Mad Max: Fury Road is not exactly the kind of movie I typically watch. I tend to watch stuff with interpersonal drama, or subtitles, or Meryl Streep, and this movie really had none of those things. I was in fact only sort of aware of it before I saw it, because a friend and I just wanted to go see a movie, and I had faintly heard that it had made some "men's rights activists" mad about something or other, which seemed like as good a reason to watch it as any.
So, apparently the anger over the film stems from it being "feminist propaganda". To be sure, the movie has heavy gender themes. "Subtext" understates it; in fact, it's less text than a smack to the face: the plot of the film is driven (and there is a lot of literal driving, of course) by a female general, Furiosa, played by the always appealing Charlize Theron, smuggling a group of women sex slaves to freedom. Her goal is to take them to "the Green Place", where "the Many Mothers" live in peace, with plenty of food and water. Her escape vehicle is a giant truck filled with human breast milk. It's not exactly subtle.
The place they're escaping is the Citadel, a small oasis in which water is pumped from deep below ground to grow crops and given -- in an extremely meager supply -- to the populace. The Citadel is ruled by Immortan Joe, an old man in a skull mask, breathing machine, and plastic armor. The women smuggled out by Furiosa were his beautiful young "wives", one of whom is amply pregnant. Immortan Joe's forces are an army of "War Boys", sickly-looking young men with bodily modifications, some of whom are dependent on transfusions from enslaved human "blood bags" to function. The War Boys are driven by religious fervor, believing that an honorable death will lead them to ride alongside Immortan Joe in Valhalla.
Immortan Joe is grotesque in every way, including physically, and the beneficiaries of his rule are himself and a few high-ranking cronies (many of which appear to be his relatives); while the film focuses on the plight of Furiosa and the wives, they are not the only ones suffering: we briefly see a large population of unfortunate people dwelling in and dependent on the Citadel. Their misery is illustrated in a scene in which Immortan Joe briefly allows some of his water supply to cascade upon the populace, who eagerly await it with any container available to them, until the leader shuts off the supply again and warns the wretches below not to grow "addicted" to it.
The film itself is almost pure action; from childhood I seem to recall "action movies" having action sequences interspersed through the rest of the film; in this movie, quiet scenes are a rarity. The action scenes are thankfully well done and manage to be both really cool looking and pretty easy to follow, without lots of bad shaky-cam making it impossible to follow. It's immensely satisfying seeing Charlize get to be as much a badass as Tom Hardy, and even more fun seeing the elderly surviving Mothers join in.
The film does a fairly deft job of making the violence it portrays exciting while not allowing the viewer to forget that it's tragic -- it's a sad necessity in a world that has become miserable and ruined. And it ends with a message of hope, allowing for a possible future in which it's not necessary for old women to be masters at gunfighting. Having literally overthrown a patriarchy, Furiosa now stands to rebuild society into something much better. Sadly, this coming place of peace doesn't have room for Mad Max, the ultimate survivor, who leaves the women and walks off into the desert again at the end.