Not to mention that at no point is anything about the society depicted as being somewhere actually good to live. The movie ends with defectors from decadence killing the god-king and presumably overturning the order he built, and it's framed positively
Dude, what? Have you ever watched Mad Max? Do you even know what it is about? lol
It has nothing to do with climate change, has no pro car message and is not even from Hollywood.
This is just ignorant.
I love the idea that someone in Hollywood okayed the idea of giving George Miller (who would have been like 70 at the time) $150 million and just sending him off into the desert to film two hours of complete lunacy, and it worked. The film like doubled its budget and won six oscars lol
Fury Road has a very strong theme of extractive/capitalist survival (represented by cars, gas, control of water etc) = bad, regenerative/communalist survival (represented by the mothers and plant life) = good. The action scenes are ofc designed to be cool but I think the broader environmental/social message is strong enough that the flame guitar doesn't drown it out.
Yet there were further signs of the desperate measures individuals would take to ensure mobility. A couple of oil strikes that hit many pumps revealed the ferocity with which Australians would defend their right to fill a tank. Long queues formed at the stations with petrol—and anyone who tried to sneak ahead in the queue met raw violence. —McCausland on the 1973 Oil Crisis, defining the theme of Mad Max
Its been a while but I have watched all but the latest one. It definitely has something to do with climate change. The first film he was still a cop and now he wanders a desert because of ecocide and societal collapse. What do you think happened between the first and second films to cause a wasteland?
It definitely has a pro car message because he spends most of the films trying to fuel his car.
They may be thinking of another movie in relation to the climate change part. I have heard several people the past couple of years (who have clearly never seen the movies) talk about how the "oceans have dried up" in Mad Max, which is clearly NOT the case.
To be fair though, the world has gone under massive ecocide in Fury Road, but that isn't climate change so much as climate destruction.
And on the car bit, I couldn't agree more. Not only are they using the cars for actual survival, but the amount of people who actually have functioning cars is miniscule. The entire plot of mad max is war over resource shortage which includes oil. In thunderdome they were literally making fuel from FECES. In 2, Max tried extracting fuel from a gyrocopter lol.
Mad Max is the film series about what if civilization broke down and only the worst tendancies were left.
The original disaster was nuclear war, but even if it had been climate change, the cars and fire guitars are appropriate. Mad Max is about what if the people who caused the disaster stayed in charge.
See also Water World. Its a common theme for post-apocolyptic media
Because it shows that whatever happens, you'll still have people so car brained that in a world where water is comodified, the world still won't be rid of coal roller-like individuals.
They have a car based religion, one of the things that destroyed their world.
From your post and from the replies, I see the film has a dual message: it appeals to environmentalists because it critiques what led to the wasteland and places the bad guys as the big oil car drivers, it also appeals to self-reliant ultraneoliberals because it indulges the fantasy you talk about of fighting for resources on car chases, a hierarchy of violence and owning people like cattle...idk.
I mean, the Matrix is supposed to be a 'trans metaphor' (edit: not my words, it was the Wachowskis who said it :/, I don't see it) https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-53692435, but probably a lot of conservatives and conspiracy nuts adopted the whole red pill metaphor as a symbol of liberation from whatever.
Rocky I is also good at this dual message, it has rugged individualism, but it also does some social critique and takes the view of the underdog, who suceeds against all odds.
Good films hit all the right buttons and end up pleasing greeks and trojans, that's why they're good I guess...but I don't like and have never finished watching the last Mad Max or any of the previous films...so what do I know 🙃
I think just "taking the red pill" is the main metaphor. It involves learning what you and the world truly are, and you can't go back to the lie. I'm def no expert though.