Fury Road: a Story of Recovery

Back in May 2015, Leah Schnelbach wrote an excellent post on Tor.com about the then recently-released Mad Max: Fury Road. 

Furiosa will get her vengeance.

The post was called "We All Agree that Mad Max: Fury Road is Great. Here’s Why It’s Also Important." In it, Schnelbach talked about how the movie was indeed an awesome action movie, and that it was indeed groundbreaking for the genre because of its themes of environmentalism and feminism, but that it was powerful because it was also actually a story about the recovery of survivors of abuse and trauma. And because its telling of the survivors' respective stories stood many of our Hollywood-blockbuster expectations and assumptions on their heads.

Schnelbach says that it was "one of the best films I’ve ever seen that took grief and trauma and, through the alchemy of George Miller’s kinetic action sequences, turned the healing process itself into an enjoyable movie." As she says in her conclusion:

"The people who referred to this film as a 'Trojan Horse' were completely correct—but Miller wasn’t smuggling feminist propaganda, he was disguising a story of healing as a fun summer blockbuster. By choosing to tell a story about how a bunch of traumatized, brainwashed, enslaved, objectified humans reclaim their lives as a balls-out feminist car chase epic with occasional moments of twisted humor, George Miller has subverted every single genre, and given us a story that will only gain resonance with time."

Schnelbach's post is definitely worth a read.