Don’t pay too much attention to the science/medical things in the film. My colleague was taken aback and the movie ruined when she tried to make sense of the breast milk and the production of it.
Just take it all and enjoy the shiny. And explosions. 
I may or may not have snorted audibly when he cut the IV tubing that was still hooked into a large neck vein and didn’t bleed out.
Shiny! Boom! Fire pretty!
Yeah, and just a bit later he yanked that shit right out of his neck and I was all “apply a little pressure there for just a moment maybe? No? Really? Ok, then. Carry on!”
Well, apparently his skin is made of sand resistant Kevlar, so perhaps his blood vessels are as well…
Oh, I’m not thinking about it as a serious dissertation, more of a casual idea that seemed a neat way of thinking about it.
I did appreciate that he had the tubing pinned to his collar for the rest of the movie, up until he used it to save Furiosa. Which made a lot of sense: ten feet of surgical tubing is probably pretty hard to find after the apocalypse, so you’d want to hang on to that shit if you’ve got it.
Yeah, that scene where he erupts out of the sand reminded me so hard of Prince of Egypt, or as my friends and I call it: Moses The Vengeful Poltergeist.
Maybe everyone’s dead and Mad Max-land is Sheol / Gehenna.
One thing that confused me, the younger set of women, the wives/breeders were all INCREDIBLY good looking, doubly so for a post apocalyptic setting. How does this affect or not affect the feminist message of the movie? Obviously, there were strong women in the move, Charlie Theron and the other set of older women (plus the younger woman with long dark hair about Theron’s age). But what is the point of these super good looking women doing in this movie?
Eye candy? But it makes sense if you’re thinking these are the wives of the head honcho. As you pointed out, most of the other women shown were not as pretty and appeared rugged and dirty for the most part (minus the naked sentinel, I didn’t know they could still get wax treatment in this dystopia).
Just because it may have some feminist leanings doesn’t mean it also has some stuff to entice the male audience members.
Feminist leaning doesn’t mean everything has to have that bent, and even if it does, the women can be portrayed other than butch, dirty, old, fat, disabled, and minority. Women can be all that, as well as beautiful and incredibly good looking.
Is the implication that good looking cannot include feminist view? The good looking pregnant actress use her looks (and condition) as a shield to help Furiosa. It was at a high cost, but she was so determined in what she wanted that she risk it. Similar, the other hesitant woman used her looks to get back to Immortan and eventually sabotage him.
I’m just glad that a film can be made like this, where the protagonist is a woman, many of the main ones are women, and it is still shiny and explosions! Oh so pretty!
Not to argue but your points would make more sense to me if one of the young women were super hot and the others were simply attractive. Having them all be superhot kind of makes it like every other movie hollywood makes…
I can’t get over how the redhead wife, who had the thing with Nux, was played by Elvis’s granddaughter.
But these women had been specially selected by Immortan Joe to be his wives. It seems to me that this fits perfectly with the feminist message of the film.
If you are creating an archetypal misogynist dictator warlord, in a movie designed to show the shallowness and depravity of a particular type of man, then surely it makes sense that your misogynist dictator warlord would have plucked the most stunningly hot and attractive women from the thousands at his disposal.
My wife’s a feminist academic, and is generally very critical of the way women are portrayed in a lot of Hollywood movies. She told me that she groaned a bit on the inside when she saw how hot the five women were, worried that it was just going to be another typical Hollywood eye candy flick, but by the end of the movie that concern had been completely rejected, and she believed that they were perfectly appropriate for the role.
Of course, it probably helps the movie’s marketability that there are a bunch of really hot women wearing revealing outfits, but the feminist critique of the movie industry has never been only about the focus on young, attractive women; it has also been about the types of roles that women get. While these young women begin the movie as fairly typical waifs in distress, they adapt to their circumstances and play an ever-increasing role in the action. They fight, they get injured, and one of them ends up dead. They are also joined by a bunch of other women, some of them much older, who play a role in the fighting and also give their lives. And the main protagonist, the person who sets the whole narrative in motion and who essentially runs the whole show, is also a woman. For many feminists, the focus on women’s suffering but also on women’s agency and power, outweighs the fact that there were some hot young women in the film.
Am I the only one who was reminded of the intro to Rock Band when they saw the guitar playing guy in Mad Max?
Sandblasting.
Agree. Except Immortus Joe had maybe a thousand people at his disposal, not thousands. No way would you find that many really really beautiful women in 1000 people even today and definitely not post apocalypse.
There were way more than a thousand people in that initial crowd trying to get water. More like 10k in the distance shots. And remember, he was apparently the king of the refinery and bullet farm as well. So maybe 20k to pick from?
And let’s face it, The Dag wasn’t that beautiful. So it’s only four out of 20K. 
Everything is problematic. It’s the nature of the beast.
The wives function for the audience as eye-candy (whatever other functions the characters serve) and that’s problematic. (Though to my recollection there were not many (any?) classic objectification shots, so if I’m remembering that correctly, they were at least trying in this regard.)
Also, the film presumes that it’s worse for a beautiful woman to be mistreated than for an ugly woman to be mistreated. Again, problematic.
Everything is problematic and it’s fair–and necessary–to call out problems.
But overall, I think the film represents a great deal of hugely significant progress on the feminist front if it proves to be part of a trend. (If not, it represents a great symbolic victory but not much progress.)
And we know they raided other settlements and took women.
And given that we have, what, half a tanker full of mother’s milk–so there’s probably quite a few more women than we saw producing the milk, and they’re probably perpetually pregnant in whatever sort of selective breeding program they can manage.
I didn’t see it that way.
Joe raided other settements, so it is possible that he took women and children from them. That’s how they got Max.
