Film / Mad Max: Fury Road

Can't you hear, can't you hear the drummers?

"If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die historic on the fury road!"

— Nux

Mad Max: Fury Road is a 2015 Australian post-apocalyptic Science Fiction film and the fourth film in the Mad Max film series; it was released after spending some thirty years in Development Hell, and its (standalone) story takes place sometime after that of the original Mad Max. Series creator George Miller returned to the driver's seat of his creation, serving as producer, director and writer once more. Junkie XL did the soundtrack.

Tom Hardy takes over the role of Max Rockatansky, a drifter doing his best to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, running from his personal demons. When he is captured by men who serve the tyrannical warlord Immortan Joe, the dictator keeps him alive as a "blood bag" for his fledgling "War Boys". Sometime after Max's capture, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) — one of Joe's trusted road warriors — betrays her master by freeing his five captive Wives and going on the run with the big tanker truck of Joe's citadel. Max ends up caught in the chase as he and Furiosa work together to escape from Joe, his convoy of War Boys, and other forces that would see them all dead (or worse).

The film's production was delayed by higher-than-normal amounts of rainfall around Broken Hill that made the area too green; filming eventually moved to, and was finished in Namibia. Miller and Fury Road co-writer Brendan McCarthy have already written sequels to this film; the first is titled Mad Max: The Wasteland. However, Miller has since refocused on a Spin-Off prequel centered on the earlier years of Furiosa, set to star Anya Taylor-Joy as the character. The film, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, is due for release on May 24, 2024.

Fury Road has a four-issue prequel miniseries published by Vertigo Comics and written by George Miller, Nico Lathouris and Mark Sexton, with stories spotlighting Joe, Nux, Furiosa, and Max. The graphic novel collection of the miniseries includes a story about the War Rig.

Character tropes go on to the Characters Sheet.

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These tropes will ride to Valhalla, shiny and chrome:

