Headscratchers / Mad Max: Fury Road

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

New entries on the bottom.

Warlords

• Are all the Warboys sons of Immortan Joe?
  • Nope, it's mentioned that Joe's sons are warlords.
  • The Warboys are any boys born with obvious deformities or chronic conditions, but are still in fighting condition. Immortan Joe's biological sons are all in high positions in his organisation.
  • There is a deleted scene showing a woman offering up her son to Joe's people as a future warboy.
  • Some are and some aren't. The majority are children of the wastelanders living down at the base of citadel who are young enough for Joe to mold into what he would them to be both physically and psychologically. The rest are his own children who were born with some deformity that made them a less the ideal heir to the throne but were still capable of fighting. Scabbard and his brother are the exception because unless something better came along Scabbard was going to inherit while his deformed brother was small and weak but intellectually very sound making him an ideal lookout.

Escapes

• I understand that Furiosa's past was intentionally left unrevealed, but how could a woman with a record of repeated escape attempts possible rise to such a high position and be entrusted with an important mission? Badass or not, such behavior usually conveys a lack of integrity and loyalty.
  • It was never said that she'd tried to escape before. She mentioned going back to the Green Place (although clearly not for a while), but that could have been as part of a raiding party (which, given that she was taken from there by the War Boys, is clearly something that has happened in the past). Presumably by the time she was trusted enough to go on raids with the War Boys, she was too brainwashed to even attempt to escape while she was there. It was only after she had risen to high authority that she had her Heel Realization.
  • Its likely the distance was too great for the smaller vehicles she was initially entrusted with, and that the trip could only really be made in a War Rig, a vehicle that only the most trusted in Immortan's cult can drive. Thus when she was given control of the rig, she could finally make the journey.
  • That was why she was looking for redemption.
  • Or, instead of going on raiding parties, she always started escape attempts, but never got very far in a small, unprotected vehicle. She always returned to the Citadel, and Joe never heard about her attempts to leave.
  • Because she never tried to escape. She simply said she'd been this way, "many times." So, take the facts: She's high ranking in Joe's army. She's been to the Green Place multiple times. Joe has many wives, through kidnapping, who clearly have grown up in a healthier, mutation- and radiation-free environment. Furiosa believes she can redeem herself by bringing the wives to the Green Place. What does it all add up to? Furiosa has clearly performed many raids for Joe in order to rise up the ranks. Over the years, some of those raids were against the Green Place/Many Mothers. Probably through the war paint, the guilt, fear, and shame, she didn't try to escape or sabotage those raids, and hid her face from her former family as well.
  • More likely she'd been raiding the Bikers for wives and resources, as she has no idea that the Green Place no longer exists until she meets the other women. She's clearly interacted with the Bikers before, to have cut a deal with them to get rid of the War Rig's escorts.

Opening timing

• In the very beginning Max is standing by his car, surveying the surroundings, even has time for a little snack... all the while a whole army of motorized raiders is homing on his position. Shouldn't he have heard them and darted long before that?
  • It's not explained, but I would guess that he had driven up there after evading an earlier pursuit, and was watching and waiting in the hopes that they would pass him by. As he was eating the lizard, he saw that they'd spotted his trail (or him), and so hiding wasn't going to work.
  • He might have been too deep in thought to boot; right before he takes off, the voices in his head start getting louder - and only then does he look over his shoulder. This happens again just before the final leg of the chase; he simply observes as Furiosa and Co. head into the sands, and runs after them once he starts hearing the voices that haunt him.
  • Besides the door of the Interceptor, Max has his swag out. The implication is that Max has either been there overnight or is intending to do so. When he finally takes notice of the approaching Warboys he is shown to be grabbing and throwing this gear into the car before driving off. While it is difficult to judge exactly how much time passes between Max reacting and the Warboys arriving, or the speed the Warboys were travelling in the first place, it is plausable that Max first heard them when they were still a kilometre away, which is not bad for a man fighting the voices in his head and with dreadlocks covering his ears.
  • The voices in his head were mixed with radio static noises, and during the smash-zoom, you can briefly see what looks to be part of a headset. The weird thing he's wearing on his back might be a radio set, and he might have been trying to scan the airwaves for transmissions from survivors. It would explain why he didn't hear the oncoming warparty until too late.

War Boy escort

• What was Furiosa's plan to get rid of her War Boy escort? She couldn't have predicted the sandstorm would conveniently get rid of them all in addition to giving her some distance on the pursuing war parties, could she?
  • Obviously the plan was getting to the narrow canyon, where she can crush the escort vehicles. Then there was the the Biker gang, who presumably agreed to get rid of the pursuing parties in exchange for fuel. It quickly got out of hand, but at least Furiosa wasn't relying on blind luck to escape.
  • Listening to the dialogue; this seems to be exactly the case. The Biker gang leader confirms it when he tells her that the deal only mentioned a small handful of pursuers...instead of three full war bands.
  • That still presumes Furiosa getting rid of all the War Boys on the War Rig itself before entering the canyon, when she made clear that only she could be seen or else the deal was off.
  • It's possible that she didn't plan to get rid of them at all, or at least not all of them. Judging by her interactions with her second-in-command before he was killed, she seemed to hold their respect, did not question her, visibly wavered when she was revealed to be betraying Immortan Joe (rather than immediately turning against her), and he also acted much more sane than the other war boys we saw. Add in the fact that Joe treated them as slaves just as much as he did his wives, at least some of the war boys might have joined her.
  • Highly unlikely. At best the chief War Boy who took orders from Furiosa seemed to behave more seriously (he also seemed older then the rest, so that would explain it), but the movie shows they were every bit as fanatical as the rest. In fact, it is with them that we saw the whole "witness me" thing in motion. Plus, as the other troper mentioned, Furiosa's deal with the biker gang was with her and nobody else. She probably intended to kill the War Rig crew herself (she certainly was well armed for the occasion), and leave the others to the bikers.
  • I think Furiosa went through "Buzzard" territory on purpose, expecting that in the battle to come, her escorts and the Buzzards would wipe each other out. Those that survived, she could probably handle herself.
  • On the above note, she wasn't following a road or anything across the territory, why did the Buzzards build a complicated pit trap in the middle of nowhere, which just 'happened' to be directly in the path of their travel?
  • They were indeed following a narrow dirt road.
  • Who says that is the only pit trap? For all we know it is just one of many pit traps, just it is the one of them they happened to run into.
  • Or it wasn't something they dug, but a onetime basement for a pre-apocalypse building that'd long since been torn down for firewood and salvage. All the Buzzards would need to do is hide it with a flimsy covering and then rake up the dust so it looks like the road leads into it.
  • The Valkyrie was waiting in the tower right where Furiosa took them. After 20 years she still knew (vaguely) how to greet them. Maybe she was expecting the Vuvalini to pick them off, like in the old days? The older women seemed very familiar with sniper ambushes whereas the Warboys are, at best, spear-range fighters. Furiosa plots a course to where she knows or suspects the remnants hunt (or where the Warboys hunted them)and hopes to survive the ambush based on being female and remembering the callsigns.

Son/daughter

• Throughout Fury Road, Max is haunted by visions of a young girl that is implied to be his own child who died by being run over before the world was destroyed. The problem is, Max's child, named Sprog, was referred to by male pronouns in the original Mad Max, and was considerably younger than the girl that appears in Max's visions. So is this a Retcon or a continuity Error?
  • Alternate Continuity. Even the original trilogy is inconsistent, they could all be alternate continuities of each other. His Falcon gets destroyed more than once.
  • That, and it's never outright stated that the young girl is actually Max's daughter - for all we know, she was just another innocent that Max had failed to save (and maybe it pains him more than usual if he got to treat her like his own daughter before she died).
  • She does call him "Pa" in that hallucination before he goes to stop Furiosa and the others travelling across the salt. It doesn't rule out ret-cons, alt-cons or adoption but it pretty much cements that he considers her his child or that she used to address him as though he was her father.
  • Even the creator has admitted that there is no actual time line he follows and thinks of all the movies as legendary tales attributed to a man called Mad Max.
  • You do see Max hallucinate another guy tell Max that he abandoned them, implying he might have left an entire community to die. It's possible that the girl might have been a semi-adoptive daughter.
  • Another theory is that the girl is more of a representation than a person. She rather notably had the same kind of curly hair Max's wife had way back in movie one, so maybe she's just a blended version of the family Max lost. If you wanna make it really sad consider that maybe she's all he can remember of the family he lost decades ago.
  • It is entirely possible that he has had other adventures that haven't been told (there are quite a few years between the first movie and this one, after all) and not all of them necessarily turned out well. It could very well be that he's tried to help other beleaguered communities and failed to save them. The girl could be someone among those.
  • This incarnation of Max is a lot more genuinely mad than in the other movies. It's possible the girl doesn't actually exist - she could be nothing more than a manifestation of his broken mind.
  • The Mad Max prequel comics reveal the girl to be Glory the Child, a little girl whom Max rescued from the Buzzards in the Sunken City and brought back to her mother - before both were run over and killed by the remaining pursuing Buzzard.
  • Max's child isn't named "Sprog"; that's just Australian term for baby. It's written right here on TVTropes.
  • What he simply settled down and had another family between thunderdome and fury road. Just like his first family they were killed due to his actions and it drove him truly mad.
  • Probably not his daughter, since she calls Max by his first name throughout the film. It's very rare for a child that age, especially a daughter, to call her parents by name. Or any age for that matter.

