schwarmerei1:

fuckyeahisawthat:

canis-exmachina:

allaboutmmfr:

mmfrconfessions:

I understand everyone has different views on the matter, but sometimes it rubs me the wrong way when people act like it was so wrong for Furiosa to kill her crew. They obviously wouldn’t have helped her once they realized what her reason for going off course was. The women she was saving are more important than the men who worship the man who hurt them, as well as the man who forcibly took Furiosa from her home and murdered her mother. I don’t think there was any bond between them.

Whether it was ‘wrong’ for Furiosa to kill her crew or not, I do disagree about the bond between Furiosa and her crew. Everything in the body language and attitude of her crew spoke of familiarity and comfort. These War Boys – Ace especially – had done this countless times with Furiosa. We see it most strongly in the casual way Ace talks to Furiosa, the way they work together so fluidly when taking down Buzzards.

A natural bond emerges among soldiers when they do missions over and over again together.

It’s important to remember that one of Furiosa’s big motivations is redemption. She wants to get back to her roots, to strip away the Imperator she’s become and return to being the Vuvalini she once was. All this implies that, for a time, even if only out of a need to survive, Furiosa was a compliant part of Joe’s war machine, working among her fellow war boys and becoming a part of them. She was gone for 7,000 days at minimum – that’s 19 years. The idea that she could spend 20 years rising to the rank of Imperator, command an elite group of fighters on the War Rig, and still not bond at all with her crew is incredibly unlikely.

Ace doesn’t ask “Why won’t you stop” or “Why don’t you stop”, he asks Furiosa “Why can’t you stop”. To me, that says it all. He seems to have no reason not to trust her implicitly, and his disbelief and shock is painfully apparent. Being stabbed in the heart hurts more than being stabbed in the back.

I think there are a lot of textual clues–A LOT–that she had, at bare minimum, a level of professional trust and camaraderie with her crew, of the type you would expect in a military unit that has spent time training and fighting together. War bonds can be incredibly strong bonds–ask anyone who’s been in the military. It certainly took me multiple viewings to see some of these clues, but I think it’s undeniable that they’re there in the text. (Instead of listing every example I’ll just link here and here.)

But what I really want to say is about dramatic choices when you’re constructing a film story. In dramatic writing, you look for conflict. Films, in particular, are structured around high-stakes choices. You’re always looking for the impossible choice–the scenario that will force your character to choose between two unacceptable options.

Having Furiosa care about her crew, and then decide she has to kill them to achieve her mission, automatically creates a much richer dramatic environment. It complicates both the good guys and the bad guys. It complicates Furiosa, because it makes her not just a single-minded revenge machine, but a person who made real human connections in the place she was held prisoner–and then decides she has to betray those connections in pursuit of the goal that makes up the main plot of the film. It complicates the Citadel, because it turns the War Boys from one-dimensional cannon fodder into people who care for, and are cared about, by our protagonist. Even if they are also people who worship a rapist, slave-owning tyrant as their god.

What would they have done if they’d figured out her mission? We don’t actually know. It seems highly unlikely to me that all of them would have made the kind of ideological break needed to side with her, at the speed that would have been needed to not fuck up her plan. But that’s the most interesting option–if she knew that, and cared about them anyway. That’s maximum internal conflict right there, which is dramatic writing gold.

And I’d like to point out that all the stuff we’re talking about happens in her first few minutes of screen time. Lots of screenplays save the impossible choice for the third act. But the Buzzard chase is her character introduction! This is the beginning of the movie! And we’re already watching her make an impossible choice! That’s some next-level writing.

I have little to add to this excellent commentary except that I believe that John Iles who plays The Ace was formerly SAS military and also receives a credit as being a warfare and weapons advisor – so that’s perhaps an additional reason the War Rig v Buzzards sequence works so well.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1QZuFuD.