Tropes A to E

• Absurdly-Long Limousine:
  • Variation: Joe's second car, The Gigahorse is an absurdly tall limo, made of two Cadillac Sedan De Ville chassis' welded on top of one another and jacked up at a 45 degree angle on monster truck tires.
  • The People Eater is chauffeured in a Mercedes limousine that is towing two massive trailers of fuel.
• Ace Custom: Everybody has a unique, pimped-out ride that usually reflects their personality. Each car has its own name, too. Rictus Erectus' monster truck is named "Bigfoot", Nux's little coupe from the first chase is Elvis, and the massive beast that Immortan Joe drives is called The Gigahorse.
• Acoustic License:
  • The film mostly takes place at high speed with a fleet of massive, unmuffled V8s, not to mention the Doof Wagon's wailing guitar chords and booming taiko drums; yet wind noise only shows up maybe once and the roar of the engines is only audible when the vehicles themselves are the focus. People have no trouble yelling to other vehicles across several meters of air that should by all rights be flooded with cacophony.
  • The film depicts the Doof Warrior as playing through the speakers at max volume at all times. Although some of the speakers and iOta's guitar were fully functional (yes, including the flamethrower) as props, most of the guitar playing we hear in the actual movie wasn't captured "live" and they didn't have the entire bank of speakers on the Doof Wagon ever playing at once on set, probably because that many speakers all playing at once right behind him with no muffling or ear protection would most likely have killed the Doof Warrior in real life^note It should also be mentioned that the guitar itself sounded absolutely terrible when it was actually being played, hence another reason why it was overdubbed in post. Even in-universe, he's canonically deaf from doing this for years.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene:
  • While Furiosa is doing repairs on the War Rig, Capable finds Nux lamenting that he didn't get to "go to Valhalla". By showing the War Boy some kindness, Capable manages to convince him that he should live on.
  • The film gives the audience a single fifteen-minute stretch — when Max and company meet up with the Vuvalini — to catch its breath before going into the finale.
  • Before the action begins again, we're treated to Immortan Joe doing a sort-of Aboriginal prayer to Splendid with what looks like a native prayer stick.
• Action Prologue: The film opens with Max chased and caught by Immortan Joe's forces, then his attempt at escaping the Citadel, before cutting to the opening titles.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Max gets a metal restraint mask chained onto his face for a good portion of the first act, which resembles Tom Hardy's role as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, and his voice slips into Bane's at points. Nux's steering wheel also bears a doll head wearing what superficially resembles Bane's mask. Additionally, this time, he's the one who beats up a huge musclebound bald, superhumanly strong villain who wears a respirator mask on the lower half of his face and defeats him by disabling his oxygen supply.
  • And the Big Bad is played by the Big Bad from the first movie, and wears a mask like the Big Bad from the second movie (whose gigantic near-nakedness is taken up by the Big Bad's Dragon).
  • In the Vertigo Comics prequel, the Five Wives are shown to have learned music. Capable's instrument is the guitar — just like Riley Keough's famous grandfather Elvis Presley. For bonus points, one of the vehicles in the chase is named Elvis.
  • Rosie Huntington-Whitley previously appeared in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, where her character had a run-in with an evil warlord tyrant who was a Big Badass Rig covered in rusty spikes and chains.
• Adrenaline Time: According to director of photography John Seale, "something like 50 or 60 percent of the film is not running at 24 frames a second". Examples of Undercranking and Overcranking are rife throughout the movie.
• Aerith and Bob: Next to names like Splendid Angharad, Furiosa, Rictus, and even Max, we have the Big Bad, the heroic veteran of two apocalyptic wars, the God-Emperor of the Citadel... Joe. He'd have a much more awesome surname, but even that is misspelt.
• After-Action Healing Drama: After the Final Battle, Combat Medic Max does his utmost to keep Furiosa alive. He pierces her side to re-inflate the lungs and gives a blood transfusion. He also decides to tell her his name.
• After the End: While the film doesn't specify an exact timeline, if you take Furiosa's backstory to heart, at least just over two decades have passed between the apocalypse and the events of Fury Road. According to director George Miller in his foreword to the art book, it's closer to 45 years.
• The Alleged Car: The War Rig frequently overheats, requiring multiple stops for repairs and cooling. Luckily, Furiosa brought plenty of water. Many of the repairs are made while the rig is in motion, thanks to its redundant engines.
• All There in the Manual: The backstories of many of the characters and some of the worldbuilding details can only be found in the prequel comic books, such as Immortan Joe, being Colonel Joe Moore during the Oil Wars. Additionally, there are some important details that are only revealed in an official website discussing the main vehicles, and others discussed in the art book.
• Alternate Catchphrase Inflection: The last time "witness me" is uttered in the film by Nux before his Heroic Sacrifice.
• Alternate Monochrome Version: Certain screenings have shown the film in black & white. One year after the movie's release, said "Black & Chrome" version was made available with both Fury Road alone and a series-wide High Octane Anthology Box Set.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The ending theme for the Japanese version of the film is "Out of Control" by MAN WITH A MISSION and Zebrahead.
• Ambiguous Time Period: Max's tattoo states he was captured on "Day 12045": exactly 33 years, but the start date is never stated; the end of civilization, the founding of the Citadel, etc.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: When Max shows off the corpse of Immortan Joe, the crowd immediately cheers and start butchering it.
• Animal Motifs: Subtly done with the War Rig to make it feel like an ancient living creature. Bear, tiger, and lion roars are mixed into the sound of its engines during crucial scenes, the battering ram on the front resembles the jawbone of an animal skull, the supercharger's exhaust letting out sounds like a gasp of breath, and the groaning of tearing metal when it crashes at the end sounds like the death rattle of a dying animal.
• Annoying Arrows: Shortly after getting his hand impaled Max pulls the arrow out and continues fighting like it was Just a Flesh Wound.
• Apocalyptic Log: Max's Opening Monologue is interspersed with news broadcasts and radio messages of increasing severity, chronicling the downfall of civilization as seen in the previous films. In contrast to The Road Warrior (which placed nuclear war at the center of the apocalypse), Fury Road emphasizes the ecological devastation and depletion that led to said nuclear war. This theme is later evidenced when the Keeper of the Seeds explains that Furiosa already passed "The Green Place" they were searching for, as the land was poisoned and withered away into the swamp they just came out of.
• Apocalyptic Logistics: Lampshaded where the People Eater complains that Immortan Joe has used up a huge amount of fuel and trashed numerous irreplaceable vehicles^note 30,000 units of guzzoline, 19 canisters of nitro, 12 assault bikes, 7 pursuit vehicles in what he describes as "a domestic squabble". Also justified in that the Citadel, Bullet Farm, and Gas Town are in close proximity to one another — each one is reliant on the resources that the other two stockpile or produce.
• Arc Words:
  • "We are not things."
  • "Who killed the world?"
  • "Witness me!"
• Arch-Enemy: Imperator Furiosa has Immortan Joe, the tyrant who kept her as a Sex Slave.
• The Artifact: Rictus was originally envisioned as a minion of the People-Eater rather than Joe's son, and the canyon chase scene (which happens right after the People-Eater's forces join up with the war party, and which features Rictus prominently) seems to have been intended as his Establishing Character Moment.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Angharad delivers a good one.
  Nux: I am awaited!
  Capable: You're an old man's Battle Fodder! Killing everyone and everything!
  Nux: We're not to blame!
  The Splendid Angharad: Then who killed the world?!
• Artistic License – Medicine: Director George Miller (a former emergency room physician) made sure to avert this trope. Many of the medical conditions and their management depicted in the Mad Max movies are done so with great attention to accuracy.
  • Nux appears to have some form of cancer, most likely lymphoma or leukemia, and is consequently severely anemic. He requires blood transfusions in order to stay active, which is why he has to take Max along as a "blood bag".
  • A quick shot shows that the People Eater is suffering from elephantiasis of his right leg.
  • Furiosa develops a tension pneumothorax,^note A punctured lung is leaking air into her chest cavity, pressurizing it and thus making it harder and harder for her lungs to inflate and Max uses a knife to perform a needle decompression, which is the appropriate treatment. She also accurately displays the effects of exsanguination (which one of the Vuvalini even mentions aloud), rapidly turning a deathly shade of grey as the blood drains to her wound.
  • The film also plays this trope straight in a few ways. If Furiosa really were rapidly bleeding to death, Max's blood transfusion would likely be too slow to adequately replenish her blood volume in time. And even if Max's transfusion was successful, the cause of her bleeding and her punctured lung would need to be addressed. Her penetrating chest wound would also need some form of continuous suction to keep her lung from collapsing again.
  • Another Acceptable Break from Reality is the Reckless Gun Usage that should have resulted in several ruptured eardrums, a notable example being when Max fired a handgun at point-blank range three times near Furiosa's head, and when Furiosa fired her sniper rifle while using Max's shoulder to keep the barrel steady. The end of the barrel was right in front of his cheek. Max does suffer brief tinnitus, but in reality it would have been much worse.
  • Also played rather straight in regards to Max's blood being transfused to Nux. It only takes about ten minutes to transfer a single pint, so Max should have been rather weakened by the time, Nux's car was wrecked in the storm, adrenaline notwithstanding. Plus, being on the outside of the car when it flipped probably should have killed him, soft sand landing or not.
  • For that matter, Max loses a lot of blood throughout the entire movie, but is never seen replenishing himself or suffering from blood-loss fatigue. Especially in the end, when after everything he's been put through, he still somehow has enough blood to give some to Furiosa and walk off into the sunset, no worse for wear. By all rights, he should've been delirious and passing out through the whole ordeal.
  • Many of the characters should be worried about getting an infection by the time they reach the end of the film.
• Artistic License – Geology: After discovering that The Green Place has gone sour and turned into the swamp they already passed, rendering her entire journey moot, Furiosa devises a new plan to ride out across the "great salt flats". These salt plains are implied to be the remains of the Pacific Ocean, since it's stated that you can "ride for 100 days" in a single direction. This raises two distinct problems;