Redemption

• Furiosa states openly that she's seeking her redemption, however, couldn't this also apply to Max? Throughout the film he's haunted repeatedly by the voices in head and visions of those he's failed to save. These are vivid enough to affect him even in mid-combat. Though he doesn't say anything of the sort bluntly, he does seem to hint at it when he offers his ploy to Furiosa and the Wives at the turning point of the chase. Hell, he goes after them only after he starts hearing the voices again asking, "why didn't he save them." The way he speaks to Furiosa about finding redemption back at the Citadel didn't feel like it was solely for her - but also himself. Or is that just me misreading a scene?
  • Yes, Max is also after redemption. He even mentions at the beginning that he was "a road warrior, in search of a righteous cause." It's just that for most of the movie, he's so broken he doesn't consider it even slightly likely for them to succeed, and is too pragmatic to throw his life away on principle.

Water Trailer

• As far as this troper knows after multiple viewings, the War Rig left the Citadel for Gas Town loaded with water to trade for fuel (and an extra fuel pod, which Furiosa secretly intended to trade to the canyon bikers for safe passage). Later on, in the final chase, when the pursuers fire harpoons at the rig, we see this water leaking out of the Rig. So here's the question: if the Rig was carrying so much water, should Furiosa have just dumped out all the water that was in the trailer, or just unhitched the trailer altogether? It would have made the Rig much lighter, and thus not only faster, but also less likely to sink into the swamp. Just a minor complaint in an otherwise pretty solid movie.
  • Given that they're in a desert, water is a commodity that you don't throw away lightly. Even if the Green place had existed, water would have still been scarce to come by and a valuable asset to bring.
  • They're in the middle of a desert, dude. Water is more precious than gold there, you don't throw it away. That, and precisely the fact that the rig was heavy allowed it to pass relatively safely through a massive storm where lighter vehicles were thrown around like toys.
  • For most of the movie, it's implied that the crew of the Rig was surviving off of the produce and water Furiosa was originally suppose to deliver to Gas Town and the Bullet Farm. At the final stretch, they still kept it because they needed the trailer to be heavy enough to collapse the canyon's bridge to close it (at this point they didn't think they needed to let Nux make a sacrifice with the whole rig).
  • To reinforce the above statement about the value of the tanker: the caravan clearly intended to trade a couple trucks of produce and that single tanker of water - clean, fallout-free, spring water, mind you- for enough fuel and bullets to make the expedition wildly profitable. This is a setting where gold is valued terms of water.

Swamp People

• So does anyone know who (or what) those things on stilts that lived in the swamp were? They came right out of the blue, and, given the fact that the swamp was poisoned, it seemed odd that they could survive there.
  • The Swamp People were a One-Scene Wonder built on Rule of Scary, that don't get any elaboration due to the film's staying mostly true to Show, Don't Tell, but we can make educated guesses: Most likely they were ex-Vulvalini who refused to leave or eventually broke down and returned to the poisoned Green Lands because, toxic or not, it still held more life and resources than anywhere else for miles around, using stilts to keep away from whatever bad shit was in the water and hunting crows to get through the day, too far gone to do anything more than trudge along til death after their admittedly creepy reveal shot.
  • One of the writers said that the swamp people were the men who were part of the society that the Vuvalini were originally from. How they got there and why they and the Vuvalini went their separate ways isn't explained.

What Exactly Killed Keeper of the Seeds?

• It is heavy blood-loss, no doubt, but what caused it in the first place? And where's the bleeding? In the movie, we've seen the Keeper of the Seeds got severely injured by a chainsaw-wielding Warboy, but while the scenes suggested that she was injured somewhere in the upper part of her body, in the next scenes there was no wound showing except bloody hands. Maybe it's because the action's just going too fast so I didn't catch it but I just can't figure out how her injury killed her. I really wondered what causes her to bleed out?
  • I got the impression that the injury damaged her jugular vein, so she bled to death pretty quickly. As for the blood, she wore a scarf on her neck that might have covered it.
  • She's "not the first one to die of heart attack in combat", to quote the classic.
  • The hedge trimmer stabbed her in the side of the neck. During the very last shot of her as she dies, you can see the bloody hole.

Max's Offscreen Teleportation

• The ending, Max is standing with other characters on the Citadel's rising platform. Furiosa turns around, Max is gone...and appears at ground level in the crowd, which at the point is probably a hundred feet below the platform, with no ropes or ladders in sight.
  • Snagged a loose length of chain off one of the masked guards, jumped during a pan shot (that lift is rather slow), and even if he did jump straight from 10 stories, it wouldn't be the most extreme thing he lived through that morning.

Remember Me?

• Why does Furiosa say this to Immortan Joe right before she kills him? He obviously knows who she is since he mentioned her as the driver of the War Rig before it went to Gas Town. Is there something I'm missing?
  • Nothing at all. It's kind of a "Show, don't tell" tactic. We don't need to know why Furiosa said this, but we can guess from the tone of her voice that there is something deep going on between her and Immortan Joe in the past. She obviously has a grudge with Immortan Joe for something she was forced to do in her past, something that caused a deep scar for her and is the main reason why she seek redemption (from what she told Max in the movie). But since it's not the focus of the main story, George Miller just has Furiosa said this line so we could guess by ourselves what she really means.
  • Another way to read it: Immortan Joe sees all of his War Boys, Furiosa included, as completely interchangeable and expendable. By everything she's done, and by growling "Remember me?" she's asserted that she is not a thing, but an individual, distinct person with her own agency.
  • This interpretation is supported by several scenes in the movie. For one thing, War Boys are obsessed with being seen before they die (with "Witness me!" being their usual go-to line). This being such a big deal points to the fact that Immortan Joe does not seem to pay that much attention to people. More than once in the movie, being looked at by Joe is thought to be an amazing experience - not only that, but it's also something implausible ("He wasn't looking at you, he was just scanning the horizon" is a line from the movie, so Joe paying attention to people is apparently a rare thing). It's also possible that Joe knows Furiosa is one of his people's generals, but he doesn't know her personally and hasn't met her in person. There has to be some kind of chain of command, and the movie establish Joe as living in isolation, and showing up to his people only from afar, as a distant figure. It is not stated explicitly, but it's possible that few people get to see him in person. So perhaps Joe knows Furiosa personally, but up until the "Remember me?" line, he did not realise he made a person he has a (bad) history with one of his Imperators. It would be in character for him, and is supported by some of the scenes from the movie.

Blood Lines

• Didn't Nux cut the blood transfusion IV when cutting the chain that connected him to Max? How did Max get another one to supply Furiosa with blood at the very end? Even if he had more than one, wouldn't it have stayed with him and not Max? Or was there another one that Max kept that I didn't notice (when I was watching explosions, presumably)?
  • They dismantled the whole IV set-up offscreen after meeting the Vuvalini, but Max keeps the plastic tubing. You can see it in the shot where he watches everyone else set off over the salt plains, rolled up and tied to his jacket with a cord, the sight of which stuck in my memory for whatever reason. Tubes like that are handy in lots of situations. You never know, right?
  • Max was probably thinking he could use it to scavenge fuel out of wrecked vehicles, same as we see him doing near the beginning of The Road Warrior.

Ms. Giddy and the Organic Mechanic

• Whatever happened to the two of them, after establishing they were riding with Immortan Joe's personal car and present at Angharad's death and that of her unborn child?
  • Joe was keeping them close at hand because he was worried about damage to the girls during the hunt, and they were the only experienced caregivers, when they fail to save Splendid and her son, if not pulling an outright You Have Failed Me (unlikely given they're still valuable), he probably wasn't pleased to see them, especially given Giddy's defiance and Mechanic's lack of deference, and had them taken out of his sight and under guard by a different car, with the understanding that they'd better save the next girl they catch, or else.
  • The actor who played the Organic Mechanic actually revealed that two scenes concerning this headscratcher entry were filmed, but didn't get into the actual movie. First, after Splendid and her child died, Joe ordered the Mechanic to torture Ms. Giddy, to learn more about where Furiosa was taking the girls (and probably because he was supremely pissed off too), which results on her death. Later, when Joe has his "oh shit" moment and figures that the War Rig was returning to the Citadel, as all the vehicles hastily part in pursuit, the camera would reveal the Mechanic taking a dump offscreen and left behind.

After

• Although by the end of the movie most of Immortan Joe's war convoys are trapped in the canyon and are possibly picked off by the bike raiders, the towns of Bullet Farm and Gastown are still functional. Even with the Bullet Farmer and the People Eater dead, Furiosa, the Wives and whoever can still fight in the Citadel have to deal with an eventual threat from the successors of Gastown and Bullet Farm (particularly the latter), especially when all three communities are within driving distance from each other.
  • That said, assuming the Citadel and the other settlements had a trade alliance—exchanges of water for gas and ammo—all three would have a vested interest in maintaining the old status quo. And if Gastown and Bullet Farm were as repressive to their populations as the Citadel, it's likely they're in the middle of a power vacuum struggle, giving time for Furiosa and her new order to consolidate (or perhaps even marshal) against the other towns. The chess board has been reset, and that means new opportunities for all the players.
  • Also, the two other civilizations are reliant on the water the Citadel produces for continued survival. If they were to attempt a siege, the Citadel is in the perfect defensive position: very tall and difficult to access, loaded with weapons, and with plenty of water and produce. The besiegers would likely starve themselves trying to find an opening until they were forced to abandon the fight or broker a deal.
  • The comics made a point that any army besieging the Citadel has to win within 3 days or else their water will run out; even Joe's massive convoy only had enough water for 3 days of the siege. Given that Gas Town and Bullet Farm are specifically designed to be reliant on the Citadel's water, it's likely that unless they bow to Furiosa's rule, they'll literally die of thirst within the week.

