Can a movie filled with tons of cars racing around and smashing the shit out of each other also be a little subversive? Well, you probably won’t hear the f-word tossed around the vicinity of "Furious 7" any time soon, but "Mad Max: Fury Road," in addition to going full throttle, apparently has something on its mind, too, when it opens this weekend. As you’ll recall, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley recently revealed that "Vagina Monologues" author, Eve Ensler, served as a consultant on the movie, and she’s shouting out the film for its progressive character work.
"I read the script and was blown away. One out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime — it’s a central issue of our time, and that violence against women relates to racial and economic injustice. This movie takes those issues head-on. I think George Miller is a feminist, and he made a feminist action film. It was really amazing of him to know that he needed a woman to come in who had experience with this," Ensler told Time.
Indeed, our own review of the movie notes that the action blockbuster "takes a traditionally testosterone-fueled series and reimagines it as a kind of feminist manifesto with much on its mind." Bold stuff, and Ensler details how Miller accomplished this task.
"George was looking to create empowered women, not victims, and I think he accomplished that. I don’t remember seeing so many women of all different ages in any movie before. I was really blown away by the older women in the film who were just as good fighters as the men. I’d never seen that before. They all have so much agency and independence," she continued. "Charlize’s character is also really fierce. But at the same time, she’s compassionate. And that’s a hard thing to pull off. All the women felt full in terms of their backstory. Even something subtle like their clothes in the film: they’re stripped down and vulnerable and objectified in the beginning. By the end, they have their clothes on. They’ve taken their bodies back and themselves back in some essential way.
Fascinating stuff. Check out a new featurette on the "wives" of the film below, coupled with a 30-minute interview with George Miller on CBC Radio‘s "q."