Congrats, anon, you’ve sent me on an epic screen-capping adventure.
Short answer: I think it’s inconclusive.
Every time I watch this scene at full speed, I see Angharad go under the wheels of the car Joe is driving (which is Rictus’s car at that point). But when you watch at half speed, it’s slightly less clear what happens.
Angharad slips and falls off the Rig. (And in case you were wondering, it’s her left foot, not her bloodied right one, that slips, although that blood is certainly prominent.)
It seems clear that she falls well outside the wheels of the War Rig, just as Nux did when she threw him out that same door earlier.
We don’t actually see her hit the ground. Max is looking the other way at this point–his attention has been pulled by something else after he gave her the thumbs-up. But he reacts to Capable and Dag’s screams. They both clearly see her fall–they’re leaning right out the door.
Max turns and looks:
And then in a shot-reverse-shot, we see what he sees, which is Angharad, on the ground, not moving.
This shot goes by really fast, and there’s a lot of dust, but it looks like there’s something by her head, just on the edge of the shadow of the Rig, which could possibly be a chunk of rock that she possibly hit her head on upon landing. It’s hard to tell, but she does have a bad head injury later. What’s clear is that she doesn’t move at all once she hits the ground.
It certainly looks like Joe’s front wheel is headed straight for her in this shot:
But as the car gets closer, it looks like she’s actually between the wheels. You can see the white of her dress right on the edge of the War Rig shadow.
But then Joe realizes what’s happening and swerves toward frame right, up the embankment that he eventually flips over on and crashes. So it seems not-impossible that in trying not to hit her, he does hit her, with the right-side wheels of the car. But there’s too much dust in the shot to see clearly where Angharad’s body is, although Rictus and the Imperator on the car react by looking for her under the wheels.
Rictus gets flipped off the car and basically bounces and rolls, and immediately goes running back to something behind the car. It’s really dusty, but I think it’s clear he picked up Angharad’s body (yo, DO NOT DO THAT IRL with a person who has unknown injuries!), because he has a bunch of blood on his chest and necklace in this shot later:
Angharad, for her part, has a nasty-looking head injury and DEFINITELY should not be being held like that.
It’s hard to tell if she has other injuries–if she’s flopping around like that because she’s semi-conscious or because something important is broken. I can’t claim to be enough of an expert on what being run over by a monster truck looks like to have an opinion on whether her injuries look like she’s been run over or not, but I agree with you that George Miller certainly does. She’s sort of moaning in this shot, so she must be somewhat conscious, but we don’t really see her regain consciousness again until she dies.
So we have the question of what actually happened, what Max saw, and what he said he saw, which are three different questions.
It’s worth remembering that the characters don’t have the luxury of replaying the events of the movie in slow-mo. They’re living them and reacting in the moment when they’re fucking terrified and fighting for their lives.
Maybe Max saw what I see every time I watch the movie, which is the worst case scenario of Angharad going under the wheels of Joe’s car. Maybe that’s actually what happened and Max is telling the truth, or maybe it didn’t happen but that’s what Max sees, yet another gruesome vehicular death he feels is at least partially on his conscience.
(Slight segue: If you’ve read the Mad Max #2 prequel comic, you may notice that Max flashes back to a very specific moment with Glory, who was also killed in a vehicular attack, which happened after Glory’s mom asked Max to stay with them and he said no. In the comic, Max comforts Glory as she’s dying, and lies to her, telling her that her mom is fine and Max will look after her, when we can see that her mom is already dead. Add that to the interpretation as you will.)
Maybe Capable saw something different in the moment, could swear she saw Angharad go right between the wheels and not under, and that’s why she’s screaming that Max doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe we don’t know which one of them is right.
Maybe Max turned quickly enough to see her land with terrible luck, smacking her head right on that rock, and years of watching people die told him instantly that the impact was hard enough that she’d be comatose or dead. Maybe he makes the calculation that this is their only chance to put distance between them and the war parties, and wasting that chance going back for someone who probably won’t make it is a terrible idea. So Max “well, you keep moving” Rockatansky says the thing that will keep them moving, which is that he saw her go under the wheels.
Maybe Furiosa makes the same calculation. Maybe she knows they have to keep moving, but having someone else say it is an awful kind of reassurance.
Personally, I kind of like that we don’t really know, that we get to see characters make snap decisions with inconclusive information and maybe be wrong. It’s not something you see in movies a lot, but it happens in the real world all the time. It’s part of survivor guilt. Maybe we should have gone back. Maybe we could have saved her. Maybe we made the wrong choice.
If you’re from the Fury Road: No Accidents school of thought, you might suggest that it’s a deliberate choice to obscure a couple of key shots with dust so we can’t definitively see what happens. Who knows? I’m open to arguments about how we should read this scene.