  • It's implied that the mass nuclear detonations of the Oil and Water Wars are what caused the oceans to boil away, but as anyone that's ever taken an elementary-level geology class will tell you, boiling water doesn't remove it from the planet; it just makes it evaporate, which will then cause it to rise into the atmosphere, cool down, condense into clouds, and fall as rain or snow. The only geological events that noticeably reduce the amount of water in the oceans are ice ages, since vast quantities of water freeze and get locked up in glaciers or the polar ice caps. Losing an amount of ocean water to render the Pacific, the largest ocean on Earth, into a desolate salt plain, wouldn't work just from nuclear proliferation.
  • On the other hand, if that amount of water did suddenly disappear from the planet (such as by getting atomized from nuclear explosions in the oceans) then Earth's biosphere would be irrevocably and incomprehensibly ruined along with it. Losing that much of the ocean would decimate the phytoplankton population of the planet, which contrary to popular belief is actually responsible for generating most of Earth's oxygen. Additionally, losing that amount of water would damage Earth's climate system by severely reducing Earth's capacity to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, as well as rendering most weather systems completely impotent or non-existent. Suffice to say that if Furiosa's understanding of the state of the oceans is accurate, it won't matter what anyone does or where anyone goes; Earth is dead and humanity is going to die within maybe a century, if we're lucky.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: after Angharad has just been shot in the leg. Unlike most examples, the questioner quips back.
  Furiosa: How does it feel?
  Angharad: It hurts.
  Furiosa: Out here, everything hurts.
• Audible Sharpness: The anonymous Mook who stabs Furiosa during the last chase pulls out his knife so loudly you have to wonder how no one heard him inside the War Rig.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Constantly. Immortan Joe's convoy has an audio truck with a whole drumming section and a Doof Warrior playing a guitar that shoots fire. (And, yes, that was a practical effect.)
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Subverted by the infamous Doof Warrior◊. The guy does look absolutely ridiculous, but it turns out he actually works as a sort of war drummer for the Warboys, playing inspiring music and even allowing Joe to give his boys orders in a world with no radio communication equipment.
  • The refinery on the back of the Gastown rig gives it a very distinctive appearance and allows the People Eater to refuel other vehicles while charging about, but it's revealed during the final battle that carrying around massive quantities of highly flammable substances in a world full of things that explode is decidedly unhelpful when it comes to not catching fire in spectacular fashion.
  • Immortan Joe's large water distribution pipes are an impressive sight to behold, but they are ridiculously wasteful, as they dump out huge quantities of water onto the ground just to allow his people to collect small amounts of it. Justified by being part of the way Joe maintains his hold on his people: by giving the illusion of generously dispensing fresh water to the thirsty crowd below in amounts that turn out to never be enough.^note As for the quantity spilled, the comics reveal that Joe is sitting on twenty thousand cubic kilometers of groundwater, enough to fill 8 million olympic pools, so he can actually afford the waste. This Tumblr post claims that Joe is actually using a discharge pipe normally used for testing the aquifer.
• Baby Factory: The Citadel has women being used as breeders.
• Back for the Dead: Max's Pursuit Special gets a whopping two minutes of screen time before being crushed in the final battle.
• Back from the Dead: Immortan Joe's shtick. He also promises entry to Valhalla to his War Boys.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Max and Furiosa do this multiple times, including inside the War Rig, and one particular shot where Max lets Furiosa use him as a rifle stand to temporarily stop the Bullet Farmer.
• Badass in Distress: Max is pretty helpless in the Final Battle when dangling upside down outside the truck with Furiosa desperately trying to keep him afloat.
• Battle Cry:
  • "WITNESS ME!"
  • Not exactly a battle cry, but the Warboys chant "I live, I die, I live again!" to psyche themselves up for suicide attacks.
• Beauty Inversion:
  • Nicholas Hoult as Nux. To quote one article: "Hire one of Hollywood's youngest, most attractive stars, then shave his head, paint him bone white, and have him play a character with disgusting chapped lips for the entire movie."
  • Charlize Theron dirties up quite believably for her role as Furiosa by having her hair cut off and her head covered in black war paint.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: This is averted with Furiosa (who gets progressively more beat up as the film goes on) and Toast (whose face stays bloody after she gets pistol-whipped), but played extremely straight when Angharad falls off the War Rig — even though she is fatally wounded, her body shows almost no visible damage. Considering she was run over by a monster truck and had an emergency c-section performed on her while still alive, that's probably a good thing.
  • Averted extra-hard when Furiosa gets stabbed, even though the wound isn't actually on her face, she quickly turns a deathly shade of ghost-pale grey-white (so pale she makes The Dag look darker) as the blood drains to her wound and her eyes turn bloodshot, in addition to the blood spilled from her lips.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Nux comments that he wants to drive a War Rig as a reward for recapturing the Wives. He gets to drive Furiosa's War Rig twice post Heel–Face Turn — once to get it out of the swamp, the other to make a Heroic Sacrifice by crashing it and blocking the path in the canyon so as to cut off the convoy's pursuit.
  • In more general terms, "If I die, I'm gonna die historic on the Fury Road." Yep, Nux gets his wish.
• Behind the Black: Justified: both the characters and the viewers are so focused on the fight with the Buzzards, they fail to pay attention to what exactly is ahead of them until the threat is abated and the camera swings around to reveal a massive wall of dust and lightning.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: All of the major chase scenes where Joe's army catches up to the War Rig count, but the most spectacular is definitely the Final Battle where the heroes engage Joe's entire host, with about 50 different vehicles in play at once.
• Big Badass Rig: There's a number of them, but the hulking black rolling fortress known as the War Rig is the most iconic — and practically a main character in its own right.
• Big "NO!": Furiosa does this when Toast is grabbed by a polecat. Cheedo has one when Furiosa shoots the bikers she wanted to surrender to and a slightly smaller one when Max is grabbed by a polecat during the final chase.
• Bittersweet Ending: Not everyone makes it, and Max decides to continue wandering the desert, but the Citadel will likely change for the better.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The names of the Wives aren't really stated, but you can tell who's who thanks to this trope. Angharad is the blonde, Cheedo is the brunette, and Capable is the redhead. Added to this mix is the dark-haired-and-skinned Toast and the albino The Dag. Not the first time George Miller directs a movie with this particular hair motif.
• Blood Is the New Black: When Max returns from dealing with The Bullet Farmer, his face is covered in his opponent's blood.
• Bloodless Carnage: Despite the film's bodycount and numerous ways characters are wounded or killed (including one mook getting stabbed in the face and throat with crossbow bolts, another getting stabbed in the eyes with bullets, a cesarean section, a human shield being used to block a chainsaw and an old lady getting a chainsaw wound to her neck), barely any blood is visible until a brief shot near the end, except as blood smears on wounded characters.
• Book Ends:
  • Max's first and last lines in the film. "My name is Max."
  • Max looks over the desert, with the same stance over the horizon in the beginning, and the exact same pose when he gets the idea to return to the Citadel. Each time he's listening to the voices of Glory the Child. The first time he was only about survival. The second time, he's about helping others.
  • At the beginning of the film, Max's blood is taken from him forcibly. At the end, he willingly surrenders it in order to save someone else's life.
  • Near the beginning of the final chase scene, Max falls off the War Rig but is caught by Furiosa with her mechanical arm. Near the end of the final chase scene, Furiosa nearly falls off Joe's Car after she's taken off her mechanical arm — and Joe's face along with it — but is caught by Max.
  • Furiosa locks eyes with Nux's "blood bag" when they first encounter each other. They lock eyes as Max leaves the Citadel in goodbye.
  • The first time we get a good look at the Citadel and its leaders we see Immortan Joe release some water from the outflow pipes for the crowded masses beneath, but only enough for the downtrodden to fight over. At the end of the film when Furiosa and the remaining Wives liberate the Citadel and present Joe's corpse, the milk mothers release the water once more, this time to let everyone have their fill.
• Bottomless Fuel Tanks: Double Subverted. Seeing all the entries about Surprisingly Realistic Outcome below (especially regarding proper maintenance of a big engine), the loss of the War Rig's 3,000 gallons/11,356 liters of fuel^note Real trucks this size get about 6MPG or 39L/100km on a flat paved highway in the rear pod halfway through the film bodes ill for the protagonists... except the only consequence is a big explosion.
• Bottomless Magazines: The movie easily outdoes all the previous films combined in terms of gunshots fired. Conserving ammunition is generally not an issue for most characters — except when Furiosa has Toast inventory all their bullets and they find there are only four for the biggest gun, a sniper rifle. This quickly becomes an issue when they are forced to use it shortly after. The prevalence of guns and ammo compared to the previous films is handwaved by Immortan Joe being allied with the Bullet Farmer.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The War Boys are trained to view Immortan Joe as a living god. As a result, they are more than willing to kill themselves in his name so they can go to Valhalla. Joe even looking at a War Boy is enough to send them into a euphoric tizzy.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: The use of 1970s-era cars, because the more recent computerised models would break down under the conditions.
• Bring It Back Alive: The heroes' survival partially hinges on Immortan Joe's order to not harm any of his prized possessions.
• Bring the Anchor Along: Max is held prisoner by the Warboys, and tied to Nux (who's leukemic) to administer blood. When Nux crashes his car with Max aboard, Max is unable to break the chain tying them (and a car door) together, and settles for carrying them with him.
• Bulletproof Human Shield: A straight example in which the shield in question is the massively obese People Eater. On another occasion, Max uses a mook to block a chainsaw attack.
• But Now I Must Go: There's no doubt Max is doing this by choice, as he exchanges a Meaningful Look with Furiosa before vanishing into the crowd.
• Car Chase Shoot-Out: During the truck chases, everybody shoots at everybody at some time or another, yet there don't seem to be any stray rounds hitting friendly targets (nor much concern evident about it).
• Car Fu: In a movie where cars are so important? Oh yes. Immortan Joe takes it to a whole new level when he rams the War Rig specifically to damage its engines, slowing it without having to risk hurting the Wives. Joe's "accountant" lampshades that they are being very wasteful with precious resources.
• Cargo Cult: Invoked by Immortan Joe with his control of the aquifer wells, not to mention the sacred treatment of the V8.
• Casting Gag: Hugh Keays-Byrne (Immortan Joe) played "Toecutter", an antagonist in the original Max Max film; Joy Smithers (one of the Vuvalini) was originally cast as Jessie Rockatansky in the same film, but had to decline after her parents refused to let her travel to Adelaide for filming.
