>>163
>Do you think there's anything else going on underneath the surface?
I don't, and that's what I mean. Fury Road is an action movie whose inciting event happens to be that some women want to escape a harem in a post-apocalyptic setting. People these days are so hyperfocused on realism/story (and there's so much money to be made in outrage politics) that they can't separate fictional events from real life events.
<brave and stunning women break away from a patriarchal oppressor!
>in a REAL post-apocalypse those women wouldn't act like that!
etc.
Then a few minutes later we see war wagons with guitar flamethrowers and bass drums hooked up to speakers the size of a house, and our protagonist is strapped to the front of a dune buggy as a human blood bag. It's not a movie interested in realism, the setting making sense, or even believability: it's an onslaught of cool stuff and action scenes that are held together with simple character beats.
>Immortan Joe is a warlord who rules his area of the desert with an iron fist and has a harem of women whom he sires children with.
>One group of women wants to escape because they don't like being prisoners.
>Later in the movie we learn that Joe's selective breeding actually did amount to something, because one of the women who escaped actually bore a healthy human child, which is a rarity in the setting.
>However, both she and her child died as a direct result of her attempting to escape.
That moment isn't meant to be a scornful indictment of the women's actions, it's meant to be a brief break from all the chaos and mayhem that forewent it. The viewer realizes that Joe's eugenics were actually onto something, and that he isn't quite as evil or as one-dimensional as the viewer likely thought he was. We can see that Joe's soldiers genuinely believed in the hope of the selective breeding producing non-mutants, and that the child being stillborn is a great emotional wound to them. Then we get more car chases and explosions. The action wouldn't be meaningful without the characters, but that doesn't mean the characters are more important than the action.
One particular example that made me realize people were either idiots or deliberately dense about the movie was the scene at the beginning where Joe opens his floodgates and warns his subjects "not to become addicted to water." This is obviously a joke, because you can't be addicted to water any more than you can be addicted to breathing air; drinking water is a necessity, not a luxury. I remember one video (I think it was by E;R) that totally misunderstood the scene: the author truly seemed to think that Joe was looking out for his subjects and the line about becoming addicted to water was meant to imply he was rationing it - even though the viewer can see hundreds of gallons of water falling to the ground and being wasted in that very scene.
The whole situation is just another type of nitpicking like the Nostalgia Critic and other hacks make/made livings from ("uh, excuse me, are we REALLY supposed to believe . . .", except because it's nitpicking related to identity politics people think it's untouchable.