Has anyone written Mad Max: Fury Road in the form of an epic poem of some kind?
… give me a few weeks
Speak, Teller, of the mad wanderer, the wastes-man, the driver, Rockatansky; Thirst-mad, solitude-mad, angry at the sky and the dust and the world mad; Humungus defeated, Thunderdome fled and burnt, Sky-Tribe flown to Sydney Savior and unsaved, alone and now hunted, fleeing toward nothing!
In the hands of Joe Immortan his madness does not free him Hung for blood and bleeding, wanderer-trophy, fury futile-fading Who is madder than the wanderer? Whose fury surpasses the madman’s? Furiosa Iron-Handed! Furiosa Woman-Thieving!
With cunning the war-rig taken with stealth the five wives stolen; Waste-crossing bravely fleeing to the wet-place nigh-forgotten; War-boys all shouting, pursuing and flaming Doof loudly playing; Blood-bag Max still hanging, car by thieves still driven chains still unbroken.
… showoff
*grumbles*
(do some more :D)
Into the storm drove Furiosa flaying sand would not deter her; A single war-boy flush with Max-blood for his master chased the bride-thief; Nux his name and short his half-life, Immortan’s glance his heart’s desire; Max-car Nux-car chased the War-Rig half-life hands could not control it.
Free’d the wanderer barely man now bound in muzzle tongue unspeaking; Found the Iron-Hand working iron saw the water in the wasteland; Gazed on Cheedo Dag and Toast then, Angharad Capable also; Stole from Wife-Thief then the War Rig did the Wanderer in his madness!
Fury and cunning both together were the marks of Furiosa; Barely stone’s-throw did he drive it; hopeless when the War-rig stopped; In her mercy brave Furiosa made a compact with the Madman; All for freedom: them, the clean girls, leave the war-boy let him die.
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.
10 Oscar Nominations: Best Picture Best Director Cinematography Costume Design Film Editing Makeup & Hairstyling Production Design Sound Mixing Sound Editing Visual Effects
“What was great about this is that the luxury of a love story was not where we were, I mean they can’t even talk to each other. It was always going to be two warriors on par,starting off with very little respect for each other and ending up with a massive respect for each other.” – Charlize Theron
For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad Max, she said, ‘Well, why me?’ And I said, ‘Because then it’s not going to look like other action movies.“
And it doesn’t. Compare the smart, iterative set pieces of Fury Road to one of the incoherent car chases in Spectre, for example, and you’ll see that Sixel prizes a sense of spatial relationships that has become all too rare in action movies. ‘She’s a real stickler for that,’ said Miller. ‘And it takes a lot of effort! It’s not just lining up all the best shots and stringing them together, and she’s very aware of that. She’s also looking for a thematic connection from one shot to the next. If it regressed the characters and their relationships, she’d be against that. And she has a very low boredom threshold, so there’s no repetition.’
That Sixel was able to whittle 480 hours of footage down into a movie that sings still astounds Miller. ‘It’s like working in the head of a great composer,’ he said. ‘Movies like this one — in particular this one, because it’s almost a silent movie — are like visual music. In the same way that a composer has to have a strong casual relationship from one note to the next, paying attention tempo and melodic line and overall structure, it’s exactly the same process that a film editor must have.’ Sixel, surely, is one of the greats.
so good on George Miller for giving credit to his wife and colleague. that said, FUCK YES women have ALWAYS edited for male directors without getting any recognition within the industry let alone any kind of mainstream acclaim. I mean, film editing isn’t really on the radar for most moviegoers/watchers so yeah, I don’t expect people to know this? But goddamn, even so many self-proclaimed film and cinema buffs fail to realize that so many of the “best” movies (mostly directed by men, natch) were edited by women. Does anyone remember that quote/anecdote about male directors discouraging their female film editors – or even actively sabotaging potential opportunities – because they didn’t want to lose the person who made sense of all their footage?
