Mad Max Fury Road is a thrilling action movie, full of giant car contraptions and fighting. Imperator Furiosa is a soldier under Immortan Joe, and she defies him with his Five Wives in order to escape his control.
Imperator Furiosa is played by Charlize Theron, a 5’10 blonde model. However, the movie does not capitalize on her good looks. In fact, Furiosa is an amputee with shaved hair and grease all over her face. There is great effort to downplay how attractive she is because the focus is on her character traits, rather than her beauty.
It’s really important how Furiosa is integrated into the plotline because the movie’s goal isn’t to sell “FEMINISM,” rather than to show a story that happens to have a powerful female character. Though the recent Wonder Woman with Gal Gadot was well received by the public, I feel that there was too much effort on making sure viewers understood that she’s a female superhero. Many of Gal Gadot’s fight scene cuts interlude with a focus on her soft clean feminine face and bouncing shiny hair, but Furiosa’s fight scenes are focused on her brutal attacks and bloody face. Even in youtube comments for both respective scenes, in Wonder Woman’s “Warehouse fight scene” people comment about how beautiful Gal Gadot is multiple times with plenty of “likes”, while the scene with Furiosa fighting with Mad Max people comment more about the actual fight scene and the way it was shot.
In Mad Max Fury Road, Furiosa is a byproduct of the story, and viewers can see the subtle qualities that make her a feminist hero. In Wonder Woman, the story is a byproduct of feminism. Though I truly enjoyed the movie Wonder Woman and the fact that Gal Gadot was portrayed as a strong superhero who can be both beautiful and badass, ultimately the movie felt as if directors were building a story around feminism, instead of a plot.
Link to “warehouse fight scene”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klidfZG9oZQ
Link to Furiosa vs. Max : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcgn4EY5_S8