• Cavalry Betrayal: Invoked; in the first chase scene, Nux and Slit decide to pretend they're backup for the War Rig as it gets chased by the Buzzards, before attacking Furiosa for betraying Immortan Joe.
• Central Theme:
  • Personhood vs Property. At the start of the film, Max is so traumatized by his past that he no longer considers himself a person (but an animal "reduced to a single emotion"), and only cares about his stuff (his car, jacket, boots, etc), but by helping Furiosa and the Wives he learns to recognize their humanity and rediscover his own. Furiosa and the Wives also rebel against being Immortan Joe's literal property ("We are not things!"), and overthrow Joe's tyranny and take back the Citadel for the people that he had literally branded as his personal property). Nux also learns to see his "blood bag" and Joe's "stuff—prized breeders" as people (though he was never malicious about it), and become the person that Joe's brainwashing prevented him from growing into, and died as himself rather than Brainwashed and Crazy Cannon Fodder.
  • On a similar note: identity. The film has Max and Furiosa constantly questioning just who they are, and they lock eyes as Book Ends, but also constantly lock eyes during the film, as if trying to find out who the other really is, too. Their constant held gazes could be read as silent dialogue along the lines of "Who are you?" "I don't know myself," which echo back and forth between them.
• Chained Heat: Max has to fight Furiosa while chained to Nux. Max does manage to get the chain off, but it stays on Nux's arm for quite a while.
• Chainsaw Good:
  • In the Final Battle, one polecat can be seen wielding a chainsaw against Furiosa. In a more non-traditional example, another mook fights with a hedge trimmer.
  • One of the Buzzards heavier vehicles sports a pair of industrial saws that look like they were made to cut down trees, here being used to try and open the War Rig like a tin can.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: An interesting variation. Furiosa offers Max to come with her group in hopes of finding something across the salt flats, but Max wants to make his own way. . . since pretty much everyone knows this is likely to amount to little more than prolonged suicide, Furiosa lets Max go without complaint (and with a fair share of the supplies). Max then decides to rejoin Furiosa's group after they've set off across the salt plains, and with a plan to seize the Citadel to boot. . . still probably suicide, but if they pull it off there's definite hope.
• The Chase: Furiosa has liberated Immortan Joe's harem of healthy breeding Wives (at least two of whom are pregnant), and he leads his entire army across the Wasteland to get them back intact.
• Chase Fight: The group spends a lot of their time fighting off various enemies, be they the War Boys or other gangs. They only really get a reprieve once they cross the quagmire, and they lose it when they go back.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Max is a universal blood donor, which saves Furiosa's life after she's stabbed.
  • Max covers his eyes when he has a hallucination of the child he failed to save. This instinctive reaction saves his life when someone shoots him with a crossbow, giving Max an Impaled Palm instead of an impaled head.
  • In fact, due to how scarce the heroes' resources are, everything they have brought with them ends up being used multiple times and for diverse reasons, from Furiosa's hidden dagger to Nux's part of the chain that tied him to Max and also the surgical tubing when he used Max as a blood bag.
  • The bolt cutters are practically part of the team, they save the day so often.
  • Max shoots at Splendid, grazing her leg. This indirectly leads to her death during one of the car chases when she is unable to find footing with her wounded leg and falls from the rig.
  • Before they can trust each other, Max collects all the weapons in the War Rig, but misses the knife hidden in the gear shift. Later in the film, Furiosa is stabbed with the knife by one of the Warboys.
  • The large spherical rear fuel pod that the War Rig is towing starts leaking gas after taking repeated fire. Once the latch to the War Rig is broken, the pod immediately rolls into a rock and explodes.
• Child by Rape: Splendid Angharad is pregnant with one. The Dag as well.
• Child Soldiers: Several of the extras in Warboy paint are extremely young, even pre-adolescent. If they aren't involved in the clan's violence outright, they're still at least brainwashed into the lifestyle of a tribe that literally has "war" in its name.
• Close-Call Haircut: Max's bullet of warning to Angharad gets a little too close and grazes her calf.
• Conspicuous Consumption:
  • Immortan Joe and the leaders of Gas Town and Bullet Farm flaunt their wealth and have war gangs with gas-guzzling Cool Cars, all of which emphasizes their power and impresses their followers. Tellingly, the Gas Town leader is wearing a largely intact three-piece suit complete with vest.
  • Joe's large water distribution pipes are an impressive sight to behold, but they are ridiculously wasteful, as they dump out huge amounts of water onto the ground just to allow his people to collect small amounts of it.
  • The People Eater lampshades this after Joe's forces get trapped, complaining about all the valuable resources they're wasting in what amounts to a "domestic squabble". Notably, when he rattles off the list of supplies they've exhausted, ^note "We are down thirty-thousand units of guzzoline, nineteen canisters of nitro, twelve assault bikes, seven pursuit vehicles — the deficit mounts, and now sir, you have us stuck in a quagmire!" he neglects to mention the body count.
  • Notably, Joe's armor is made out of some kind of plastic or acrylic, both of which are petroleum products; even outside of his mass resource wealth that he constantly flaunts, he literally clothes himself in a substance just about as precious as water solely so he can show off.
• Continuity Nod: Why won't the party be able to cross the salts with even 160 days of supplies? Because in Beyond Thunderdome it was shown that the nuclear war evaporated (or partly evaporated) the oceans.
• Continuity Reboot: Technically, Fury Road isn't one. George Miller declared the Sequel Gap made him discard trying to make Fury Road a "proper" sequel to Beyond Thunderdome, but since he considers the Max films to be, essentially, "Legends of the man called Mad Max", continuity isn't all that important. It can be considered a Thunderdome sequel with Max's age simply (in Miller's words) a "James Bond" situation,^note That is, just roll with it, or an alternate follow-up to the original Mad Max (it opens with Max on the Pursuit Special, haunted by his dead family). The tie-in comics imply the former by referencing the events of Road Warrior and Thunderdome as parts of Max's past.
• Cool Bike: The Rock Riders and the Vuvalini use these as their main form of transportation, in addition to the War Boys fielding a large number of them as well.
• Cool Car: There's an entire fleet of those: not only does the Pursuit Special return but there are no fewer than three different massive tankers (one of them having an entire 1980s Mercedes-Benz limo for a cab), a Chrysler Valiant coupe on tank treads, a beaten up Perentti (a rare Australian kit car) and a monster truck with a body made from two-thirds of a 1959 Cadillac put on top of another 1959 Cadillac.
• Cool vs. Awesome: Max's brawl with Furiosa. One exhausted, beat-up, dehydrated, and barely conscious or sane but extremely strong and determined road warrior vs. a smaller, lighter, one-armed but otherwise healthy vicious imperator, with a very enthusiastic War Boy (physically chained to the road warrior) and five unarmed but brave wives as backup for each side, respectively.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: At one point, Max can be seen using his blood to draw a map.
• Counting Bullets: When Furiosa has Toast inventory their ammunition, she announces that they only have four rounds left for their SKS rifle. While Max is using the rifle to take potshots at the Bullet Farmer, she lets him know how many bullets he has left after each shot. He reconsiders his aimless shooting and lets Furiosa take the last shot, which shatters the Bullet Farmer's spotlight and blinds him.
• Crapsack World: So, so much. The oceans have evaporated, the soil is barren and polluted and people like Nux are developing deadly cancers from the radiation. The Citadel is one of the few stable places to live and it's mentioned it's the only other arable land in the area besides the Green Place (and even the Green Place has become inhospitable within Furiosa's lifetime), with large water reserves that Immortan Joe uses to control his people. In addition to the resource scarcity and hostile environment, opportunistic bandits like the Buzzards and Rock Riders roam the lands outside Joe's domain.
• Crazy Enough to Work: Max's plan for Furiosa. Max plans on turning around and taking the Citadel. Immortan Joe's summoned all his forces to retrieve the wives, leaving the Citadel undefended.
  The Dag: ...I thought you weren't insane anymore?
  [...]
  Keeper of the Seeds: I like this plan...
• Creepy Crows: The bog the War Rig gets stuck in is full of crows picking through what still lives in the sludge that's used to be the Green Place.
• Crisis Point Hospital: The Organic Mechanic's corner of the Citadel can barely qualify as a surgery, much less a hospital: it's squeezed into a hallway, with the patients and donors set up on stone steps, scant inches from being trodden on by passers-by. Needless to say, it's hardly sterile, and not helped by the fact that the Mechanic is pretty demented even by post-apocalyptic standards; also, the War Boys are notoriously contemptuous towards the weak and infirm.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Several characters (mostly War Boys) meet their ends in very painful-looking ways.
  • One of Joe's Polecats takes an explosive crossbow bolt to the chest, which blasts away so much of his flesh his ribcage is exposed.
  • Joe himself gets his face torn off when Furiosa hooks a harpoon through his mask and lets the cable wrap around the Gigahorse's axle.
• Darkest Hour: At one point during the Final Battle, all hope seems lost. The truck is slowing down due to engine failure, the enemy forces are converging. Toast has been snatched from the group, Max is hanging from the truck, held only by Furiosa who has just received a severe stab wound to her side. Then suddenly Nux manages to fix the engine problems, kicking off the badly needed Heroic Resolve.
• David Versus Goliath: Max vs. Rictus in the climax.
• Deadfoot Leadfoot: After using the grossly obese People Eater as a Bulletproof Human Shield, Max presses his bloated foot to the gas pedal to keep moving.
• Dead Guy on Display: Joe's corpse is nestled between the engines on the Gigahorse when Max, Furiosa and the remaining survivors return to the Citadel, proving he's dead and allowing Furiosa to claim the throne when she presents herself.
• Deadly Dust Storm: It's gigantic, complete with lightning strikes and tornadoes inside it just to hammer in how deadly it is.
• Death of a Child: When the pregnant Angharad dies, an emergency C-section fails to save her baby, presumably because they lack the medical technology to keep a premature baby alive.
• Decapitated Army: At the end, when Max reveals Furiosa has killed Immortan Joe, the younger War Boys immediately turn against Joe's remaining "sons", allowing the Citadel to fall to Furiosa's command.
• Defusing the Tyke-Bomb: Capable convinces Nux that it's not yet his time to die.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: While the War Boys have been thoroughly brainwashed to feel remarkably upbeat about the possibility of achieving a glorious death in the service of Immortan Joe, the audience knows that their leader is at best a very charismatic dictator that sees them as disposable, thus their sacrifice is meaningless.
