Thanks, I Hate It: Mad Max: Fury Road

There are impressive things in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. The stunt work is astounding, for one. The scene in which Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) watches his soldier Nux (Nicholas Hoult) eat dirt while attempting to board a moving war rig and shouts with gleeful disgust “Mediocre!” before abandoning the kid to his fate is both hilarious and a genuine gut-punch. But the rest? The rest, gang, is bullshit.

If you’re going to reboot a beloved geek dude series of yesteryear, I strongly agree with the idea that you should make it about women. Fury Road, though, with its five immaculately beautiful and more or less interchangeable escaped concubines, isn’t so much about women as it happens to include women. Preferable to the alternative, sure, but it plays directly into the movie’s repugnant tendency to equate goodness with beauty and deformity—specifically congenital defects like Corpus Colossus’s (Quentin Kenihan) dwarfism and osteogenesis imperfecta, or the People Eater’s (John Howard) grossly swollen clubfoot—with evil. 

By confining deformity to the film’s nakedly monstrous antagonists, Miller uses the lazy, bigoted shorthand of physical disability to communicate characters’ personalities. We know Immortan Joe is evil because of the warts and lesions covering his body, framed with ominous stillness from the chest down as he’s powdered and dressed before speaking to his people. There’s no face to focus on, just ugliness accompanied by menacing music. I don’t know what else to say about a movie where the bad guys are on oxygen and in wheelchairs and the good guys are Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron (whose disability is a war wound, not a birth defect), and a bunch of picture perfect magazine models.

Then there are the fat women, glimpsed once near the film’s opening and then again for a moment near its end. In the former appearance, they’re being milked. They’re literally being milked. As a fat woman I can’t tell you how much misery and self-loathing I felt while watching that in a packed theater, people’s giggles and exclamations of “ewwwww” ringing in my ears. That’s all fat women’s bodies get in Fury Road. We’re things not just in the movie but to the men behind the camera, as much as the oh-so-feminist graffiti in the brides’ vacated harem quarters begs to differ.

Ideological disappointment aside, the movie’s more-is-more approach to updating the spare, empty world of Miller’s earlier The Road Warrior and its companion films left me cold. Ten times as many trucks, bigger explosions, more fantastic acrobatics. If it had been in service to a new theme, a new plot, I might have been able to get my teeth into it, but here? It feels like a slice of cake with three times the icing it needs, sickly sweet and cloying. The overexposed reds and yellows which make up its palette only heighten the impression of Too Much. And what is it, in the end? Just a story about meatheads crashing into meatheads until the beautiful meathead is president of the wasteland instead of the ugly one.