Justice at the end of Fury Road

Abstract

The 2015 reboot of George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, with the long-promised and long-in-production Mad Max: Fury Road, provides an opportunity to reflect on the 33 years between the previous instalment - Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome - and the present. Indeed, much has changed. The titular Max is now played by British actor Tom Hardy rather than the mostly Australian Mel Gibson, and the celebrated desert landscape around Broken Hill has been replaced by the Namibian desert in South Africa. The visceral rawness of the earlier films, in which survivors of the apocalypse drive and battle over the remnants of civilization, has now been captured in vivid high-definition digital. Although the narrative arc of the franchise is left open at the conclusion of Fury Road, there is a sense of an ‘end’ to the film. In this chapter, the ends of Fury Road are explored - primarily the end of the themes seemingly celebrated by earlier films: the violent culture of men and cars in Australia. Hardy’s Max does not save, and he does not lead; these roles are well occupied by Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa. Unlike the other films, where Max’s heroism ends with the conservative continuation of patriarchy, in Fury Road there is the possibility of transformation. Emerging from the death and destroyed machines is another engagement with technology and gender. It does not flee, but instead returns to build a home at the origin.