• Desecrating the Dead: After displaying Immortan Joe's mangled corpse for all the Citadel to see, Max unceremoniously throws it off the Gigahorse and the crowd wastes no time tearing it to pieces.
• Despair Event Horizon: Max, of course, is waaaaay past his. Nux reaches his following his third failure in Immortan's service on the Fury Road, this time right in front of Immortan, who dismisses him as "mediocre". Furiosa encounters one when she learns that the Green Place long ago turned to a poison bog. Finally, at the very end of the movie, the Citadel's response to seeing Immortan's faceless body is to immediately surrender and declare Furiosa their new leader.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Max's desperate attempt to escape the Citadel in the prologue is just a rapid-fire barrage of Hope Spots, including twice when he hesitates one second too long because of hallucinations.
• Diagonal Billing: Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron are given this during the opening credits. Hardy gets the lower left slot while Theron gets the top right. Nicholas Hoult and Hugh Keays-Byrne share a similar card during the end credits as do Zoë Kravitz and Rosie Huntington-Whitely.
• Didn't Think This Through: Showing off his wealth, the People Eater rides a War Rig with a huge tank full of fuel. That's right, his vehicle of choice is a massive firebomb just waiting to go off which it does.
• Digital Bikini: In the original film, the character Valkyrie is first introduced trapped in a cage and nude. In some international versions (and in order to please the rating boards of certain countries), she is introduced trapped in a cage and wearing underwear.
• Diegetic Music: Immortan Joe's army features a truck called the Doof Wagon, a former military vehicle covered in speakers with the "Doof Warrior" sitting on the main stage playing an electric guitar and a band of drummers pounding away on timpani drums and the score incorporates this, with several tracks featuring the metal sound of the Doof Wagon. The guitar part even stops while Max fights the Doof Warrior.
• Disturbed Doves: The explosion during Max's Offscreen Moment of Awesome disturbs some crows.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Immortan Joe is a terrorist leader who has a harem, Brainwashed and Crazy suicidal soldiers who believe they'll be gloriously rewarded in the afterlife, and lives smack dab in the middle of a desert. They were inspired by the Vikings, but other parallels are easy to draw.
    George Miller: The fact that now we have suicide bombers and terrorists doing the same thing is just proof that history always repeats itself. There have always been people who do bad things. Fury Road deals with themes that are timeless, really: Dominance, hierarchy, tyrants.
  • Other reviewers noted:
    ... the cult suggests an alternate-universe counterpart to the Islamic State or Boko Haram, with its blend of nihilistic violence, tyrannical social control, crushing ignorance melded with fanatical religious fervor, and especially subjugation of women as property, valued only for their fertility.
  • Their bastardized appropriation of concepts from Norse Mythology also calls to mind modern neo-nazi groups.
• Downer Beginning: For the first fifteen minutes, Max is captured, beaten, tortured, and made a blood bag. He also loses his equipment and his car.
• Drums of War: Immortan Joe transmits his orders via The Power of Rock and a massive truck with enormous speakers, a guitarist and four drummers in the back.
• Dying as Yourself: Nux's previous attempts to go out in a blaze of glory had him pumped up on paint fumes after spraying chrome paint onto his face. When he succeeds in demolishing the War Rig to save Capable and the others, he does so completely sober and calm, and though his last words are "witness me", it's an Ironic Echo, barely above a whisper.
• Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • Pulled by one of Furiosa's War Boy subordinates during their skirmish with the Buzzards at the beginning of her escape by diving with explosive-head spears into one of the Buzzards' cars after being heavily injured. In fact, all War Boys have this as their life goal.
  • Done by Valkyrie and the other Vuvalini during the final battle.
  • Ex-Warboy Nux. Taking the wheel and flipping the War Rig to kill Rictus Erectus and block the mountain pass, thereby saving Max and the Wives and stopping the pursuit dead.
  Nux: Witness me...
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The movie ends with one of these, with Furiosa, Max, the Wives, and a few surviving Vuvalini defeating Immortan Joe, taking control of the Citadel, and restoring some sense of peace to their world.
• Easily Forgiven: Max, Furiosa, and the Wives seem to forgive Nux rather quickly for, respectively, using him as a bloodbag and strapping him to his car, attempting to choke her with his chain, and trying to recapture them and take them back to their hated "husband". Justified, though, in that they really don't have time to hold grudges, the Wives in particular recognize him to be just as much a victim as they were (especially Capable, who took pity on him and vouches for him when he comes to their help), and he proves himself to be useful and faithful (by the time he attempts to pull the War Rig out of the mud by tying the winch around the tree, they have completely foregone holding him at gunpoint).
• Easy Evangelism: Justified Trope. Nux goes from such a fanatical believer in Immortan Joe's cult that mere eye contact with Joe sends him into a frenzy of religious ecstasy, to helping a coup overturn his rule. Justified because he knew that he'd failed Joe one time too many, and too spectacularly, and thus there was no place left for him with the cult.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Max and Furiosa's entire alliance begins as this due to the distrust the two have until they, and the entire group, become Fire-Forged Friends. Nux's whole character arc begins as this as well.
  • When Nux wakes up during Max and Furiosa's fight, he immediately begins helping Max by tripping Furiosa and grabbing the magazine from her gun. This is after Nux has been taking his blood for the first fifteen minutes of the movie, but he begins working with his "blood bag" without speaking a word or any hesitation.
• Emergency Multifaith Prayer: During a quiet moment, one of the Brides starts muttering to herself and making odd gestures. When asked by one of the other Brides on what the heck she's doing, she states she's praying...
  Toast: What are you doing?
  The Dag: Praying.
  Toast: To who?
  The Dag: Anyone who's listening!
• Epic Fail:
  • Nux's third attempt to recapture the Wives is met with a personal blessing from Immortan Joe himself, dramatic music, and an equally dramatic leap... and results in his dangling chain getting caught in a railing of the War rig, tripping him and making him drop Joe's gun in front of a very unamused Joe.
    Immortan Joe: Argh, MEDIOCRE!
  • Played for drama when Splendid (who is carrying Immortan Joe's child) dies shortly after this after falling from the War Rig while it's driven by Nux's "blood bag" (Nux having brought Max on the pursuit in the first place). There's simply no way that Joe would forgive Nux for that, which helps fuel Nux's Heel–Face Turn because he has no other option.
• Epigraph: The movie ends with a quote from The First History Man: "Where must we go... we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?"
• Escape Route Surprise: Max's first escape attempt from the Citadel is foiled when he runs through the caves and out a door where he suddenly finds himself at the edge of a cliff high above the ground. He jumps out and latches onto a swinging hook, but he keeps swinging back toward the War Boys and they manage to pull him back into the tunnel.
• Establishing Character Moment: Just about every main character in the film gets one.
  • After his ominous opening monologue, Max is seen scanning the ravaged horizon in a brooding fashion, before stomping on a mutant lizard — and eating it — without even looking at it, showing even people who've never seen a Mad Max movie before that this dude is badass, troubled, and rapidly going insane.
  • Another moment for Max comes in his brawl with Furiosa where, despite being dehydrated, partially exsanguinated, barely conscious, and having just recovered from a car crash, he still manages to beat Furiosa in hand-to-hand combat — and deliberately blows three precious bullets on warning shots instead of just shooting her in the head, the first major indicator — both to the other characters and the audience — that despite what horribly shell-shocked Max is, he's still a good man who doesn't kill people if he can possibly avoid it.
  • Joe is introduced as the War Pups attend to his ruined body, putting on armor that gives the illusion of physical strength, before giving the people of the Citadel enough water to fight over but not enough to survive on, telling us everything we need to know about him with only a few sentences of dialogue.
  • Furiosa is shown through a close-up of Joe's brand on the back of her neck, and all the War Boys saluting as she passes, indicating that she's both highly respected and no less a slave to Joe than anyone else. Notably, it's not until she gets in the War Rig that we see she's both one-armed and female.
  • Nux is shown slumped against a wall asking the other War Boys what's happened, apparently too weak to fight, but when Slit tells him he's too sick to drive, Nux knocks him down with a headbutt, demonstrating that Nux is sickly but much stronger than he looks, both physically and mentally.
• Eternal English: This movie is set several decades After the End, yet people still speak our modern version of English. Downplayed since there are new, alien-to-English words in some people's vocabulary.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Joe fails completely at understanding why the Wives would want to flee his captivity, and constantly insists that Furiosa "stole" them from him.
  Joe: Where is she taking them?!
  Miss Giddy: She didn't take them, they begged her to go!
  Joe: [quietly] Where is she taking them?
  Miss Giddy: A long way from you!
• Evil Is Hammy: All of the villains in the movie are ridiculously over-the-top and loud and all the heroes are much more stoic and naturalistic (Max and Furiosa in particular). The warlords, especially Joe, use this in conjunction with their Conspicuous Consumption to present a larger-than-life image of themselves to further impress their followers and retain their loyalty. The War Boys in turn work themselves into a frenzy to commit acts of valor. This is so omnipresent in War Boy culture it's almost a plot point — notably, Nux loses this trait after his Heel–Face Turn.
• Evil Plan: Immortan Joe seeks to recapture some of his sex slaves that Furiosa rescued.
• Exposed to the Elements:
  • The warboys ride shirtless in a hot desert.
  • The Five Wives wear scanty robes ill-suited to protecting them from the desert sun and sand, let alone fire and flying metal. Justified as they are a harem who've spent their lives in a Gilded Cage and literally escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
  • The Vuvalini's "bait", who is naked on a tower exposed to the sun in the middle of a desert. Though it is part of a Honey Trap, as she is later revealed to wear appropriate clothing for living in the desert and motorcycling.
• Extended Disarming: After seeing Furiosa go for a hidden gun on the outside of her rig, Max correctly assumes that she has more weapons hidden in her rig's cab. And she does. He almost gets all of them.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The movie takes place over approximately three days and two nights, with the War Rig party stuck in the quagmire the first night, resting with the Vuvalini the second night, and driving all three days.
• Eye Scream:
  • The Bullet Farmer gets blinded when Furiosa shoots the searchlight on his vehicle. You can even get a glimpse of his bloodied face afterwards. In the next scene, he is shown with ragged bandages over his eyes, which doesn't abate his penchant for shooting.
  • The Keeper of the Seeds shoves a bullet into the eye of one of Joe's goons even as she's dying.