Crossing the Salt Plains

• How did Furiosa expect her and the Vulvalini's attempt to cross the Salt Plains, which is implied to be a dried Pacific Ocean, to succeed anyhow? It's highly unlikely with motorcycles that they would have the fuel and rations necessary to survive the estimated 160 day trek.
  • When were they implied to be the Pacific and not one of Australia's many salt lakes that have expanded since the end of civilization? 160 days was the maximum days they had supplies for, not necessarily the length of time the trek would take.
  • Max says that "160 days that way, there's nothing but salt." The only place where this would make sense is if they were crossing a dried-up ocean. The Immortan Joe comic also shows that the sea has at least receded around the Sydney Opera House until it's a dry desert, confirming that the oceans at least partially dried up.
  • Doesn't just have to be a dried up ocean. Could be land suffering from high salinity. It's a problem in Australia right now, as a matter of fact - parts of the south-west are useless for agriculture because of it despite being completely land-locked. Turn it up one thousand percent like everything in the movie, and it would look like that, especially in the absence of rainfall.
  • But still, 160 days of travelling six hours a day at 60 km/h adds up to 57600 kilometers, more than the earth's circumference
  • That's how fast a car goes on a road, not how fast a loaded bike goes on salt (or how fast a pedestrian walks carrying supplies once the fuel runs out).
  • There's nothing saying that Max knows that for sure. It's just his cynicism talking.
  • To answer the original question, Furiosa probably doesn't expect it to succeed, really; she's just hoping it does in the absence of anything better. Given how quickly she and the others come around to Max's counter-plan, which posed much more in the way of immediate risk, it can be reasonably surmised that none of them seriously believed that that they'd find anything other better than what they were running from. As for Max, he probably has no idea what lies at the end of that particular trail, but he's just repeating what Furiosa said about how much they had in the way of supplies to emphasise his belief that it doesn't matter how far they travel, they'll find nothing good waiting for them, and their only real option is to turn back and fight.
  • Perhaps distance is most commonly measured in terms of days on foot as a default, because the vast majority of survivors won't have access to any other means of travel. The bikes are the only thing that even gives them a chance of success, because they'll let them cover more ground than that if they try it.

Why bring gas to Gastown?

• So at the beginning, Furiosa is supposedly on a routine trade mission with Gastown. But why does she bring a full fuel pod to Gastown? Surely the Citadel would be sending their water and milk to trade for guzzoline, in which case they'd need an empty fuel pod to bring it all back. Yes, she knew she had to trade that gas with the biker gang, but it's not like she could have secretly loaded up 3,000 gallons of it herself, and not have anyone else notice (especially when all the other warboys are the ones attaching the fuel pod to the war rig).
  • Presumably she had an excuse. My guess is emergency supplies. It's entirely possible that the fuel pod is there to refuel the War Rig and escort on their journeys, with an emergency surplus in case something goes wrong. We don't know how far apart the three places are, but it's unlikely they could do the whole trip on one tank for the escort vehicles.
  • Or it could be that the Gas was a surplus intended for the Bullet Farm. The three leaders of the settlements seemed to be on good terms with each other, so it is likely that their dealings don't have to be 1:1 every time. We don't know if the Gastown has tanker trucks of their own, so it is possible that Furiosa has to carry the commerce between the Citadel, Gastown, and the Bullet Farm.
  • When loading up at the beginning, Ace says that today they're hauling Produce, Aqua Cola (water), and Mother's Milk, and doesn't mention the fuel pod. So it's probably being carried for resupply, rather than trade.
  • All the surviving vehicles are older generation models that have been kept running and functioning. They're not the most fuel-efficient designs in the world. It makes sense to have extra fuel on hand, especially if something in the road breaks a gas tank and it needs to be repaired/replaced.
  • They don't want to use the same tank for fuel that they use for water or milk, because it would contaminate the tank for future beverage transport. Furiosa probably led most of Joe's people to think the pod was empty, and led the ones who filled the pod with gas that it was needed because the load was especially heavy this trip.

The Plan

• How was Furiosa's plan supposed to work? She evidently didn't get the bikers to agree to get rid of anything more than a few pursuers for her, so unless she was lying to them from the start about who would be following her, she didn't count on Immortan Joe catching on to the plan (at least, not as soon as he did) and thus being right behind her with all his forces in tow as she entered the canyon. But Joe's son Corpus was watching her the whole time and reported her as soon as she went off-route; did Furiosa simply not know he was keeping an eye on her? If she did, what did she plan to do to lose or keep ahead of the army Joe would inevitably send after her once he found out? The bikers weren't going to do it for her.
  • She gambled that it would take Joe longer to realize her true plan. If Joe had just thought she was making off with a war rig and some of his gas and water, he would have likely sent a small party to recover her. But Joe immediately figures out that she's rescuing the wives, so he calls up every warrior from all three towns.
  • Gastown was clearly visible in the distance at the other end of the Fury Road, and would have people watching the oncoming caravan just as Corpus was. If she could have turned aside without being observed, she would have, but she knew that even if Corpus overlooked her change of direction, Gastown would have relayed word of it via mirror-flashes within a matter of minutes at best. The best she could do was to just veer off and drive like hell, and hope the Bikers and Buzzards would take out her escort quick.

Vuvalini ambush

• The Vuvalini live between a nearly-impenetrable poisoned swamp and a giant saltplain. While that's a safe place to live since you are protected somewhat in two directions (and nothing is ever mentioned to lie in the other two), why would they set up their ambush site there? Who would fall into it?
  • The swamp is to the west, and the salt to the east. There's still people traveling through from the north and the south.
  • It's a defensive ambush. It's not something they do regularly for resources. And it's a great tower to scout from. They see potential enemies incoming, everyone runs and hides behind the dunes, the girl tosses her clothes to the base of the tower and lures people in closer.

Immortan Joe's heir

• It's shown that Joe is not long for this world, hence his attempts at producing a worthy male heir before he dies. It makes sense that Joe hasn't been knocked out of power due to his ill health and weakness because his cult of personality keeps him supported and worshiped by the war boys. But there are still problems with his plan: Would Joe really have lived long enough to raise a new heir, or wouldn't he be more likely to die long before the child's coming of age? And what would have stopped Rictus Erectus from taking power once Joe was dead and any new male heirs were still too young?
  • Rictus seems too stupid and servile to even think of attempting a coup, while Joe's other son Corpus might have the intelligence, but lacks the physical capability. Neither of them seem capable of posing any threat to him or his successors, but neither are they worthy heirs on their own, which would explain why Joe is so upset over the stillbirth of Angharad's son, who was explicitly said to be "perfect in every way". Joe probably wouldn't live long enough to see his son grow up, which might require an Imperator to be brought in as regent, but Joe seems more concerned with simply having a perfect dynasty in any case.
  • The idea seems to be that Rictus, the big one, has the mind of a child (his gear is covered in baby and doll icons) and Corpus is smart but physically incapable. Joe is hoping for a son who is a "viable human" - ie physically capable AND intelligent.
  • There is one character in past movies that would make Corpus and Rictus a threat to the new Heir, Master Blaster, Corpus is shown being able to order Rictus around a bit, but if he indulges Rictus to do what he wants as long as he enforces for Corpus, remember Joe would be dead probably not that long after the baby is born, even if the Organic Mechanic is the only viable doctor around, I doubt Joe is risking organ transplants.
  • Even if Corpus were ambitious enough to cling to power with Rictus's assistance, neither of them seem likely to sire a healthy heir, either. More likely, their little brother would be brought up as their mutual successor, and would be expected to take over after Corpus died.

Immortan Joe's tyranny

• Did Joe directly kill anybody besides shooting the People Eater as a human shield in the film? He's a tyrant for many reasons presented on screen, but how directly cruel was he really, besides owning women as breeders?
  • Plus purposefully with-holding water from people, lording it over his own small fiefdom, forcibly farming captives for their milk or blood? Joe's probably caused the deaths of thousands, even if he didn't do every single one personally.
  • And you can't really wave off abducting women decades younger than him specifically so that he can rape and impregnate them. Or the whole suicide cult thing.
  • Also, you presumably don't become the dictatorial leader of a (for the setting) huge army of fanatical, well-practiced warrior death-cultists by being a nice guy, so we can probably assume a large amount of off-screen violence.
  • Also he repeatedly promises the War Boys he will take them to Valhalla. You don't get there alive, so if you read between the lines, if they succeed he's going to kill them.
  • It's obvious that Joe doesn't keep his army around for purely defensive purposes, but what makes him evil isn't so much his propensity for violence as his propensity for exploitation. The Citadel functions strictly for the benefit of its ruling elite, who live in as much luxury as a nuclear wasteland can provide (there's a reason Joe has such a portly physique). The only things the haggard crowds outside can look forward to are table scraps, run-off water, and a comfortable afterlife; maybe a chance for their children to become War Boys, if they're lucky. Immortan Joe's rule is parasitic feudalism on steroids. Furiosa and the Vuvalini aren't perfect, but they're still better than that.

