After a thirty year wait, the fourth movie in the Mad Max series is finally out. It’s a big, visually stunning action film which builds on the dystopian ideas explored throughout the first three, and in a refreshing twist, it is full of empowered female characters whose purpose extends further than pretty-love-interest or token-tough-girl.
The female actors cast in Fury Road are all physically gorgeous powerhouses, which is a positive start. There’s Riley Keough as ‘Capable’, Zoë Kravitz as ‘Toast the Knowing’, Courtney Eaton as ‘Cheedo the Fragile’, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as ‘Splendid Angharad’ and Abbey Lee as ‘Dagfrom’ who are known as ‘the wives’ and who are all on a mission of survival led by Charlize Theron’s character ‘Imperator Furiosa’.
As part of the preparation for their roles, George Miller asked Eve Ensler — author of the Vagina Monologues — to speak with the actors to lend insight into playing a character who may have been affected by rape or sexual abuse. In Fury Road the women are strong and smart. They stick together and they win. All of which has apparently enraged men’s rights activists around the world who see the film as having a feminist agenda lacking the misogynist values we’ve become so accustomed to in our action flicks.
Thankfully, the world’s general reaction to the angry men who took to their keyboards to call for a boycott has hovered somewhere between ridicule and distain which might ultimately even do more for feminism than George Miller’s new blockbuster.
For more on why Mad Max: Fury Road is the feminist action flick you’ve been waiting for, check out Vice’s take here.
Credits
Text Briony Wright
Photography Jasin Boland