*Spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road ahead, obviously*
I am hoping you clicked on this article because you, like so many people out there, have suddenly been made aware of 'Meninists' - also MRAs, or Mens Rights Activists - because of a Return of Kings article demanding a boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road. (Guardian article linked, because if you visit the original they'll get ad money).
 |
| This is them, patrolling the YouTube comments section. © 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved |
"Men are being tricked by explosions and boobs into watching feminist propaganda!" They cry. "We wanted this film to be just for us (along with all the others this summer, and all other summers)!" Hell, they're even upset at a 'piece of American culture being ruined' (ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the funding, director, lead, writers and locations of the original Max films are all Australian, as is this one).
They also complain that the film is called Mad Max, yet Furiosa seems to do most of the fighting. If we remove gender from the equation, it does admittedly seem a little odd that the titular character takes such a back seat. But in this landscape of reboots, sequels and studios being terrified of taking a chance on new intellectual properties, nobody would have thrown this kind of budget behind Imperator Furiosa: Awesome Robot Arm the movie.
 |
| Even though we would all watch the crap out of that movie. © 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved |
If you're upset at a movie being affected by financial concerns, then boy are you writing about the wrong multi-billion dollar industry. Plus, the clue is right there in the subtitle: Fury Road. Greek mythological spirits of vengeance, notably female. The film is almost literally called 'The highway of angry women.' It could only have been clearer if they'd called it The Vagina Monorail (A title which I'm copyrighting and working on as we speak).