Five Brides Escape

• Don't know if I missed it, but was it ever explained how Furiosa got the five brides out of the vault and down to her Battlerig without anyone noticing?
  • It was explained in one of the tie-in comics. The previous night, Furiosa killed the guards at the harem's entrance and sneaked the Wives out into the Rig. What bothers me more is how Miss Giddy managed to stow away a shotgun in that vault - especially since the comics imply it had been hidden there for a while.
  • Maybe Joe gave it to her knowing that Miss Giddy had long since been broken so she wouldn't make an attempt on his life normally but would have the motivation to protect the wives?

Radios

• Why doesn't anyone use them? The Humungus had a megaphone at least.
  • They may not have powerful enough transmitters to broadcast over any significant distance (i.e. between cars). Plus, there's no indication anyone actually has a radio, let alone enough radios to communicate with an entire army—it's doubtful that that many radios survived the end of civilization, or that they have the resources to build their own.
  • Given the widespread environmental damage, it's plausible that some something, be it some kind of crap blown into the atmosphere, damage to the Earth's magnetic fields, etc. interferes with radio performance. Why bother with radios if they don't work anyway?
  • It's known that the world ended with nukes. All of the vehicles are built from old models that use little if any electronics and have solid-state ignitions that are naturally resistant to EMP. Radios were probably fried like everything else electronic.
  • They have an abundance of 1970s cars; 1970s radios would be similarly resistant and easy to maintain. Spark-gap transmitters and telegraphs are possible too, and would have been a better solution instead of the signal tower to communicate between the three settlements. The only explanation in-story that makes sense is that the war somehow damaged the magnetosphere to the point that radio communication is difficult if not impossible.
  • It's possible that no-one in the postapocalyptic world knows how radios work or even that they used to exist. It seems that at least a generation passed since the war, human memory is faulty in the absence of reliable record-keeping, and the idea of the pre-apocalypse world seems to be somewhat fuzzy for people. They know that TV shows existed, but they think "everyone had their own show". They worship cars. Not everyone is familiar with the word "tree". Radios might very well be legendary or even forgotten devices.
  • If they worship cars, that'd mean they would be well acquainted with radios, given as virtually all the cars they have would have been equipped with one.
  • "Everyone had their own show." You don't think she's talking about YouTube, do you? Because if you've got an account and a video camera, everyone CAN have their own show.
  • They have enough electronic know-how to rig up speakers for an electric guitar, and some means of refrigeration for the Mother's Milk they trade in. Most likely there aren't any radios because such devices were considered so strategically important in the early years post-apocalypse that they were snatched up by feuding factions and used until they broke down, got destroyed, or were sabotaged.
  • Assuming we're talking walkie-talkie type radios for communication, it's likely a matter as simple as batteries no longer existing in the world.
  • If batteries don't exist, how do their cars work? They are clearly electric start, and even if they weren't, all automobiles use electricity to power their ignition systems, at the very least. Even the first car ever built, the Benz Motorwagen, used one. There is no way to make a gasoline automobile run without a battery. So batteries have to exist, or they'd all be riding horses and bicycles.
  • Might be worthwhile to draw a distinction between large chemical batteries and miniaturized batteries suitable for a small item like a handheld radio. A large chemical battery like a car battery can be rigged up fairly easily from a nonreactive container, a suitably strong reactant, and some sponges. Additionally, a car battery can be recharged repeatedly by the cars alternator to avoid dying entirely. Miniaturized batteries would require more advanced and delicate chemical processing to create, you might be able to rig something similar that would be significantly large up ala Doc Browns bulky batteries in Back to the Future 3 but they'd weigh at least a few pounds each, have dangerous reactive chemicals very close to peoples bodies, and have very limited range under good conditions.
  • Yes, but that only makes portable radios more difficult (although frankly, I doubt armies that rely so heavily on suicide attacks would care much about battery acid leaking), stationary and vehicle mounted radios should still be possible. Especially when almost all of their vehicles would have had a radio in the first place. Not to mention things like Max's car, which was a police car and was equipped with two way radios.
  • Max himself had radio equipment on hand in the beginning, so clearly there's the expectation that someone out there might be broadcasting. Just not the Citadel and its sister communities. They likely just got unlucky and haven't found enough intact sets of transmitters and receivers to use for their own ends, or else lacked parts/expertise/whatever to repair any damaged sets recovered from old big rigs. They'd need three of them in working order just to replace the mirror signalling system with a basic communication system between the three main settlements, and quite a lot more to outfit their vehicles. Batteries, engines, fuel tanks, and innumerable other spare parts they can get from any of various vehicles they're maintaining their fleet with (though not all of it would be useful without jury-rigging to some degree), but only some of the vehicles they're taking in as salvage would have CB radios, making them proportionately much less common.

Use Another Gun

• Instead of wasting time asking for a rifle that wasn't loaded yet, why didn't Furiosa just use one of the many pistols that were in the bag right at her feet?
  • Was the bag actually at her feet? I thought Max took it from her.
  • Yes, it was clearly somewhere between the front seats, as seen when Furiosa grabs the flare gun. Max took the bag when he went onto the trailer to hook up the hose for the pods brakes, but he brought it back.
  • Rewatching the scene, It seems to be more a timing issue. Furiosa seems to have misjudged how long it would have taken the Wives to reload the rifle, and appears to be surprised at the arrival of the Rock Raiders' boss on the Rig. In the same amount of time it would take for Furiosa to duck back down, grab a new handgun and open fire, the Rock Raider's boss would have been able to open fire.

Vuvalini murder squad

• The Many Mothers have bait of a woman calling out for help, which they use to shoot any man that comes by. Now, this makes sense with warlords, scavengers, rapists, etc who are looking for a new prize, but what about some traveling merchant, wanderer, or do gooder who sees what looks like some poor woman in distress and comes to help. The Many Mothers note that they shoot any man who comes by, so does this mean an Amazons Attack style of killing all males who wander by? Is this why the Vuvalini are dying out, as they kill anyone who dares comes near them? What does this mean for the males in the new home they established? Are they living on borrowed time?
  • Pretty much anyone who passes by is going to be a warlord, scavenger, rapist, etc. If someone seems genuinely helpful and friendly, they can change their plans, maybe adopt them into the tribe. But after the Green Place turned foul, they became just another band of scavengers, albeit one with a richer history than most. So yes, they were living on borrowed time, but not because of their ambush tactics.
  • Given there are no mention of any male Vuvalini, they probably were an all-female society to begin with, and the men they used for reproduction were either captives or slaves. While the Green Place was, well, green, their life was easy enough to afford this. But once they were forced to fight for survival, with scarce water and food, their death rate jumped up until there was only a dozen of them left. Who are now too old to have children. No need to take men alive anymore, might as well shoot 'em on sight.
  • Perhaps the Vuvalini will be more egalitarian; maybe an abundance of resources will mitigate their harsher traits. While the Vuvalini are mostly heroic, this sort of thing could be part of the reason some, as stated on the YMMV page, consider them or the film itself misandrist along with the film having "all the bad guys are men, every woman in the film is heroic, the villains being a tyrannical patriarchy and implying that men in power killed the world."
  • The film pretty much addresses that point, with the Dag saying she thought an all-female society would be above murdering for resources, which quite obviously wasn't the case with the Vuvalini.

War Rig intakes

• The War Rig is stated and shown to be powered by twin supercharged engines, with direct intakes via the big scoops sticking up out of the hood. So what are the intake filters on the sides of the cab for that we see Furiosa knocking the dust out of after the storm?
  • The war rig has multiple air intake systems. The superchargers are for when the air is (relatively) clean. They close off when it's not, and it reverts to the filtered air box. You can see the supercharger intakes close during the scene when they drop the plow to put out the flames.
  • And yes, this is not how actual real-life engines work at all, but just go with it.

Filters

• For that matter, very few of the vehicles shown have anything like an actual air filter. How have all those engines not ground themselves to shavings from all the particulate matter they're ingesting?
  • The entire film takes place over the course of two days, and it's obvious they rarely ever take out the entire fleet like this. Supply runs are probably planned around the weather so it's less dusty. And we have no idea how much time they spend repairing cars vs. driving them during the normal day-to-day usage.

Furiosa's position

• The culture of the Citadel is shown to be utterly sexist, with women being used as slave labor to produce milk and breed children. Given that, it's not surprising we don't see a single woman among Immortan Joe's army, not even among the footsoldiers... Except for Furiosa, who holds the high rank of Imperator. How on earth did she gain such a prominent position, when all the evidence (such as the fact that Joe's army is named "War Boys") suggests women are not even allowed in the army?
  • Short version: By being exactly that good. Although first of all she would have to be established as unsuitable for breeding purposes; the missing arm might have been enough, although she might have had to be in some way incapable of bearing children. Either way, she'd then have had to fight her way to the top, and in this culture she'd probably have had to be three times as tough and five times as ruthless as any of the men. Having seen the film, can anybody doubt that she is?
  • There's also the good chance that she may have merely outlived her competition. While she may have been infertile and unsuitable as a breeder or milk-mother, she was originally born in the "green place" which is implied to have been quite healthy. The other warboys, and even Immortan Joe's own sons (who presumably get the best food) are full of genetic mutations or get cancer at an early age. Furiosa looks quite healthy for her age.

