase over the back of someone’s head. People who aren’t henchmen or women – Mark Kermode for example – mistakenly dismiss these interesting and diverse characters as a concession to the male gaze, when their whole purpose is to challenge it. They aren’t Slave Girl Leias or Fay Wrays; they are rape victims, and Eve Ensler was shipped in to advise them on how that could have shaped their characters. They’re not pretty for us – they’re pretty for the story. Mainstream films have been telling us for ages that women are not cool or even relevant when we are over 30 and/or funny looking and/or funny. MMFR features a whole rebel motorcycle club full of wise crackin’ wastelander women over sixty, dag nabbit.

“People keep saying, ‘strong women’ but we are actually just women. We had a filmmaker that understood the truth of women is powerful enough and we don’t want to be put on pedestals or made to be unnaturally strong.” – Charlize Theron

The earlier MM films were more bloke-filled but they still offered a shotgun wielding farm owner in MM (Sheila “Prisoner” Florance), the (albeit unnamed) Warrior Woman in MMRW and Tina Turner in MMBT. MMFR presents us with the patriarchal concept of a female apocalypse survivor – the dairy animal and the breeder, who have survived only under the protection of men. It then shows us what a real female survivor would look like, offering women their own Sanjuro Kuwabatake, their own Dirty Harry. We have Sigourney Weaver, we have Geena Davis, we have a few young archers; and they are all wonderful but it’s still nowhere near enough. Women are just as keen as men to fantasise about pwning a dystopia. You don’t see a female polar bear starving to death because it can’t open a jam jar, or a lioness running away from a spider, so pls don’t discredit half of the human race next time you’re planning for Armageddon.

Riley Keough plays “Capable”, one of the “five wives” who rage, “we are not things!”. Ironically, she has been referred to as “Elvis Presley’s red-haired granddaughter” and similar by several journalists (some of whom were female). If you like, you may refer to Elvis Presley as Riley Keough’s dead brunette granddad, as he isn’t up to much else at the moment. Capable’s acceptance of and affection for conflicted warboy Nux has a faintly ridiculous tenderness that makes me think of Jodie Foster handing poor, broken Mel Gibson a beaver puppet and saying “Show me where it hurts”.

 

Not That Brian May

Brian May is one of the key sounds of the Australian New Wave – he scored the creepypasta 1978 film PATRICK (there is an ominous remake available on Netflix, with a paltry one-star rating) and also provided the soundtrack to the first MM film: a feverish orchestral craquelure, peppered with weird Milk Tray motifs. For MMRW he got a bit more John Williams, which complemented the Star Warsy wipe transitions. MMFR’s music comes from composer Junkie XL, who cut his teeth on scores for Xbox racers and ended up working with Hans Zimmer on big comic-book films.

 

Comics

Let’s talk about Brendan McCarthy. He is a feisty British comic artist with a penchant for the anarchic and a natural talent for storytelling. It’s thanks to him that the scraps of dialogue in MMFR are so succinct and on point. The Warboys hang out of windows and flop on bonnets like blissed-out dogs on the road – and in a particular moment of rapture one of them squeals, “Oh what a day, what a lovely day!!”. In the eighties McCarthy worked with emo-fop Peter Milligan on Freakwave, a MM inspired series; and moved on in the nineties to even more outre titles such as Shade: The Changing Man. He’s also part of the 2000 A.D. family, so who knows why that brat Alex Garland was chosen to script DREDD. Which leads me to THE BEACH, which shares a composer with MMFR. Small wasteland!

 

Bad Guys

The bad guys of the earlier MM films ranged from John Waters roadscum via new-Romantic queer fetish to Gilliam rabble; MMFR has Power Rangers villains reworked by Mervyn Peake. Every single character and vehicle in a MM film will always have you aching to buy the toy. It’s just a shame that movie merchandise is so often aimed at the kidult’s cabinet these days, and not the backyard sandpit – the world needs Kenner style MMFR figurines with articulated joints, and some die-cast Tonka miniatures. Did you know that Hugh Keays-Byrne was in a TV adaptation of Moby Dick, with Ted Levine, Patrick Stewart, Henry Thomas and Gregory Peck? And you thought SILVERADO had the ne plus ultra of cast lists.

 

How many homages did you spot?

MM in MMFR is always having flashbacks. This brought to mind something my mother told me when I started reading TinTin. She pointed out that he’d been knocked unconscious so often, that IRL he would have severe brain damage. There was a moment in MM when I was watching Tom Hardy’s eye twitch and I thought “God – it’s like he’s actually mad!”. Then I remembered the name of the film was MAD MAX. I’m stupid in this way. His flashbacks contain scraps of early MM carnage – explosions, bugging eyeballs. Because if you survived all the MM films, and were MM, that would probably happen. Like when you or I remember an excruciating social faux pas, and actually cry out in shame. He remembers societal faux pas that marked the breakdown of civilisation and that’s even worse! You guys!

Other visual homages to early MM: low angle sand faceplants, polevaulting highwaymen, Lord of the Flies bodypaint, long-handled bolt cutters – these are a few of my favourite things.

 

Editresses and Art Directresses

17% of editors in the film industry today are women, according to the Celluloid Ceiling report, and Margaret Sixel had only ever worked with pigs, penguins and nuns before she came out of the kitchen, made Tom Hardy a peanut butter and honey sandwich and took her sewing scissors to MMFR. By her design, the action is full throttle but we know exactly where we are at any given point – who’s in the lead, what’s about to blow, which way leads to the desert storm. MMFR’s peers often allow their material to dissolve in a mash of fire and sweat but Sixel is such an excellent and operatic navigator that we can even embrace a brief descent into blue ‘n’ orange, or a gratuitous 3D shrapnel bukkake.

Art director Jacinta Leong made the dieselpunk war rigs happen. It must have been like ordering a car in Burger King. I’ll have a Gigahorse – that’s a pair of Chevy 502 engines in two Cadillac bodies with extra shocks, bump stops and a gobful of spray chrome. They had to look obscenely beautiful and work as authentic and safe vehicles. Leong used a 3D modelling program to trial the designs, and troubleshoot any potential interference between spiked wheel and overwrought chassis. The same program was used to block out some of the indoor action scenes. She worked with second art director Shira Hockman and set decorator Katie Sharrock, who developed the embossed tail pipes and ‘Nam style skull motifs that complete the traditional MM look. Furiosa’s War Rig is based on a Tatra T 815 Truck with a unique jack-knifing risk, so it needed to be as closely choreographed as its drivers, passengers and guards.

Hot tip: If you loved Furiosa’s war rig, and have “toot the air horn on a Peterbilt 281” on your bucket list then these guys can literally help you make that happen: www.thedevilonwheelsmovie.com/ Meanwhile, there’s always scruffy Bethesda mods.

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