If Max had been the hero:
He would have successfully outrun the horde of people trying to capture him in the beginning of the movie, inadvertently winding up in the vault where the women were kept, and then he would have been the one to convince them to help him commandeer a war rig in order to escape before he was caught
He would have been the one to arrange the failed rendezvous point
Splendid’s death would have been framed as a personal loss for him, another person to add to the long list of people he couldn’t save, and her fridging and his subsequent manpain would be the motivating factor that prompted him to go off on his own and fight the Bullet Farmer
The camera would have followed him when he went to beat up the Bullet Farmer and his posse; instead of happening entirely offscreen, that moment, when he finally gets his first taste of real revenge against the people who’ve been enslaving him, would have been the centerpiece of the film
After it happened, Furiosa (if she was even in the movie) or one of the women would have had to sit him down for a wise talk about how he shouldn’t become the thing he hates, because even a hero needs guidance from the women around him
Her words of wisdom would inspire him to re-take control of the floundering group, re-establish himself as its leader, and give them a rousing Bill Pullman speech about how he’s going to go recapture the city, but he “can’t do it alone; who’s with me?” after which they of course all follow him out of inspiration/loyalty
In the final showdown against Immortan Joe, Max would have been the one crawling over the car, screaming some kicker line like “Get off my plane!” “Yippi Ki Yay” “GET—OUT—OF—MY—CAR!” while punctuating each word by slamming Joe’s head against the steering wheel. (Yes, I know that vehicle is not actually his car at that point but you get the idea)
The final shot of the movie would have been Max being lifted into the air on the podium while the crowd shouted his name. He would have allowed himself to kiss Furiosa (or whoever), framed as leaning into him as a supportive and adoring sidekick.
Because that, all of that, is what action heroes do. The action is framed in terms of how it affects them personally, they’re given the most intense moments of action in the story, they’re allowed to drive the plot, allowed to have the catch-phrases, the witty one-liners, the ~love interests~. The agency of other characters is denied so the hero can have his motivation to do plot things. For the vast majority of action films, this results in women who are only there to serve as sources of love, wisdom, or anguish for the main male character. They’re love interests or wise spiritual matrons or fridged women or all of the above (the Trinity Syndrome). These tropes are so familiar to us that we could have literally mapped out the possible cliched action movie plot of Mad Max using a thousand iterations of what’s come before it.
But instead, none of that happened. Every single one of these tropes was subverted. Furiosa got to do everything that Max would have done in a typical action movie. The camera doesn’t show us everything through his POV. The big second-act battle moment that occurs in every other action movie happens entirely off-screen, because Max is not the hero. In the end, Furiosa is the one who gets the final action-movie tag line (”Remember me?”) as she singlehandedly defeats the villain. And in the end, while the crowd is chanting, “Lift them up”—not him, them—Max is actually slipping away into the shadows, because Max is not the hero.
snowghoul
janainaart
ellievsbear
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