Why did Max have to be such a dick?

• Furiosa clearly saw him as a blood bag lashed to Nux's car. She probably saw him again in the storm. Why did Max have to approach Furiosa and the wives in such a hostile manner? He could have just said "Hey I was that blood bag you saw and so I have no reason to be working for Immortan Joe. They attacked me, captured me, stole my car and then lashed me to the front of a car while the driver sucked out my blood and tried to kill me." He had no reason to love Immortan Joe or the war boys, and should have been a natural ally to Furiosa, but he went about things in the most dickish manner possible. This doesn't really jive with Max's character from the previous films, either.
  • When Max prevented Nux from suicide bombing the War Rig, she ran him over with the full intention of killing him regardless of who he was as it'd be safer and practical on her side. Naturally he had no reason to treat her any better, just looking out for himself.
  • He probably had a hard time speaking with that damn thing on his face. Besides, with how intently the War Boys were chasing Furiosa, there was no way for Max to tell if he might have an even worse time dealing with her than he did with some wimp like Nux. Or maybe Max just thought that playing up his survival instincts might've helped him more than his social instincts would, not that he's used those in a really long time anyway.
  • Given all the crap Max went through at the very start, not to mention his own mental issues that pops up time to time, it could be that he just really wasn't in the mood for any sort of decency on his part, and just wanted to get the Hell out of the whole situation. At the time, he doesn't know anything bout Furiosa and the wives other than Immortan Joe is after them, and it was something Max felt wasn't his problem. Basically, just take the War Rig and never look back was his intent in my opinion. It's just that the fail safe Furiosa set up more or less forced him to ally with her which eventually turns Max around to genuinely help the group after some time with them.
  • In his opening monologue Max says that at this point in his life he only cares about survival. His whole character arc in the movie is that he gradually moves from being motivated by mere survival to being lead by his moral compass. The scene discussed here happens when Max is still in survival mode, and it's used to emphasize that point, so we get a clear contrast between two Maxes: one driven by self-preservation, and one who acts more selflessly.
  • "So I exist in this wasteland... A man, reduced to a single instinct: Survive." That basically defines Max at the start of the film. What does he get if he helps Furiosa? Immortan Joe's whole army chasing him down. What does he get if he abandons them in the desert? A war rig, and the whole army is likely to go home after picking up their real target, the brides. Abandoning them would greatly increase his chances of survival. Even after the killswitch, we have two choices: allow himself to be captured and pretend to be on Immortan Joe's side and live out his days as a blood bag, or risk helping them and getting killed by an entire army.
  • At this point nether of them knew each other nor their own motives; all Max knew was that Furiosa has a vehicle that he can use to get the hell out of dodge. Given that food and water are all scarce, there was no way she would have been happy to take on another mouth to feed when she already proved she can handle herself out there. Not to mention that, until he saw the brides, he had no reason to think Furiosa's motives were pure; only we saw the wives sneak around under the rig and he had every reason to believe Furiosa was just another selfish raider who decided to steal an expensive rig from a warlord to run off.
  • It's also pretty strongly implied that nobody in the Wasteland is particularly diplomatic, given that supplement materials put the time of the apocalypse around 45 years ago. That is a long time to completely forget normal social graces that modern day viewers would consider reasonable. Not to mention at the beginning of the film, multiple characters refer to Max as being "nearly feral." So much time alone in the Wasteland has made him completely forget how to be sociable, because it was no longer a skill he needed.
  • Max being an uncaring dick isn't exactly out of character for him. In Mad Max 2, even after witnessing Pappagallo's tribe plight he still didn't give a hoot, and it's only after Wez and his cronies make it personal that Max truly becomes involved in the conflict.

Coma Doof Warrior

• What is the dude's purpose? Other than boosting morale and being really fucking awesome? I kinda theorized that Immortan Joe used Coma Doof to convey orders using the guitar, but what else does the guy do?
  • That is more than enough. Armies have had musicians for morale and communication for centuries. He's just a post-apocalyptic version of a drummer boy.

Politics of God-Kings

• The Bullet Farmer and The People Eater are Immortan Joe's equals, and probably the closest thing he has to friends. They address each other as "brother", call him out when they feel it necessary, and are under no obligation to obey him, though they don't go against him without good reason (i.e., Joe is distracted by the stillbirth of his son, and the Bullet Farmer doesn't want to wait to continue pursuit). All well and good when you're dealing with mere rulers of men, but Joe's people think he's a god. How does the behavior of The Bullet Farmer and The People Eater fit into their theology? Are they gods too?
  • Their religion seems to borrow some parts (at least the concept of "Valhalla") from Norse mythology, which has multiple gods... So it seems likely they are indeed polytheistic.
  • Who needs justification? All Joe has to do is to tell the Warboys to leave them alone, and they will. Something something divine grace yadda yadda. It's not like any of the boys are going to question his authority.
  • The Bullet Farmer has a whole Judge feel going on with his "hairdress" of bullets, so it wouldn't be out of the question that they see him as some sort of divine judge in their messed-up pantheon. As for the People-Eater...well the name itself should be reason enough for most people to stop questioning.
  • There's actually a pretty close parallel to this situation from real history - the pharaohs of the New Kingdom of Egypt were worshipped as gods by their subjects, but acknowledged the rulers of the Hittite Empire and Babylon as peers and addressed them as "brother" in diplomatic correspondence. Unlike the pharaohs, the Babylonian and Hittite monarchs were not worshipped as gods.
  • I always took it that Joe told his War Boys these two were other, lesser gods in the V8 pantheon (like the Thor and Tyr to his Odin) who, although lower on the totem pole than Joe, are still way higher than mortals like them and thus should be treated with reverence and fear.

Timeline

• Miller has said that this is supposed to take place 45 years after the apocalypse, which doesn't seem right at all. Max is far too young to have been a cop (or even born) before the apocalypse, and for that matter unless Immortan Joe is in his 80s he's unlikely to have been a Colonel pre-apoc either. Is this timeline a hangover from when Mel Gibson was supposed to play Max, presumably as a much older character?
  • This is why a lot of people are having fun with the WMG that Max is in some way immortal, an eternal wanderer of the dead Earth. This also explains why the Pursuit Special is back, despite having been blown up in the second film. As for Joe — he's a physically feeble old man, on crude life support, who is never seen to do anything more vigorous than drive a car. It's entirely possible that he is in his 80s. It's also possible that the apocalypse was preceded by a major war, in which promotion often comes rapidly to men of talent; He could have been a colonel at 30.
  • The actor that plays Immortan Joe is 67. And he was made to look older than the actor looks normally.
  • Word of God says that the movies are the collected legends of Mad Max, and depicted from the viewpoint of an Unreliable Narrator.
  • They also utilize the "James Bond" aging effect. Technically, the different actors playing Max over the 30 year time span are playing the same Max. But the point is, according to the filmmakers, it doesn't matter.
  • It's also possible that it's 45 years since the start of the apocalypse. If it's a long degradation and breakdown rather than a single incident (as the series of escalating wars and resource shortages the intro seems to imply might be), rather than a singular nuclear exchange and the aftermath) the collapse could have taken over a decade. Max could have been born in a world what was already Just Before the End after the apocalypse had already started.
  • Whoever said that Fury Road's version of Max was a cop before the apocalypse? He could have been one of the security troops for a post-collapse community, like those dudes with the scruffy fake mohawk headpieces who kept order in Bartertown for Auntie Entity. When that community fell apart in turn, Max hit the road as a solo survivor.

Music?

• In the deleted scene where Immortan Joe executes Ms. Giddy, a song begins playing right after he says, "Turn every grain of sand!". However, I can't seem to find it. Would anyone be able to help?

What really happened?

• In the prequel comic, Glory the Child died after being run over by Buzzards. In the video game, the same thing happens, only with Scrotus instead. Both of these events have enough evidence to lead up to this movie pretty well, one being a prequel comic and the game has Max retrieving the Interceptor, and hearing voices, at the end. So, what really happened?
  • It's entirely possible that Max cannot precisely recall what has happened in his past. His madness is emphasized in this movie, so it is possible that he has multiple conflicting "memories" about his past. The conflicting backstories could be two different accounts that Max has spinning around in his head, and that the only fact he knows for sure is that the little girl existed, and that he failed to save her.
  • Alternatively, they're just different legends. If you'll recall, the story in the game is told by Griffa, whereas the story in the comic is told by the First History Man. While both stories fit, it's much more likely that Griffa's is closer to the truth since the First History Man's account fails to explain Scrotus's fate, even though he mentioned him before. Adding to the theory that Griffa's story is closer to the truth is the fact that he claims to have personally assisted Max in his journey to fight Scrotus, which would make his story a firsthand account and therefore much more reliable than the First History Man's tale.
  • Except for the first one, all the movies are told as stories by characters. Road Warrior is a story told by the feral kid, Thunderdome is told by one of the plane crash survivors and Fury Road by one of the wives. Max may only be a legendary figure in the post apocalyptic world to whom survivors attribute goodness to.
  • Continuity has never been a hallmark of the franchise, and George Miller has stated that there is no definite timeline for Max. The first Mad Max shows a world where society is breaking down, but still has some semblance of order (there exists a somewhat effective police force and court systems are referenced). By Fury Road people seem to know the old world only by memories of their parents yet Max is not noticeably older though it would have taken decades to reach that point.

