FURY ROAD IS THE GREATEST POST-APOCALYPTIC MOVIE EVER
SCIENCE FICTION EDITOR John Joseph Adams is a well-known fan of post-apocalyptic fiction. He’s collected many of his favorite post-apocalyptic stories in books like Wastelands 2 and The End Has Come, and he’s also a huge admirer of novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz and videogame series like Wasteland and Fallout.
But when it comes to post-apocalyptic movies, Adams has mixed feelings. He’s enjoyed parts of various post-apocalyptic films, but never found one that he could recommend wholeheartedly. That all changed this month, though, with the release of the new George Miller movie Mad Max: Fury Road.
“Now I’m glad that I can say my favorite post-apocalyptic movie is Mad Max: Fury Road,” Adams says in Episode 152 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxypodcast. “Not with any qualifications or anything. It’s just like, obviously that’s my favorite post-apocalyptic movie.”
Bestselling author Carrie Vaughn agrees that Fury Road is virtually flawless. She says critics are right to praise its stunning action sequences, but she also feels that people shouldn’t discount the film’s excellent storytelling. She notes that the large number of strong female characters is revolutionary for this type of film.
“Post-apocalyptic—especially post-nuclear-apocalyptic—movies seem kind of dated as a concept,” she says. “But in some ways this was a really timely and relevant movie.”
Hugh Howey, author of the mega-popular post-apocalyptic novel Wool, also praises the film for its rich themes, such as the idea that we should make life better in the here and now, and not dream about running off to some better world.
“There are a lot of people living today who just think, ‘I’m going to follow these rules and I’m going to go to some better place in the end times,'” he says. “When, you know, let’s make this [world] the better place. And I thought that was a really cool theme throughout the movie.”
Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtleythinks films like Fury Road also help remind viewers about the dangers of nuclear weapons.
“I kind of wonder if all these Mad Max movies made people more aware of how bad a nuclear war would actually be,” he says, “and as [younger people] grow up not watching all these after-the-bomb type things, if they’re becoming a little more complacent about the prospect of nuclear war.”
Listen to our complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Carrie Vaughn, and Hugh Howey in Episode 152 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Carrie Vaughn on the women of Fury Road:
“There have been plenty of chick flicks about multi-generational women doing things and working together—things like Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes and stuff—but they’re chick flicks. To see that dynamic, or something like that dynamic, in a movie like Mad Max was so revolutionary and so brilliant that I have no words. I have no words—speaking as a woman in her 40s—for how massively powerful that was. And then to have the entire third act of the movie that’s these women working together, and teaching each other, and fighting for each other, in a totally straightforward way, it was perfect. It was just perfect. … In fact, I think in the entire third act if you tried to do a reverse Bechdel Test—were there actually men talking together about anything during the third act?—I’m not sure there are.”
Carrie Vaughn on the world of Fury Road:
“As far as the worldbuilding—and I think this is in the movie’s favor—it is depending on a filmmaking language that has been around for about 35 years now, since the first Mad Max movie, of the post-apocalyptic landscape. That’s part of why I love the movie, is I’m a big fan of the genre. I call it the ‘1980s post-apocalyptic road trip movie,’ and it’s an entire genre, and there’s hundreds of movies that fit in that genre, and there’s things that you always see over and over again, like the motorcycle gangs and the desert landscape, and just the gonzo weirdness, and that kind of thing doesn’t need an explanation, because that’s part of the genre. It’s part of the tropes, you just need to sit back and take it in. … I’ve seen a lot of blog comments and Facebook posts saying ‘This movie had no story,’ and my response is, ‘Well, just because nobody stopped to explain it to you doesn’t mean there’s not a story there.'”
Hugh Howey on post-apocalyptic fiction:
“I think we make this mistake of thinking that post-apocalyptic stories are new. It seems like every 10 years we act like these disaster films or these apocalyptic films are this new thing. You know, you look at the Old Testament and it’s full of stories like this, and every religious tradition has their own version of the destruction and what comes after. They’re all survival films. They go through different iterations, but the whole ‘lost on a deserted island’ was a type of post-apocalyptic survival film. The Westerns were a type of post-apocalyptic survival film. It’s all about being in the wilderness and how you make it through. So the guise of them has changed, but the idea of going against nature and having to survive by your wits, and how long will you last, is thousands of years old.”
Carrie Vaughn on changing fears:
“The nuclear apocalypse story came to a head in the 80s for really obvious reasons, you know, the bombs got so much better and Reagan escalating things, but even going back to the 60s you have movies like Fail-Safe and On the Beach, so that fear had a couple of generations to cook by the time we get to Mad Maxand The Day After and Threads and those kinds of movies. What’s interesting to me is that the vehicle of apocalypse has changed. I don’t know that we need to instill a fear of nuclear war, because what we have instead of course is the fear of pandemics like Ebola, climate change, economic collapse. The zombie apocalypse I think is a metaphor for all of these other things maybe put together. … So the tropes don’t necessarily change, but it’s the vehicle of apocalypse that’s very easily adaptable from one apocalypse to the next.”
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