What a good fight scene. This encounter could have been played a lot of ways, some of them unsavory given we start with one armed man and six unarmed women,.but the most terrified character here is easily Max. The Five Wives are frightened, but more angry and fed up, and Furiosa is just, well, furious. Meanwhile, Max spends the first half of the film acting like a nervous stray on the verge of fear-biting.
This is it exactly. Max keeps flicking the guns around and snatching things because he’s honestly on the very edge of panic. He’s just been chased down, tattooed, used as an unwilling blood donor, made a hood ornament, nearly died in a car chase and dust storm like 5 million times, and is plagued by hallucinations on a GOOD day. Everything he does up until he starts realizing Furiosa needs his help and she TRUSTS him is someone fueled completely by terror. It says something about Furiosa that she figures out very quickly that Max isn’t so much a threat as he’s also a victim, useful, and SCARED.
Something my boyfriend pointed out is that Max is remembering how to talk through the first chunk of the movie.
I thought he was just grunting and stuff because “rawr I am a badass male action hero man” and didn’t wanna use words. But no, no he’s remembering how to talk. He’s been wandering the desert for who knows how long, not speaking to another soul, hallucinating, and when he’s confronted by the Wives and Furiosa he can barely communicate beyond the violence he’s been subjected to at the hands of the War Boys and in his interactions previous to that. He remembers how to speak as the movie progresses.
Also, Max clearly isn’t interested in killing anyone in that first fight. Furiosa puts a gun to Max’s head and pulls the trigger – twice – but Max walks up with a busted shotgun, wastes six bullets on warning shots, and disables Nux with a punch in the solar plexus even though he’s holding a loaded pistol.
Even at his most feral, just out of an experience that would curl most people into a ball of helpless panic, Max just wants to get away, not kill anybody. It breaks my heart.
Beautiful commentary about Max and Furiosa, but I’d like you to also look at the Dag. This has probably been mentioned a million times before (I read it in a “things I noticed after watching Mad Max for the third time”-post about a month ago) but she is stalling. We just saw her remove the chastity belt from Cheedo without any effort, and now we’re to believe she suddenly forgot how the bolt cutters work?
No. Look at her face in the third gif, the way she looks over her shoulder and gets out of the way, look at that grin. She knows exactly what she’s doing, she knows Furiosa is on her way to fuck Max up. (Also look at Furiosa huddling up like an american football player before tackling, this is just such an A+ scene all around <3)
I think I reblogged this months ago, but reblogging again because I realized it relates to the Fight and Flight post.