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.
