If the MRA set hadn't gotten their panties twisted nobody would be yelling about how feminist this film is. Don't remember anyone making a huge splash about Dredd treating Anderson like a person, and this isn't beyond that. If we were going to start doling out social justice cookies Fury Road's claim to any are thin as shit, given that it in no way undermines any inequality in the film industry (never mind the idea of Brendan McCarthy and Eve Ensler working on something that could honestly be called "progressive").
But it's just an action film about cars crashing shit, so imo it would be very strange to be disappointed by how it isn't some feminist manifesto
Every so often, a dose of truth slips past the Hollywood censor. Occasionally, the mask comes off, and we are allowed (accidentally) to see a realistic portrayal of how American women behave in a crisis. One such example is ironic, and instructive. The scene I will discuss happened to involve Charlize Theron (the irony!). The movie was 2009’s The Road. This was a realistic and terrifying vision of what a real apocalypse might look like. This is the face of reality, not the face of Hollywood leather-clad make-believe.
There is a scene near the beginning of the film where the Charlize Theron character and her husband become aware of the calamity that has befallen civilization. She and her husband (Viggo Mortensen) also have a small child. Theron, unable to handle the collapse of social order, abandons herself to despair. She wants to kill herself. And in an extremely disturbing scene, she simply abandons her family and walks out into the night, hoping to find a place to end her life. Lacking any character or strength, she abandons her family with unforgivable cowardice.
In other words, she is the typical modern American woman: lacking in character, tenacity, and endurance, and ready to sell out her man the minute that the shit hits the fan.
This has the ring of truth. And this is what makes the scene so disturbing. This is why no critic ever commented on it. If a real apocalypse were to happen, the response of nearly all American women would be: (1) curl up into the fetal position and die; or (2) seek out a male figure to protect her. There would be no altruism. There would be no virtue. But of course, this reality is almost never portrayed. Instead, what we get is the bullshit feminist pipe-dreams of Mad Max: Charlize Theron as a bionic-armed, karate-chopping ass-kicker, able to take down bodybuilders and brutes of all types.
