6 Lessons That Mad Max: Fury Road Can Teach Future Action Movies

Mad Max: Fury Road is everyone's new favorite action movie. Blending over-the-top violence, dystopian world-building, intense action and injected with a healthy dose of forward-thinking feminism, the film has put every other summer blockbuster to shame and made at least this writer question just where director George Miller has been all these years. Because the new Mad Max is so very spectacular, for so many reasons, we greatly hope that a number of Hollywood producers and filmmakers are sitting up and taking notice. Just in case they're not though, here are several lessons that all action movies can learn from Mad Max: Fury Road. Lesson 1: Your Hero Doesn’t Have To Be All That Heroic There are two heroes of Fury Road: Max himself, and Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa. From the outset, Max appears to be out for himself, even trying to beat the shit out of Furiosa and steal her truck, thus abandoning her and the Wives to recapture and potential execution. Even when he joins with the women, Max continues to be pretty silent and pretty reluctant, holding guns on his companions, grunting and growling his way through, and at one point almost taking the bike and running. Only very late in the game does he attempt to do more than just go along for the ride. For her part, Furiosa’s motivations are murkier than Max’s – she claims that she is “searching for redemption,” although it is never made clear what has she done as an Imperator to make her feel like she needs to be redeemed. In short: these are two heroes who often behave un-heroically. Neither Max nor Furiosa are any better than they appear. They do the right things for the right reasons, but they’re also destructive, damaged warriors, capable of exceptional cruelty and selfishness. Neither of them sits around ruminating on their flaws, however, they just go right ahead and get the job done. Lesson 2: You Don’t Have To Spend Fifty Minutes On World-Building One of the great downfalls of any film set in a fantasy world is the need to quickly and clearly establish the rules of that world (and be certain you don’t break them). Many fantasy films – and this includes the entirety of the MCU – spend an inordinate amount of time setting up the rules and dictates of the society, the powers of the characters, and the physical and social limitations they live under. Mad Max: Fury Road is part of a franchise, but it is also that rarity: a sequel that does not depend upon an intimate knowledge of its predecessors. The film gives us the bare essential information at the very beginning, and then flings us headlong into the action as Max flies across the landscape, being pursued by some obviously nasty people. But it also doesn’t stop there: the film establishes characters and their places in the society with minimal exposition and almost entirely through the use of short snippets of dialogue and short establishing scenes. We know the construct of the society without ever being directly told what an “Imperator” is, or how Immortan Joe got to be the patriarch. We know about characters being branded as possessions, and about Joe’s army of blindly devoted warriors based on a complex, hyper-masculine religious system. We see the juxtaposition of the Vuvalini (the Earth Mothers) and the patriarchal industrial complex of the Citadel and Gas-Town. We know that Max is being used as a “blood bank” for a warrior, that some women are forced into becoming “breeders,” that mother’s milk is a precious commodity. And we know all of this without ever having to be explicitly told. Lesson 3: Women Are People This is a lesson that all too many films have profound difficulty in grasping. Fury Road has been touted as a “feminist” action movie, but what that really means is that the female characters are treated as whole human beings and not plot devices. The film passes the Bechdel Test by the first introduction of the Wives; the trajectory of the plot is more concerned with Furiosa’s redemption than with Max’s; the antidote to Joe’s patriarchal warrior construct are women working together to bring life back to the earth. Capable women are at the center of the narrative – and they are women of all ages and all types. While the film adheres to certain broad tropes, it takes those tropes and turns each character into actual human beings. Lesson 4: Tropes Can Be Used To Excellent Effect Mad Max: Fury Road is chock full of easily recognizable tropes, which is part of what makes its world-building so effective and apparently simple. Max himself occupies the role of reluctant hero, the man doing good despite his surface drive for self-preservation. Furiosa is the hero in search of redemption, the Wives are initially couched as damsels in distress, and Immortan Joe is the quintessentially corrupt oligarch. All stand fully in the action movie/fantasy world stereotypes. While never destroyed, the film brilliantly bends and subverts the tropes, building each character from archetypes into full-blown human beings. There’s something heart-warming about knowing who the heroes and villains are, being able to recognize them by both sight and sound, but also accepting them as fully-fledged inhabitants of this bizarre dystopian world. The binaries in this film - matriarchy vs. patriarchy, earth vs. industry, life vs. death, good vs. evil – are both easy to define and made extraordinarily complex within the confines of a more or less straightforward action film. Lesson 5: Excess Has To Have A Point Nothing in the movie theaters right now is as excessive as Mad Max: Fury Road. Flaming-throwing guitars, big ass explosions, an army that brings its own soundtrack, this is a thumping, roaring, crashing, banging film, with sweeping character types, a rich apocalyptic landscape and almost no respite from the thundering violence that occupies every turn. But for all its excess, Fury Road is a cohesive and well-put-together film, relying not just upon big explosions but adequate character development and the nuance behind those explosions. It comes in at exactly two hours long, a comparatively short film when you take into account Age of Ultron and its fellows. The excess is never…excessive, instead using its mad mentality to treat of contemporary issues while still giving us our fill of flame-throwers and roaring engines. Fury Road takes on issues of capitalism, industrialization, religious mania, feminism, and the effect of patriarchy on the whole of society. The patriarchal construct here is damaging to both the women who are treated as property and the young men, the warriors, who are duped into sacrificing their lives for Joe by being promised a place in Valhalla. Puncturing contemporary fanaticism and the military industrial complex in one fell swoop might seem remarkable in a film that also features a flame-throwing guitarist and an army high on blood, but it manages. Lesson 6: You Can Set Up A Sequel Without Making It The Film's Focus Sequels and franchises are the name of the game right now, and I’m on record as hating the constant en-franchising of every single film. But it’s easy to forget that Fury Road is a sequel, and there’s a reason for that beyond the fact that it does not star a young and angry Mel Gibson. Mad Max: Fury Road is a perfect standalone film. It establishes the world surrounding it and depicts a single event in the life of Max with rising and falling action and a satisfying denouement. While it sets up for future installments, it does not rely either on a knowledge of past films (to which there are only a few, oblique references that do not make up much of character motivation) or on the establishment of a franchise. In other words: Fury Road sets up for a sequel without making the franchise its central concern. Unlike many films – looking at you, MCU – that seem to be extended commercials for the next installment, Mad Max: Fury Road can stand on its own merits while also leaving things open for another film, as Furiosa and Max’s narrative comes to a close and Max heads off in search of redemption. Take note, filmmakers: this is how it’s done.