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

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.