Why waste the water?

• Much is made of Immortan Joe's cruelty and Conspicuous Consumption in opening the valves to give water to the pathetic rabble at the foot of the Citadel. It's a wasteful method of distribution, it's never enough water, and the whole thing is more of a display of his wealth than anything else. A bit of pipe and a spigot would work much better. But here's the question: why give them water at all? What benefit does he get from having a bunch of beggars hanging around his door? Yes, every king needs subjects, but all of his useful subjects - his warriors, his farmers, his milk supply, his breeders, his technicians and medics, etc. - are all inside the Citadel. Joe is too much of a Pragmatic Villain to keep a bunch of thirsty mouths around just because he likes to hear them chant his name. He may be very wealthy in terms of water, but the stuff isn't infinite. Does he just keep them alive on the off-chance of finding more warboys and breeders among them?
  • Probably so. Plus, Immortan Joe isn't necessarily that pragmatic; he'll do what he needs to do in order to maintain his fiefdom, but that's just what it is; a fiefdom, a place where he rules all, lives in luxury, and gets to fulfill his hedonistic desires and take pleasure in taunting those he considers beneath them with what they can't have. At heart, he seems to mostly be a raging egotist, and if he sees himself as having good intentions, it's probably because he's a Tautological Templar.
  • Added fact: that pipe is probably a discharge pipe, so the water is just waste anyway. He's basically doing token charity for the sake of either looking good in the eyes of his lower subjects or self-delusion of being benevolent at all. Or both.
  • He keeps the plebs around and drops water on them every so often because it pleases him to be the big guy who gets to decide whether they live or die. Same thing that's motivated pretty much every tyrant in history who ever lived once you boil it down.
  • The comic shows that much of his army and his breeders come from the rabble below; those that are healthy or capable are brought up the lift to become either warboys, those hapless souls on the gigantic treadmills or (if they're girls) become breeders or milk mothers. The random water spouts are likely there to draw attention and attract people to his rock.
  • Weirdly enough at the end the heroes use the exact same method of distribution, only apparently they keep the valves opened longer, to let everyone get some water. For something said to be so valuable people sure waste it a lot.
  • Possibly they opened the valves in order to create a pond as a permanent water source, so the people at ground level wouldn't have to come begging at specific times anymore.
  • we don't see what they did after they got back and liberated the place. Turning on the water was presumably a symbol, a sign that things were going to change, because Furiosa was in charge, not immortan joe. it is likely that afterwards they rigged up some less wasteful system of distribution. but setting up a proper set of pipes for distribution would take time, and the story was over, so why bother showing it?
  • Joe knows precisely what he's doing. By offering limited resources to desperate people, he knows the desire for survival is going to take over, and only the strongest, or the most desperate, people living down below will get enough water to survive to the next drop. He's utilizing Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest, knowing the older/weaker folks will be beaten out and eventually die off, leaving only the cream of the crop around to bolster his army with.
  • It's also worth noting that since its being spilled into the shaded valley, most of the water spilled will soak back into the dry ground and eventually make its way back into the aquifer. What little does evaporate will cool the canyon down and add a little bit of local humidity, which helps to keep the plants healthy. By spilling too much to catch all of but not enough to pool on the surface, he's making a huge show of power that actually costs him very little in permanent resources.
  • I think people don't quite understand how big Aquifers can be. Yes, depletion is still a concern for our levels of population, but *considerably* less so to just a few thousand people living in the Citadel. The Great Artesian Basin in Australia (which is probably what the Citadel uses as a water source) contains aprox. 64900 cubic kilometres of water, so even if they use it liberally it is not going to run out any time soon.
  • It's a water source in a place where every drop is worth struggling for. If Joe didn't release a token amount periodically, in a dramatic fashion that makes it look like he's being overwhelmingly generous, the same people who are praising his name and offering up their sons and daughters to serve him would be laying siege to the place and hurling rocks at the balconies. Better to have a friendly rabble outside his fortress than a rabid rampaging one.

Setting

• So is the movie, like previous Mad Max movies, set in Australia? There's no mention of it being set in Australia, and apart from a few characters (Cheedo, Ace, The Dag, maybe a few others) the majority of the characters speak English with barely an accent. The Buzzard drivers even speak Russian. In addition, the majority of the vehicles seen in the movie are configured for left-hand drive.
  • Max's car is still right hand drive, and several of the other cars are good old Australian cars. The Bullet Farmer's tank is built from an old Valiant, one of the war bands cars is also a Valiant. There's also an aussie kit car, the Perenetti. The fact there's Us muscle cars is most due to the fact Australia has a very active car scene, especially with older muscle cars.
  • Immortan Joe was a Colonel in the Australian Army who left Sydney to become a warlord in the prequel comics so it's still in Australia.
  • Not to mention, y'know, all those accents.

Happiness in Slavery?

