I’m putting most of this under a readmore so that you can:

a) avoid spoilers

b) avoid being trigger by the warnings of the things in the film that are hardcore triggering.

I got to see a free screening of this last night (and I’m glad, I would NOT pay for this movie) and I’m only writing it up because I think people need to be warned about what’s gonna happen when they see this movie.

If brutal reproductive violence and atrocious amounts of ableism and fat hating are things you need to avoid, just don’t even go near this movie. Find something else. Save that money for a better movie that will not trigger the fuck out of you. ‘cause this will.

It’s not such a great movie that I’d tell anyone it’s worth enduring those things for. The best part of the movie are the striking visuals, but the plot isn’t anything special, a sack of potatoes who could jump onto moving things could’ve played Mad Max for all it was worth.

It’s basically a very, very long and tedious car chase scene that breaks up once and a while and lets a movie happen. When you make explosions and high speed chases boring, you’ve done something wrong. Like, I dunno, making them 75% of the content of your already mediocre film.

There’s nothing in this film that made the world building particularly interesting or even coherent. Wow, lots of metal and grease and funny names and post apocalyptic stuff. WOW I HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT EVER DONE BEFORE AT ALL IN MY LIFE. [/sarcasm]

So I would suggest that if the things I’m about to discuss aren’t things you can handle well, don’t waste the effort/spoons/well being (and money) on this movie.



So, trying to be light on the spoilers, the basic plotline is that in a post-apocalyptic world Mad Max gets captured by Immortan Joe’s warboys and brought back to the Citadel. At the same time, Imperator Furiosa makes off with Immortan Joe’s “breeders” or wives, headed for her homeland (the Green Place). Max ends up getting dragged along when Immortan Joe sends his war boys in pursuit.

As you can guess, Mad Max teams up with Imperator Furiosa and the fleeing wives and off they go.

The wives technically have names as characters, but we don’t even hear all of them. Or at least I didn’t catch them.

One of the wives, Angharad, is about 7 months pregnant when they’re fleeing.

And something very, very bad happens to her. She is hanging on to the side of the rig on which they’re escaping when they go through a narrow part of a canyon and she gets clipped and run over.

The others have to leave her behind, but then we see Immortan Joe standing there, holding her broken body in his arms. She’s still technically alive and breathing, but not for long.

Fast forward to when Immortan Joe and his people have taken a break in their chase and the closest thing they have to a doctor says that Angharad is about to die. Immortan Joe asks about the baby and says to just cut it out of her.

So the doctor guy does. Cut it out of her. While the gore is kept off screen, we hear a lot of wet squishy noises and then we see a lifeless undersized baby being pulled out of her by the feet, examined like a piece of meat and then sort of flopped aside because the child is dead.

It is even more disgusting and disturbing than I have described here. I’m not someone who’s terribly triggered by reproductive violence and I wasn’t outright triggered, but god I felt sick watching it.

It was gratuitous. Just plain and simple. There was NO reason for it be in the movie. None. It’s not even something that serves the purpose of showing that Immortan Joe and the Citadel are really, really fucked up. The movie has emphasized that over and over again.

And when I say emphasized, I mean used disabled bodies as signs of evilness.

A lot of people are going to start screaming, “But Furiosa only has one arm and she’s the heroine of the movie!”

I like the character of Furiosa, I think she’s done fairly well. But one well done character does not wipe out the mountain of ableism in the movie or the fact that this film uses disabled bodies to emphasize how evil, decrepit and disgusting Immortan Joe is time after time.

The plot pretty much revolves around the premise that Immortan Joe has these wives because he wants a perfect son. Because his sons definitely aren’t. One of them has to wear an oxygen tank and tube under his nose all the time. Another has osteogenesis imperfecta. It’s all but said that the reason they’re disabled (read: disgusting, broken) is because Immortan Joe is so morally repugnant as a character and his children’s bodies reflect that.

That’s not okay. That’s never okay. There is nothing you could do with Furiosa that would make that okay for a film to do.



Then there’s the vicious fat hate. There’s the room full of very fat women who are hooked up to milking machines because they provide what is called “mother’s milk” (and it literally is). It’s framed as part of a sequence that shows us how much is wrong with the Citadel, and these bodies are meant to be viewed as disgusting. Because fatness is another shorthand here for wrong, broken, disgusting. There’s no way I can see that the movie DIDN’T intend for the audience to immediately think of cows.

Then there’s Immortan Joe’s brother(?) - The People Eater. Who walks around with two holes cut in his shirt so he can wear nipple clamps on a chain and stroke them from time to time in the movie for the “eww!” factor for the audience. In a later scene, we see that the People Eater has extremely large, swollen feet indicative of severe lymphedema. (Which is when fluid is excessively retained in one part of the body. It often gets confused with lipedema which is the excess collection of fat cells in a location on the body, which all gets heavily associated with fat people).

So take all this and juxtapose it with the fact that the good guys in this movie, the one who “save” the world (in as much as it can be saved) are supermodels (no, really, everyone of the wives has been a big name model, including Zoe Kravitz), Tom Hardy, and Charlize Theron with a prosthetic arm.

There’s a much deeper analysis about the dichotomy between someone who is born with a disability and someone who acquires it later and how it’s treated in this film, but suffice to say, the film kind of makes it clear that if you lost an arm in battle, you’re fine. That’s an okay disability. If you were born that way, obviously it’s because you’re disgusting and evil and so’s your dad (literally).

It’s okay to love Furiosa and appreciate her without denying the mountain of ableism in this film.

All in all, it’s style isn’t enough to rescue it from the lack of substance. It’s just not a great movie. It’s an okay movie. It’s a mediocre movie. It’s not the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s just not that great in the end.