Tropes F to K

• Face–Heel Turn: Played with: Cheedo, at the last moment during the final chase, begs Rictus to take her on board Immortan Joe's vehicle, to her fellow wives' shock. But she then uses her position to help Furiosa get back into action and ultimately kill Joe. This is more effective because Cheedo had already tried to go back to Joe and the other pursuers before.
• Facial Dialogue: Max throughout most of this film seems to communicate entirely through this method, only speaking a scant few lines or just grunting otherwise. Take his triumphant expression when Slit unlocks him from where he's chained to the front of Nux's vehicle, as he now has a chance to escape.
• Facial Horror: Immortan Joe's gruesome demise.
• Fan Disservice:
  • The room full of women being milked. What titillation there is, is removed by the fact they're A) morbidly obese, B) treated like cattle to feed child soldiers, and C) obviously very unhappy.
  • The "breeders" have Stripperiffic outfits... because they're Sex Slaves.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The organizational structure of the Citadel — a city-state almost entirely populated by slaves, kept in line by a small elite group of men who are separated from their family at a young age, stripped of their identity, and then indoctrinated into a Martyrdom Culture designed to make them fanatically loyal to the state — resembles that of ancient Sparta.
• Feedback Rule: Downplayed. There is a slight feedback when Immortan Joe grabs the microphone for his speech to the crowd.
• Feminist Fantasy: An unconventional example in that the film is filled to the brim with explosions and spiked monster trucks and bare-chested War Boys, but nonetheless has a very anti-patriarchy message: women are not things. Additionally, the film is driven by Action Girl Furiosa rather than Max himself (who is more of a Supporting Protagonist and Audience Surrogate), and her struggle to liberate five objectified women from sexual slavery. And then there's the Vuvalini. Ultimately, Fury Road manages to be both a testosterone-driven action extravaganza and a female power fantasy. Considering the women in the movie, and the women who worked to create the movie though, perhaps it's time to at least partially retire the idea that explosions and monster trucks aren't things women would like.
• Final Battle: Immortan Joe and his forces chasing after Max and Furiosa across the Wasteland back to the Citadel.
• Fire-Forged Friends:
  • Max and Furiosa.
  • This is invoked with the original team and support vehicles of the War Rig. Note how well they work together during the Buzzard attack. This is a group that has seen many battles together, and mesh well as a unit. When asked what she wants to do about the approaching Buzzard raiders, her response is to "fang it", and no one in the crew so much as questions her decisions, instead they all kick into "battle mode". The main example is when Furiosa and Ace make a coordinated attack against the Buzzard Wrecker. The fluidity of their attack shows the audience that they have made this move before many times, making her "traitoring" of Immortan Joe all the worse in her former crew's eyes. She has been their driver and leader for quite a while, so they are understandably upset when she suddenly wants them all dead. Note the pure hate in Ace's eyes as he tries to choke her after learning of her betrayal.
    Ace: What have you done? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
• Foreshadowing:
  • Angharad is the only Wife who is injured when Max shoots at the War Rig. In the entire film, she is the only one of the Wives to die.
  • Furiosa's skill with long-range shots is actually displayed well before the moment she shoots out the Bullet Farmer's lights in the quagmire; earlier while taking a small reprieve, she shoots down two War Boys on a motorcycle who had just barely gotten into visual range — with one bullet. Two birds with one stone.
  • Even earlier than that; while the group was speeding out of the canyon facing off against the bikers — take a look at how Furiosa and Max decided to take out their pursuers: Max opted for the handgun — using as many shots as he needed to bring down a target; while Furiosa took the rifle — and she aimed for headshots. This also foreshadows the Vuvalini's penchant for long-range rifles, as they say themselves: one man, one bullet.
  • The quagmire they pass through with dead trees is a hint that The Green Place is no more.
  • Furiosa offers to help remove Max's mask. At the climax, she removes Immortan Joe's to kill him.
  • While he's being comforted by Capable, Nux tells her that he thought he "was being spared for something great". He was.
  • Nux: "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die historic on the fury road!"
  • Keen viewers might notice that, while the characters and film are focused on the explosive skirmish with the Buzzards, the sky ahead is steadily filling with nasty storm clouds.
• Franken-vehicle: All the vehicles in the film have parts of other cars used in their construction such as the War Rig driven by Imperator Furiosa, Immortan Joe's Gigahorse and the Bigfoot that is used by Rictus Erectus.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Pause at the right time when Immortan Joe dies, and you can clearly see that his lower jaw is ripped off.
• Future Imperfect: Enough time has passed for the old world to become shrouded in mystery and folklore, which isn't helped by how books were lost when the end came. On the other hand, the presence of someone like the First History Man means that there's some concerted effort to preserve the past as much as possible.
• Future Slang:
  • Nux seems to use "chrome" or "shiny" as a way to say "cool" or "wonderful". There's also "half-life", a person destined to die from radiation sickness, and "full-life", someone who's healthy. There's also "guzzolene", continued from The Road Warrior. "Fuk-ushima" is used as a swear and the term "Kamikrazy" appears a few times in the film, as does "McFeast."
  • This applies to sentence structure and conjugation as well. Several times, the War Boys will state that they will show their enemies how to "do war". Also, "traitor/betrayed" has mutated into "traitored"; for example, Slit stated that Nux and Furiosa "traitored" Immortan Joe.
  • Some of it is simply obscure, old-fashioned or regional Australian slang. "Fang it" means quickly pushing a car's acceleration as far as it will go, equivalent to "step on it". There's also "schlanger", which the Dag uses to mean the male genitalia, and "smeg", which seems to mean something like "creep". It's apparently based on "smegma," which is grime that collects on genitalia. Then there's "dag", which is the hardened bit of excreta that accumulates under a sheep's woolly tail.
  • At the start, before the War Rig sets out to Gas Town, the Prime Imperator calls the War Boys "fucachima kamakrazee" in his Rousing Speech, apparently a mangled version of "Fukushima" and a portmanteau of "kamikaze" and "crazy".
• Goggles Do Nothing: Averted. Goggles are worn by numerous characters to protect their eyes from the desert sand.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band: One of the ongoing traits across the series. Everyone's nickname would work as an awesome name for a metal band. See here.
• Good Prosthetic, Evil Prosthetic: Deuteragonist Imperator Furiosa possesses a make-shift Diesel Punk left arm that she is more than capable of functioning without. This is in contrast to The Antagonist Immortal Joe, a Dark Lord on Life Support kept alive through a breathing apparatus designed to look like a menacing skull mask that gives him Vader Breath.
• Go Out with a Smile: The Keeper of the Seeds after being mortally wounded in the final battle.
• Gorn: Immortan Joe's death is very brief but extremely gruesome.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • With the exception of Immortan Joe's horrific death, most of the messiest deaths in the film are shown only briefly or not in detail. At one point in the final battle, Max blocks a chainsaw with a human shield but we don't get to see much more than the unfortunate mook thrashing around with blood on the blade, and the camera pans away before we can see the mess that was made of his torso.
  • Invoked with the demise of the Bullet Farmer. Max comes back with a bag full of ammunition, a replacement steering wheel and a boot for Nux. He comes back covered in blood after the War Rig crew hear a loud explosion. Furiosa notes that the blood "isn't Max's". Something truly horrible happened to the Bullet Farmer's men, and its name is Max, but the audience never sees what. Doubles as an Offscreen Moment of Awesome.
• Go Through Me: Angharad uses herself as a human shield to stop Immortan Joe from shooting Furiosa. Since Angharad is very pregnant with Joe's child, he doesn't even consider shooting.
• Guardian Entity: Max's hallucinations of Glory the Child is a weird example of this. Most of the time, she's there to torment him of his failures (especially when he's entirely out for himself), but there are a couple of occasions where her appearances benefit Max. Once is when she appeared and motivates Max to come up with a plan to take the Citadel and convinces Furiosa's group to turn back from their suicide journey across the Great Salt. The other time is when her appearance triggers Max's instinctive reaction to cover his face with his hand, saving his life from a bolt fired at his head by a War Boy.
• Gun Porn: The film features a lot more guns than the post-apocalyptic norm set by The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, where people tended to shoot arrows instead, and bullets were few and far between. Justified, in that one of the towns is The Bullet Farm, where there's smelting and mining to manufacture ammunition.
• Guns Akimbo: The Bullet Farmer with long-barreled revolvers, Heckler & Koch submachine guns and AK-47's, in an attempt to hit something after he gets blinded.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: While both Max and Furiosa show ability in both melee and ranged combat, Furiosa is definitely the better shot of the two, while Max does more damage against the War Boys close up, including going toe-to-toe with Rictus Erectus and an implication of what he did offscreen to the Bullet Farmer and his mooks using a kukri and a fuel can.
• Hamster-Wheel Power: Giant treadmills are used to work the lifting platforms that carry vehicles up into the Citadel.
• Handicapped Badass: Many characters in the film are this, in order to emphasize the brutal nature of life in the Wasteland and the gritty reality of the setting.
  • Furiosa has a mechanical left arm. However, she isn't always wearing it, and as her fight with both Max and Nux shows, she is far from helpless without it.
  • The majority of War Boys have some sort of illness. For example, Furiosa's lieutenant, Ace, has a tumor and yet appears to be in his forties, meaning he's survived as a wasteland warrior for quite some time in spite of being terminally ill.
  • The Bullet Farmer becomes this after Furiosa sniped his headlights, inadvertently blinding him with the resulting shrapnel in the process. His response to no longer being able to see where bullets go? Dual wield SMGs and then upgrade to assault rifles. It doesn't do him much good though as Max kills him offscreen.
  • Nux appears to be dying from leukemia and is severely anemic.
  • Both Immortan Joe and Rictus Erectus have tubes going up their noses suggestive of a condition similar to cystic fibrosis.
  • Max has disturbing hallucinations, hears voices, and wears a leg brace.
• Happiness in Slavery: While everyone in the Citadel is effectively owned by Immortan Joe, it is acknowledged that some positions are better than others.
  • One of the Wives, Cheedo, seems most regretful about escaping the Citadel, stating that they had the high life there. Background material implies this is because she is the youngest of the Wives and has not yet fully witnessed Joe's bad side.
  • A deleted scene has a woman offering her newborn son to the Citadel guards to make him a Warboy. When the guard refuses on account of the boy being already covered in tumors and unlikely to survive, she offers herself as a milker. The guard accepts her and she leaves the baby with her daughter and abandons them to their fate. The woman can be seen in the released film as the woman standing in the middle of the War Rig lift as the guards push people off the people clinging to it.
• Hate Sink: Immortan Joe is a post-apocalyptic cult leader who hoards water at the expense of his people. He brainwashes the men in his thrall to fight and die for him while keeping the women as sex slaves. When several of these women escape his clutches, Joe leads a war party to hunt them down. He eventually manages to catch his prey but has grown so frustrated with the hunt that he decides to kill them all.
• "Have a Nice Day" Smile: What Nux has tattooed on his two tumor "friends".
• Headbutt of Love: Furiosa greeting Valkyrie.
• The Hecate Sisters: Represented by the Wives as the nubile young maidens, Furiosa as the protective mother (as well as the more literal "milk mothers" of the Citadel), and the Vuvalini as the wise old crones. An alternative distribution would be the Wives as varying between maiden and mother (the visibly pregnant Angharad in particular tending towards the latter) while the infertile Furiosa fulfills the role of the bitter and warlike crone.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • The plot is kicked off by one, when Immortan Joe's lieutenant Furiosa betrays him to free his "breeders" from slavery.
  • Nux makes a turn via Defusing the Tyke-Bomb, when Capable convinces him that it's not yet his time to die.
• Held Gaze: Several between Nux and Capable, and Max and Furiosa, during the final chase.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • The crows in the Quagmire indicate that this is not a happy place, and that it's actually what's left of the Green Place that Furiosa has been searching for.