• In this movie, Joe's wives are said to be in a terrible arrangement (and Joe is an imperious, sadistic tyrant). However, there is more to it than meets the eye. Joe's wives are living in a beautiful, gilded cage with a giant safe door protecting the entrance. They get to keep their beauty and don’t have to worry about working, starvation as well as other tasks, everything is taken care of for them. They’re wives of the most powerful person in a post-apocalyptic world and all they have to do in return is give him sexual pleasure and sons (given how much Joe is revered, I thought there would be women offering themselves to him; if there are any gold-digging women who survived the apocalypse, they would likely line up for Immortan Joe). But Joe's wives are willing to risk their safety to go into the desert where there is no food or water. Also, while the women getting milked are insinuated to be forced into that position, they’re fed enough to become obese in a post-apocalyptic desert where food and water are scarce; I don’t think they’re being made to play with those dolls while they get harvested for their milk. The process looks like a little give, a little get; the women get well-fed in return they provide milk, as Squick as that sounds. First, in medieval Europe there were women who chose to stay in the security offered by castles, so why would women at the top of the food chain in a post-apocalyptic world abandon that for the desert lacking in food or water? Second, considering how much tyrannical dictators get away with in real life and still get revered (for example: Fidel Castro caused a higher death toll than Hilter, yet there was a lot of mourning for his death), isn't it unlikely Immortan Joe's ways would foster resentment, especially in a post-apocalyptic world where morality and/or religion ^note  religion here meaning ones with a basis in truth that teach good morals, such as Christianity, rather than Joe’s martyrdom cult bastardization of Norse mythology seem to be absent?
  • Joe's wives were probably brought to citadel at a very young age and never worked or starved. They are used to luxury, so they don't appreciate what they have. But they don't like to have sex with Joe, so when Furiosa comes along and offers them an escape, they view it as getting rid of the only unpleasant thing in their personal world. Even if she did warn them their new life wouldn't be as comfortable, they didn't have the experience to compare. Basically they expected (consciously or not) to live just as comfortably as before, only without the drawback of having to pay for it.
  • While Joe is a sadistic tyrant and it was wrong to force himself on his wives, that makes the Wives come across as spoiled and selfish. Surely they would've seen the desolate desert out of the window of their gilded cage (I think it had windows)? What about Joe don't they like (assuming it took them awhile to figure out that he was a sadistic tyrant, and people have unfortunately overlooked such things for a comfy life before; also, whatever disease Joe's sick with he doesn't seem to have infected them and they are devoid of scars possibly indicating they're not beaten or even hit)? Also, in light of the points raised earlier, why weren't more women offering themselves to Joe? I'm not defending the evil and sadistic Joe, I'm saying I think that in a world where the worst of human nature is allowed to run rampant I don't think the Wives are going to have too much of a problem with Joe.
  • They don't 'dislike'' Joe as a human being. They resent being prisoners, in a gilded cage, being raped by a old, dying, diseased man, forced to bear children (reproductive abuse - because once they have children, they will not be able to leave), and crucially, they have every reason to believe that things will not change. Best case scenario, Joe dies, and whoever replaces him will continue what they are doing. Worse case, he dies, a power struggle continues, and they will be used as pawns by those who seek to replace him. You don't have to hit someone to terrify them. You don't have to beat a woman stupid to make her understand that she can't leave, she can't resist, and above all, if her womb doesn't work right, and she is a victim to the pollution/fallout/disease that is rampant, she will die. They have a piano, books, and beds, true, but they are also raped, treated as walking wombs, reduced to objects, and discarded when they fail to serve. Everything they have isn't what they've earned, it's distractions from the relentless life of rape, get up, eat, sleep, wait, rape, eat, sleep, bathe, rape. When another wife joins them, she's not married Joe, she's been literally stolen from her people for the sake of her womb. It's made clear in the story by the use of chastity belts and the huge vault door that Joe wants to keep people out and *them in*, purely for himself. More woman probably did offer themselves to Joe - when your choice is starvation and thirst or a gilded cage, the choice is easy. When you have to choose between constant rape, objectification, degregation, and abuse, for the sake of your sex, or freedom, the pendulum swings the other way.
  • All of these arguments made by individuals who have never had a taste of what it's like to be used for their body, or have their worth reduced to that of their sexuality, or "use". The wives were NOT at the top of the food chain, they are, in fact, in a glorified bottom spot. They had no real power in the society of the Citadel, they are not wives, they are Sex Slaves. Emphasis on the slave part. Their quality of life was the highest seen, but it came with many strings. They aren't seen as people, they're property. They're kept away from the rest of society, have no say in any of the details of their lives, and are forced to have sex/ give pleasure to a sick and dying old dictator no matter if they like him, or even like men in general. Also, as explained in other materials, they're on a "3 strikes" rule. If they don't give birth to a male child three times in a row they're sent out to the wastes to DIE. In movie they're called Breeders; not Wives, not Loves, but BREEDERS. Like animals. Joe only cares about them because they are his only avenue to a healthy boy child, no fucking shit they begged to be set free. They're children would not be warlords.
  • The dialogue makes it as clear as day. Joe yells "THEY ARE MY PROPERTY" and the Wives insist "We are not things". It takes some incredible MRA bullshit to call the Wives "spoiled and selfish" for wanting to escape being sex slaves of an evil warlord, and imply a free life of deprivation is necessarily a worse fate than existing for the sole purpose of rape and reproductive exploitation.
  • Ok, I'm going to try not to leap to stereotypes here. You might be anyone. But let's hypothesize that Joe's ambition wasn't for an heir, rather that he just has a very specific sexual desire he wanted to be able to fulfill on a whim. Let's hypothesize that Joe's very specific sexual desire is for whatever you are. What level of comparative luxury would you consider a fair price for being repeatedly raped? You, yourself, troper who posted this question - what would you need to receive in exchange for being imprisoned in a closed space (however comfortable) and raped at any time? What price would you require to not just accept being raped, but to feel grateful for the opportunity? If, given the choice, would you choose to stay IMPRISONED to be REPEATEDLY RAPED, or would you opt to escape and try to survive on your own terms? Would you risk injury and death for freedom, or would you stick around as long as Immortan Joe found you sexually desirable?
  • And if that attempt at empathy is too challenging, what if it were Max? What if Immortan Joe had been gay and thought that Max would make a nice change from all his Warboys? Would you be sneering at Max's spoiled, petulant attitude when he fought to escape rather than choosing to sit and dangle his feet in the pool while he waited for Immortan Joe to get a bit randy? Would you be pointing out that there were probably plenty of straight men in the rabble who would trade sex for safety, so obviously Max ought to be willing to do the same? After all, the opening narration said all Max cared about was survival, so it would make sense that he'd be happy to "pay" for a pleasant life by performing such an easy task, no matter how "unpleasant" he might find Joe personally.
  • Also, just as a note, I'm sure if this was the situation, NO ONE would refer to Max as "spoiled and selfish."
  • Also, those women weren't given the dolls as a treat. They were given dolls to hold in order to trick their bodies into continuing to produce milk. God only knows what happened to the actual babies. If Joe only wants sons and doesn't cross the line from pedophilia to incest, well, there are two other warlords in need of sex slaves. . .
  • It's also odd that the original troper is implying that Joe's way of life is functional OR safe for the women or men in his city. Joe sees ALL of his subjects as objects; the War Boys are all dispensable fodder, and women are either cattle or pets. To act as if the Wives are just twiddling their thumbs and laughing like schoolgirls while waiting for Joe is a misunderstanding of their situation. They have no choice, it's not even transactional, Joe isn't bribing them because he controls their lives, he is literally saying "give me a child or die." Sure, they aren't starving or thirsty, but its for the function of having healthy babies, not because he feels like being nice. Joe's people in GENERAL are all suffering, perhaps not to the same degree (The War Boys, Mothers, Wives, and civilians are all treated with varying levels of inhumanity) but the situation is not ideal for anyone aside from Joe.
  • Finally, even highest historical estimates place the death toll of the Castro regime at less than a tenth of that of Hitler's.
  • Slavery is a horrible experience, even if it comes with "perks". Case in point, George Washington had a slave named Hercules Posey who worked as Washington's chef. Being a chef is obviously easier that working all day in the fields, right? Plus, Posey was paid for his work, and actually received a similar sum to what a white chef would have earned, and he was allowed to go into town every so often and buy stuff with his money. He used that money to buy himself fancy clothes, among other things. But regardless, he was still miserable. How do we know? Because eventually he ran away, abandoning all the perks I just mentioned just for a chance to be free. He was so desperate for freedom that he abandoned his own daughter. Here's a diary entry from a visitor to Washington's home: "The general's cook ran away, being now in Philadelphia, and left a little daughter of six at Mount Vernon. Beaudoin ventured that the little girl must be deeply upset that she would never see her father again; she answered, 'Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.'" Obviously Posey hated being a slave, just like how every slave hates being a slave. (Particularly in the case of lifelong enslavement; indentured servitude is at least time-limited). No matter how many perks you get, the mere fact that you're considered property that be used or abused at any time is inherently painful. So no, it's not at all mysterious why the wives in this movie would want to run away. (And I haven't even mentioned the part where their enslavement involves getting raped all the time!)

No sparks?

• During the dust storm chase, when Max fights his way into Nux's car, Nux empties the fuel tank into the cabin, then lights up a flare. They're fighting in a dust storm which blows stuff all over the place, the vehicle is rocking, and gasoline isn't exactly averse to evaporation. Are you going to tell me that not one spark from the flare fell into the fuel puddle and blew them to smithereens?
  • Yes.
  • Aditionally it's not necessarily the flare or sparks there of he would need to worry about. It's the gasoline evaporating in an enclosed space up to the point of flammability. Liquid fuel isn't that dangerous in of itself, it's when its turned onto an aerosol that explosions happen.

Trading in breast milk

• How, exactly, can Joe's people manage to collect a tanker-truck's worth of "Mother's Milk" without it all spoiling before it can be shipped out? Human breasts aren't capable of producing more than a few fluid ounces of milk per day, and even if they've jury-rigged some kind of primitive pasteurization and refrigeration system, their product isn't going to last more than a few weeks before it becomes undrinkable. For that matter, why is milk in such high demand that it's considered worth trading, on par with bullets, guzzoline and water? It can't just be for the calcium, because human milk contains less calcium than many vegetables they could grow with a lot less trouble.
  • Joe uses mother's milk for two reasons - one is the pure fact that the milk is worth more than water. Bottle for bottle, milk will outclass water in a stable environment. It is a pure, untainted source of food, that only comes, in this quantity, from abundance. Joe is using it as a form of conspicious consumption - only he has the food and water to make it, so it makes him powerful, and he controls it as a form of food+medicine+water to the rest of society. It has medicinal properties (antibodies, can help promote healing, and it nourishes the sick, Joe has sick warboys and his own children). For high ranking people, Joe's own family, and for trade, mother's milk is worth the effort it takes to produce. Note, by the way that although we see only a handful of milking mother's, it's entirely possible that it is just *one* room of them. In a world where nothing is new, and you can only work with what you have, people are a viable source.
  • The other reason is Joe's weird psuedo-religion/cult. Women have absolutely no visibility in this society, families are broken, and of those who are left, they are ill, with no hope of medicine. Look at the War Boys and War Pups. Few are old - Ace is one of the oldest that we see still in the field and many more seem to be less than thirty. To them, 'mother' is not something they have or know - they just know how good their milk is, it gives them healing, extends their lives for a little bit, and therefore, it makes an aura of 'scaredness' around it. 'Mother's Milk' and the women it comes from are both treated differently than even another precious resource - water. Those breast pumps are beautiful, with metal work, and made deliberately that way. The women who are being milked are sitting in chairs, wearing the same gauzy material as the wives. They're extremely well fed - in a society where outside, people beg for even a drop of water, the milk mothers are very fat. Giving water is a payment for working, giving milk is a gift from Joe himself.
  • Joe gives the populace milk instead of water because it's a means of exercising his power and control.

Importance of chronology

• As I understand, the creators place this film's time setting in between the original Mad Max film and the Road Warrior film. Why do they bother if Fury Road shows little if any detail that places the film clearly in the overall time set of the franchise, nor is there any important thing in the other films that point to Fury Road's place in the canon?
  • It's about Max's character, who's far closer to his Road Warrior incarnation than his Thunderdome one. It's a Broad Strokes thing.

Max's Inhuman Durability

• How exactly (apart from it being a movie) does Max survive the injuries he sustains in Fury Road? First he's strapped to the front of a car, then a Warboy suicide bombs a Buzzard car inches from his face that sends shrapnel everywhere (and would have easily killed him), then he hangs onto the back of the same car while it goes through a sandstorm (the severity of which should have sandblasted his face clean off), then the car is destroyed by the War Rig ramming it, sending it flipping end over end and him ragdolling off it at high speed (since he's attached by chain to the driver Nux), which should have ripped his arm off and caused grievous injuries. Not to mention, he has an IV hooked into his neck, and the force of that crash should easily have ripped it out and caused its own share of problems. Guns going off near his ear not once but thrice are also easily shrugged off.
  • Magic. No, seriously, his survival is so improbable (and his personal timeline so confusing) that one theory is that he's the Wandering Jew, an immortal who has been around since Biblical times. But if you don't like that one, remember that Word of God is that this is supposed to be the legend of Max, not a perfectly accurate account. So maybe the History Man got some details wrong, exaggerated a few events here and there.

