Mad Max (film review)

...can't say i found Mad Max: Fury Road all that feminist, as some seem to claim*. it still seemed like a case of damsels in distress to me. the "wives" were pathetic 1 dimensional creatures (did any of them actually have a personality?), consistently portrayed as unable to fend for themselves, looked like they came straight off the cat walk and serve mostly as eye candy throughout the film, except for when they're giving birth or falling in love with the repentant boy (wtf was that about?). Furiosa is the only female in the film that's really badass or gets to compare with most of the male "warriors" and even then she has to take Max's lead 'coz her own plan failed and then get saved by him with a blood transfusion towards the film's end (wouldn't it have been so much cooler if it had been her calmly saving him with her awesome first aid skills?). they could have done something with the whole horrors of macho dystopia thing with everyone drinking breast milk and trying to kill each other; that was kind of cool; as was the post-apocalyptic petrol fetishism motif. however, women borrowing the gun for a bit isn't a feminist narrative and neither is a cartoon harem of wives running away from a cartoon patriarch. there's an element of "wow, an action movie that doesn't totally shit all over women"**, which is defo more welcome than your average action piece of shit, but the main appeal, on a gendered level, seems to be simply that it includes more offensive tropes about masculinity than it does about femininity. big whoop. Mulan will have more of a lasting feminist impact***.

*the origins of this speculation appear to be enraged MRAs. fucking boo-hoo.
**so it passes the bechdel test - so what? so do around 50+% of blockbusters.
***that said, Mulan achieves respect only by emulating a masculine stereotype. ...and then there's the racist and frequently incorrect Chinese stereotypes. however, she does also single-handedly save china, completely off her own steam, which is pretty sick.