  • The decompressed sound of Max's pulse after he awakens to discover a tube in his neck siphoning his blood. It's both paranoia-inducing and viscerally uncomfortable.
• Helpful Hallucination: Max has a recurring hallucination of a young girl. At one point she appears in front of him and he instinctively covers his face, and this winds up saving his life by giving Max an Impaled Palm instead of an impaled head. She also appears at a critical point in the movie and gives Max the idea to take the unguarded Citadel.
• Heroes Act, Villains Hinder: Furiosa liberating Immortan Joe's harem and driving them to the Green Place sets off the events of the film.
• Heroic BSoD: Furiosa has one after the group finds the Many Mothers, and she learns that the Green Place has become a barren swamp. She then drops her arm in the sand, kneels down and does a Skyward Scream.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Nux does this in the climax by wrecking the War Rig to let Max, Furiosa, and the Wives escape — and to keep Rictus and the other hostiles from reaching the group.
  • This is attempted by Furiosa herself when she leaves the War Rig and carries the fight to Joe, even while seemingly dying of a stab wound. She does not expect to come back; luckily, her friends have other plans.
• Heroic Second Wind: The War Rig loses an engine, Max is left dangling from its side, Furiosa takes a crippling stab wound, Joe's forces surround the Rig, Toast has been captured, Slit moves in for the kill driving in Max's Pursuit Special... And then Nux gets the second engine repaired, Furiosa guns the engine and asskicking ensues.
• Hidden Supplies: Max sees Furiosa try to pull a gun from a hiding place on the War Rig and immediately concludes she has more weapons hidden elsewhere in the vehicle. He finds almost all of them.
• Hollywood Darkness: Exaggerated Trope. In most visual media, the "blue filter = night" trope generally works because we're used to it at this point, but like everything else in this movie, it's played way over the top by tinting everything electric blue (except for conspicuously orange flames, and a spotlight on the Doof Warrior).
• Homemade Flamethrower: Quite an abundance of them too. The most infamous one however is the one owned by the Doof Warrior; not only is it a double-neck guitar made from all kinds of parts, but it also just so happens to be able to shoot flames too!^note And it was no CGI, but a fully functional prop. Max even weaponizes it when he ends up on the Doof Wagon.
• Honorable Warrior's Death: The War Boys are obsessed with dying in such a way and going to Valhalla.
• Hope Is Scary: Max's worldview.
  Max: You know, hope is a mistake. If you can't fix what's broken you'll go insane.
• Hope Spot:
  • The Splendid Angharad seems to be crushed when the War Rig sideswipes a boulder, but look! She's a-okay! Max even gives her a thumbs-up! She then proceeds to slip thanks to her injured leg, falling off the War Rig and getting crushed to death by the Gigahorse.
  • The War Rig has escaped Immortan Joe's army, Nux has pulled a Heel–Face Turn, Max personally killed the Bullet Farmer and got plenty of ammo out of it, and our heroes finally meet Furiosa's old tribe... But then she finds out that the Green Place of her memories has turned into a rancid swamp and that the Vuvalini have been reduced to but a handful.
  • During the final fight, Valkyrie and her battle-sister have been knocked off their bike and Joe is heading right for them. Valkyrie shoots at Joe but all her shots miss, Joe's car is bearing down... and she manages to fling herself to the ground and avoid being splattered just in time. Then the People Eater's War Rig comes around...
  • Immortan Joe has been killed, the Wives have gotten onto the deceased warlord's vehicle, and once the passage is blocked, the good guys have won. Then Rictus reappears and rips the engine from the War Rig. Nux and Capable both realize this means he has to die or everything they fought for was for nothing.
• Hufflepuff House: Of the three settlements controlled by Immortan Joe, the Bullet Farm has less relevance to the plot than The Citadel and Gas Town and is the only one of the three territories with no distinctive Mooks. It doesn't help that their only named character dies well before the climax.
• Human Notepad:
  • After being captured and taken to the Citadel, Max has all the information relevant to their People Farms forcibly tattooed on his back: he's a Universal Donor, has intact eyes and testicles, no apparent radiation scars, and is a road warrior. The tattoo also notes also that he's aggressive and must be kept muzzled.
  • Nux has his ritualistic scars sculpted in the shape of an engine schematic.
  • Miss Giddy, the old lady who tries to shoot Immortan Joe at the beginning of the movie, has her entire body tattooed with historical notes (as does her successor, as shown in the comics).
• Humanoid Abomination: Whatever those... things were that the gang passes on their way through the swamp look the part. They walk on what appear to be stilts, are hidden under ragged cloaks, and (according to the Vuvalini) have some sort of relationship with the crows. As the War Rig passes by, they stop and creepily stare. They're what's left of the Vuvalini that stayed behind, and they are called the Crow Fishers. The stilts are the best way to navigate the toxic swamp they live in, and for food they catch crows with nets, and use the feathers for clothing. Otherwise, they are normal humans.
• Human Resources:
  • The Central Theme: George Miller had his "Eureka!" Moment as to Fury Road's plot when he visualized, "an extended chase, and the things being chased were going to be not an object but human beings." "(Women) are not things" is the battle cry of Furiosa and the Five Wives; a battle for the future course of human civilization, with the heavy implication that it's stern father-figure patriarchs like Immortan Joe that led to this Crapsack World while Furiosa's Amazon naturalists represent hope and progress — and those who support them ("Battle Fodder" such as Nux) are complicit in their crimes and accomplishments.
  • The Five Wives are Immortan Joe's Sex Slaves, but when his women are no longer useful for the purposes of breeding, they are milked to provide sustenance for the War Boys; an impressive luxury in a world without cattle.
  • When Max is captured, the War Boys use him as a "blood bag", which allows them to perform a blood transfusion on a War Boy if one of them is injured badly enough, or anemic due to medical conditions, like Nux.
  • The War Boys themselves are nothing but Immortan Joe's "Battle Fodder" — not human anymore, but merely mindless weapons in the service of Joe's empire. Nux's service is decried as no different from the armies which caused the apocalypse. And him changing sides is the turning point in the battle.
  • There's also The People Eater, if his name is to be taken literally. (Which, given his obesity and his case of gout, you probably should.)
• Human Shield: Both heroes and villains use this tactic throughout the film.
• I Am X, Son of Y: When the "Rig family" reach the lands of Vuvalini, Furiosa introduces herself with her whole tribal lineage.
  Furiosa: I am one of the Vuvalini! Of the Many Mothers! My Initiate Mother was K.T. Concannon! I am the daughter of Mary Jabassa. My clan was Swaddle Dog!
• If I Do Not Return: The moment Furiosa realizes Max is a good, trustworthy man is when he tells her that the rest of the group move on without him if he takes too long dealing with the Bullet Farmer. You can see the realization appear on her face.
• Imperiled in Pregnancy:
  • Angharad is pregnant, spends all of her screentime in horrible danger, and gets horrifically injured when she slips off the War Rig and is run over by Joe's car. Unlike most examples of this trope, both she and her baby actually do end up dying as a result.
  • The Dag also counts as this trope, although it's not played completely straight, as she's not showing and neither the audience nor any other characters know she's pregnant until they're already (temporarily) out of danger. It never really becomes a plot point like Angharad's pregnancy.
• Implied Love Interest: Capable and Nux, but like everything else in the movie, it's portrayed visually, without any explicit confirmation.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: Many of the War Boys make use of grenade-tipped throwing spears against vehicles.
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • After Max misses twice (shooting over a distance of a few hundred metres, through fog, at a moving target only visible by its lights), he hands the rifle over to Furiosa, who manages to bullseye the last sniper rifle bullet they have into the searchlight on the Bullet Farmer's car-tank, blinding the leader in the process.
  • When attacked by the biker gang, both Max and Furiosa prove adept at shooting the bikers out of the air when they're jumping over the War Rig to drop bombs. Max even does it one-handed with an ordinary pistol while driving the Rig.
• Improvised Armor:
  • A car door gets used as a shield during the Max/Furiosa struggle; then later when the Bullet Farmer opens up on them (justified as the door would likely be reinforced by actual armor).
  • An accidental version when Max's rake-muzzle blocks several blows to his face from Furiosa.
  • A polecat is using a Give Way sign as an arm shield.
  • Judging by the tight grouping she makes on the Gigahorse's windscreen with her Winchester, the Valkyrie would have had Immortan dead to rights had the glass not been bulletproof.
• Improvised Weapon: Damn near everything by damn near everyone.
  • As they are in a Scavenger World, ordinary tools are often reworked as weapons, then reworked as tools again when they break.
  • Max is the undisputed champion of this trope, using a dud shotgun, a length of chain, glass bottles, bolt cutters, a car door, oxygen tanks, and a skull all successfully as weapons at different points in the film.
  • In the final chase, the Keeper of the Seeds stabs a War Boy in the eye with a bullet.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Immortan Joe desires a perfect male heir, combining physical strength, cunning and intelligence, but none of his three sons measure up to his standards: Corpus Colossus is a clever administrator, but due to his physical disabilities he could never lead a warrior culture like the War Boys. Rictus Erectus is huge and strong, but he's a child-minded simpleton who could never lead due to his lack of intellect. Scabrous Scrotus is a "psychopathic killer,"◊ and would probably become The Caligula if he was left in charge of the Citadel, jeopardizing Joe's whole legacy in the process, which is the last thing a Well-Intentioned Extremist like him wants. Angharad's child would apparently have been the true heir, being "perfect in every way."
• Instant Drama, Just Add Tracheotomy: Max saves Furiosa from suffocation by puncturing one of her lungs in order to let air in.
• Instrument of Murder: The Doof Warrior has an electric guitar that shoots flames, and it is indeed used as a weapon during the final battle — though mostly to bludgeon people.
• Invasion of the Baby Snatchers: Furiosa ended up at the Citadel as a child because Immortan Joe kidnapped her from the Vuvalini. It's unlikely he stopped with just her, too.
• Ironic Echo: "Witness me."
  • "Filth! You traitored him!" First used by Nux against Furiosa, then by Slit against Nux himself.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: The War Boys refer to Max as "the blood bag" or just "it".
• It's the Journey That Counts: Downplayed, but the destination in the film is Where It All Began. During the trip, Max and Furiosa learn things about each other and themselves.
• It May Help You on Your Quest: The characters have a notable tendency to take anything with them that they can. Innocuous materials such as the medical tubing used to give Nux blood become vitally important later.
• It Works Better with Bullets: After Max holds up Furiosa and the Wives at gunpoint in exchange for water and bolt cutters, Furiosa manages to turn the tables on him, grab the shotgun he was holding them up with, and pull the trigger... only to find out it was unloaded. The shells it had when he first got it were duds so he discarded them.
• I Want Them Alive!: Immortan Joe wants his Wives back alive and unharmed, impeding the use of heavy firepower against the War Rig. Averted with Furiosa; when Nux offers to stab her in the spine so she'll be paralyzed, Immortan isn't interested and tells him no, giving Nux his revolver and says to just Boom, Headshot! her instead.
• I Work Alone: Max, of course. And as is par for the course, he remains true to that ideology until his morals finally tell him people need help near the climax. And of course, he ends up Riding into the Sunset.
• Karmic Death:
  • Heavily implied with the Vuvalini, and mixed with Redemption Equals Death. All of them have engaged in banditry, with the Vuvalini Elder stating that all of them have done terrible things to survive (never mind our introduction to them basically being a lure to reel in potential victims). All of them die in the final battle, each giving their lives to make sure Furiosa, the Wives, and Max complete their mission.
  • Big Bad Immortan Joe wears an air scrubber on his back and a breath mask to ensure that the air he breathes is cleaner than anyone else's, and drives a war chariot with more horsepower than anything his War Boys have access to. Thus there's something poetic about his death: Furiosa hooks the hoses of his mask with a harpoon and drops the line into the chariot's wheels, ripping the lower half of his face off.
• Keep It Foreign: In the Russian-dubbed version, the Buzzards speak German instead of Russian to keep them foreign and evil.
• Killed Offscreen: The Bullet Farmer, courtesy of Max.
• Klingon Promotion: In the end, Furiosa takes control of the Citadel after she kills Immortan Joe.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: None of Joe's surviving men objected when Furiosa becomes the new leader.