The origins of the Buzzards

• So why, exactly, is there a gang of Russian speaking people in the middle of Australia decades after the apocalypse? How did they get there?
  • Australia, as a nation founded on the principle of immigration, has a a strong Russian immigrant community and remains a top destination for Russia emigres even today.
  • Roughly 19k in a nation of 25 million isn't really that significant of a community, especially when we figure that there was a massive, apocalyptic war in which most Australians died. It's kind of a stretch to assume that there would be much of an Australian-Russian population left at all after the war. Furthermore, why JUST Russians? We don't see any other ethnic gangs. Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Arabic and even Italian are far more common languages in Australia than is Russian. That's not even mentioning the Aboriginal people, who outnumber all those groups significantly and yet seem to have entirely vanished from the wasteland.
  • It was a world war — and it's a fair chance that Russia itself was hit pretty hard by it. There could've been a flood of refugees from Russia down to Australia when things went bad.
  • That's an awfully long way to go, though, especially during/after a world war, in which we know Australia was involved. It doesn't make much sense that refugees would, or even could, go that far in such a situation. Maybe they were the remnants of a Soviet/Russian army which had invaded Australia?

News Broadcasts

• If the voices during the intro are supposed to be news reports just before, and during, the end of the world, why are they already using Wastelander slang?

Why are all the weapons and vehicles so bad?

• Seriously. All the weapons and vehicles in this movie range from absolutely uselessly stupid to impractical to very easily improved. For example, look at the harpoon launchers. We know that they have grenades, of a sort, with an impact fuse (and I question how exactly they make those, but that's another question) and we see the pintle mounted harpoon launchers. Why has no one ever thought to combine the two? Why in the world would you use suicide attacks to deliver your rockets when anyone with some duct tape could easily make a wasteland RPG?
  Furthermore, why even bother with those at all? This is a society which, in order to build any of the things it has, absolutely must have access to electricity and machine shops. Otherwise, there is absolutely no way they could build the vehicles, let alone maintain them, especially after all the huge amounts of custom work done. You can't just slap some scrap together and make a working vehicle, that's not how it works, they have to engineer and do loads of custom fabrication to build any of those vehicles, and without welders, 100% of them would be impossible. Welders means electricity. Custom parts would also be required, and they need some way to acquire spare parts for all those cars, especially given as they can't be very reliable at that level of power. As there are no parts stores, that means machine shops. If you have the ability to do that sort of engineering and fabrication work, would it REALLY be that hard to just build a machine gun? A 3000hp supercharged race engine is much more complex.
  So anyone who could build a war rig could easily build a pintle mounted HMG and enough real guns to equip their entire army instead of just garbage scrap and antiques.
  Then there are the vehicles themselves. Most of the work they do is absolutely stupid and actually makes the vehicles WORSE. Why is there no armor on any of the vehicles? They will cover them with spikes, and stupid seesaws for their suicide grenades, but no one ever thought to just weld some plates on there? They also just have guys standing there, in the open, waiting to get killed on the war rigs. They clearly have the ability to make turrets. Why would you not do that? And why waste incredibly scarce fuel on enormous and unreliable racing engines? Furiosa's truck, for example, came equipped from the factory with running gear ideal for a wasteland. A simple, air cooled diesel engine that can be easily repaired, and produces enough power to haul heavy loads, and the truck was built to operate in austere conditions. Furthermore, why in the world are they all using sports cars and rat rods? Where are the pickups? The Toyota Hilux is one of the most common vehicles in Australia and is renowned for being incredibly reliable and capable, but none seem to exist anymore. A pickup with a simple pintle mounted MG in the back would be a more effective weapon than anything they have in the world, and you could make it even better by using your resources to build things like APCs or IFVs instead of just just stupid dune buggies with huge V8s. Sure, it'd be slower, and wouldn't look as cool, but why in the world does it matter if they work?
  Basically, how are people this stupid able to even exist? They use the resources that they have in the worst, least efficient way possible, and yet are somehow not wiped out by the first rational people they encounter. Immortan Joe was a military veteran in the pre-apocalypse days, it's not like he wouldn't know about these sorts of things.
  • Rule of Cool.
  • More to address these points: First off, they do have heavy machine guns, Furiosa's escorts have one mounted on one of the cars. How much ammo they have might be a different matter altogether, considering their ammunition evidently is made by Bullet Farm. The huge amounts of ammunition used in the course of the film is implied to come from there as a special purpose measure just for this chase. In that light, it makes sense to use weapons that don't depend on a different regime for the ammo. The explosives everyone seems to be using up left and right are easier to produce once they've got raw materials, not needing the precise tooling of mass produced ammunition. And they're arguably more effective against vehicles than bullets.
  • As for vehicles: Armored vehicles, believe it or not, take a LOT more maintenance than plain old cars. Tracks wear out a lot faster than tires, and counterintuitively there's plenty of places they can't go that wheels can. Armor needs transport just to get where it's going. (Several armor units in Normandy after the D-Day invasion took weeks to get into place because the railway networks were so utterly torn up.) Armored vehicles are highly specialized for the tasks they do. Cars and trucks, not so much. That's why armor units consist of mostly non-armored vehicles like maintenance rigs, fuel trucks, recon vehicles and even motorcycles. Last, automobiles are an existing resource; modifying technology that you already have is easier, in a resource-strapped economy, than building technology you don't have. A lot of people know how to maintain and work on cars, very few have experience with tanks and personnel carriers.
  • Another noteworthy point is that many of the vehicular weapons (tire spikes, harpoons and so on) are explicitly designed to do the least damage possible, to capture rather than destroy enemy vehicles. Cannons would certainly be more effective at killing vehicles, but that's frequently not the goal.

Food and other supplies

• How is anyone - especially population centers - actually fed in this setting? The unwashed masses are scrawny and clearly malnourished, but there are so many of them that it's not clear how they're able to be fed at all. Especially telling are the clearly obese milkers, who not only are able to have enough food to gain that much weight but also to continually produce milk. We see the Citadel grows some greenery, but nothing obviously substantive, and even if it was relatively calorie-dense plants like potatoes, there's still a certain protein deficiency risk.
  Gasoline and other petroleum products can be explained as coming from Gastown, but what about all the other items needed to run a vehicle? Tires, brake fluid, coolant, etc. It's allegedly 45 years After the End, so all original rubber tires are almost certainly dry-rotted beyond use at this point, and the vehicles in question obviously have pretty powerful brake performance - requiring something that doesn't catch fire or boil away with high speed (thus high temperature) braking. Lastly, all those hotrods will need something to keep them from overheating and burning out in short order.
  The Bullet farmer has a lead mine, but there's more to bullets than lead. Even assuming cartridges are reloaded and perhaps caps formed with some kind of mercury source, gunpowder is going to be hard to concoct, especially the high-pressure "smokeless" varieties that they are obviously using (especially in the context of automatic weapons, which need the high energy of modern powders to cycle correctly and not foul beyond use after only a short duration of fire).
  • They have an industrial base. We don't see much of it, because that's not what the film is about, but Immortan Joe passes through some aeroponics racks, making it clear that they're using relatively high technology to make up for their limited resources. The Bullet Farm is presumably not just a lead mine, but also chemical plants to make everything else that goes into guns and gunpowder. One of the points of the film is that they've actually moved past scavenging, but Joe and the other dictators are keeping their people starving to maintain their own power.

"Mediocre"

• How did "mediocre" somehow become a compliment ("Mediocre, Morsov!!")? Joe still uses it in the standard sense. Is it a word that fell out of use, then got misinterpreted (because Joe probably calls a lot of people "mediocre") as being something positive?
  • What? Joe was insulting Nux. He gave Nux every opportunity to succeed, handed him his own gun, and Nux tripped, dropped the gun, and utterly failed. Joe scoffed that, after all that buildup, it was just a mediocre performance at best.
    • I (original poster here) was talking about two different uses of the word. First, all the War Boys cheer the suicidal bombing against the Buzzards vehicle with, "Mediocre, Morsov!!" That doesn't seem like they're mocking the dead man, they're saluting him. Then, later, Joe does just dismiss Nux by calling him mediocre. The tone is different.
  • And I guess I found as good an answer as any. The Looper speculates [1] that "mediocre" is probably the least derogatory thing Joe ever said to any of them, so the Boys turned it around and believed that it was a compliment.
  • When Morsov sacrificed himself, I think it was only Slit who said "Mediocre, Morsov!". Slit had thrown his harpoon just as Morsov jumped, and seems to have felt he had struck the killing blow and deserved the credit.
  • It was indeed only Slit who said "Mediocre, Morsov!". The others all yelled "Witness" to show their respect for his Dying Moment of Awesome. Slit dissed him and tried to perform a Kill Steal because he's just a jerk.
  • Nowhere in the film had the word "mediocre" being used in anything other than a dismissive sense. Joe berated Nux for failing him, and Slit was annoyed at Morsov stealing his kill and taunted his death when all other War Boys were celebrating it.

---