Australian Auteur George Miller, MD, had already cranked out ten films and earned the top golden man for animation when Warner Brothers finally approved his 3,500 storyboarded idea for a fourth Mad Max Franchise installment. At the age of 70, Miller took almost a thousand cast and crew members to the middle of the Namibian desert for over a year to create what has been called the greatest action film ever made. Behind the scenes was a twenty-year battle between two studios, several heads of production, and three huge movie stars to create what we see on the surface to be a film about our global fears regarding survival, psychosis, and the ever-disappearing access to the elements that keep us alive. After the dust settled, and Fury Road took home an astonishing six Oscars from ten nominations, the critics and fans pointed to the real story of Fury Road: the warning of dictatorship, megalomania, and the power of femininity that could save us all. Witness me and Dave Anderson as we go scene by scene through Fury Road and argue the finer points of Valhalla, Gas Town, and the Vuvalini. As always, all music is by Rozalind MacPhail. You can find her at www.rozilandmacphail.com. Works Cited: Buchanan, Kyle. Blood, Sweat, and Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road. William Morrow. New York. 2022. Smyth, J. E. “Prick Flick”: Taking the Measure of Manly Movies. Cineaste, Fall 2017. Vol. 42, No. 4 (Fall 2017), pp 20-24. Walter, Martin. Landscapes of Loss: The Semantics of Empty Spaces in Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. “Empty Spaces: Perspectives on Emptiness in Modern History” Ed. Campbell, Courtney J., Giovine, Allegra and Keating, Jennifer. University of London Press. Payne, Darin. Shifting Gears and Paradigms at the Movies: Masculinity, Automobility, and the Rhetorical Dimensions of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Studies in Popular Culture, Fall 2017. Vol 40, No. 1, pp 102-135.