Tropes L to P

• Lady Land: The Vuvalini — initially, they are angry and worried that Furiosa has brought two men (Max and Nux) with her.
• Large Ham:
  • Immortan Joe, considering that he's played by the same actor as Toecutter from the first film.
    Immortan Joe: It is by MY hand... you will RISE... from the ASHES... of this WO-ORLD!
  • The Bullet Farmer definitely qualifies as well, at least after he gets indirectly blinded by Furiosa, after which he goes into a completely nonsensical and self-important rant while firing a couple of guns like crazy, not caring whether he hits and kills any of the Wives or not:
    The Bullet Farmer I AM THE SCALES OF JUSTICE, ConDUCTOR of the choir of DEATH! Sing, Brother Heckler! Sing Brother Koch! Sing, brothers! SING!! SIIIING!!!
  • Nux also deserves a mention here, enthusiastically shouting almost half his lines over the course of about the first half of the movie. It's pretty clear that Nicholas Hoult was having a blast playing the character. However, he noticeably calms down after his Heel–Face Turn, and is more prone to speaking in a regular, less flamboyant manner from that point onward.
• Last Fertile Region: The Green Place, the land that Furiosa grew up in and perhaps the last fertile region in the blasted Wasteland. Unfortunately, by the time she returns, the Green Place had turned into a poisonous swamp.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: Joe's forces are stopped in the quagmire when the vanguard vehicles are taken out by Max and Furiosa's booby trap, forcing the following ones to stop and get bogged down. When the Doof Wagon gets caught in the jam, the Doof Warrior keeps playing for a bit before noticing that they aren't moving anymore, gives a few more tentative strums, then stops.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: There's a Call-Back to the first movie when Max finds himself chained to an unconscious Nux and is fully prepared to shotgun off Nux's wrist. Fortunately for Nux the shells are duds, and Max has to carry him to someone who has boltcutters.
• Live-Action Cartoon: In a rare non-comedic example. Characters survive things they really shouldn't, the Deadly Dust Storm is frankly impossible, everyone has as much gas, water, and bullets as the film requires (despite the scarcity of these resources being a major element of the world, pointed out repeatedly), all in the name of balls-to-the-wall-over-the-top action and deeply, emotionally compelling story. Because of the excessively long production style, George Miller actually considered making it an animated film.
• Look Behind You: When told by Furiosa to look behind him, Max is savvy enough to pull one of the Five Wives close and put a gun to her head before turning to look. It turns out there really is another gang approaching them.
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Warboy Slit grips one of Max's shoes and take it with him just as he's thrown out of the car. He later brandishes the shoe as if it were a worthy trophy. Max takes one of Nux's shoes to replace it.
• Lost Common Knowledge: Nux has trouble putting his finger on one of the most basic plant words.
  Nux: There's high ground, just beyond that thing.
  Capable: He means the tree.
  Nux: Yeah, tree!
• Made of Iron: Max and Nux both repeatedly survive large crashes with few injuries.
• Madness Montage: To show that 'Mad' Max deserves his nickname. While trying to escape from the Citadel, he has scary hallucinations of his family that he failed to save.
• Male Gaze: Notable for its absence in a Rated M for Manly action movie, except for a joke subversion in the beginning: Max climbs out of Nux's wrecked car and spots the stopped War Rig. Approaching it, he spots the beautiful, scantily clad women washing each other down with hoses... and completely ignores them, going for the water they're using to wash each other off instead.
• Malevolent Masked Men:
  • Immortan Joe and his grinning skull half-mask.
  • Gastown's Faceless Mooks. Special mention goes to the black-masked guy who stabs Furiosa and then takes a fistful of bullets to the eyes — that doll face on the back of his head counts for extra nightmare points.
  • Even Max takes on this appearance with the metal restraint he's forced to wear.
• Martyrdom Culture: Immortan Joe's War Boys are this. Justified in that Nux tells Capable that if his "mates" (the two growths on his shoulder) don't get him, the night fevers will; a chance at Valhalla is his only hope for a good death. Nicholas Hoult (who played Nux) compared him to a suicide bomber in an interview.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The reaction of just about everyone when they finish off the Buzzards, only to finally pay attention to what's ahead of them and realize they're about to run headfirst into an insane storm. The only one who seems unperturbed is Rictus, but even Joe doesn't seem to share his confidence.
• Maternity Crisis: Subverted—Angharad clutches her stomach and gasps in pain while hiding from the Rock Riders, but it turns out the baby was just squirming and kicking painfully. A brief shot of her bare stomach during the ensuing chase shows him kicking so hard that her skin stretches.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • A shot of Max standing next to his vehicle, feeling lost and tormented by voices, is given once at the start and then again when he doesn't join Furiosa and the Vuvalini.
  • When word spreads that Furiosa has gone rogue, Slit gets a steering wheel and Nux, who is supposed to be the driver, has to grab it and have a tug-of-war with Slit as he fights for the right to drive. Later, when Max gives Nux another wheel to replace the War Rig's lost one, it's like the former scene in reverse, and Nux seems honored to be given the wheel by the rig's current driver.
• Meaningful Look: Furiosa and Max share one in the final moments when Max leaves.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Nux is Latin for "nut" (which he is), but also figuratively for "a worthless thing", which he considers himself as at the beginning. Also, according to the comic book tie-in, Nux was so-named because he was "a hard nut to crack".
  • Vuvalini is close to "vulva", which is appropriate for an Amazon Brigade.
  • Furiosa — a near-synonym of "mad" — has about as much reason to be as "mad" as Max. In the sense that "mad" can mean both "mentally unbalanced" and "extremely pissed-off." Mad Max and Furiosa have elements of both, but Max leans more towards the former while Furiosa leans more towards the latter.
  • Capable is the most knowledgeable and assertive of Immortan Joe's "wives".
  • The name "Angharad" has long been associated with Welsh royalty. Rather fitting considering Angharad is named as Immortan Joe's favorite of the wives. Her first name, "Splendid," also fits for one being described as "the favorite," and while she's not the only Wife with two names, her names are given a bit more focus, establishing her role as the unofficial leader of the harem.

• Meatgrinder Surgery: This is the Organic Mechanic's specialty. All of his surgeries take place in dirty, unsanitary environments with crude tools. When he performs a C-section on a dying Angharad, he uses a breaking knife instead of a scalpel.
• Mêlée à Trois:
  • The battle between the War Rig, the War Boys, and the Buzzards. The War Boys are trying to take out the Buzzards so they can get Furiosa alive, while the Buzzards and Furiosa each fight off the other two.
  • The canyon battle between the War Rig, the Rock Riders, and the pursuing convoy of War Boys, plus the People Eater and the Bullet Farmer. The Rock Riders are not happy that Furiosa has brought the Citadel invaders into their territory and blow up the canyon to block the progress of Joe and his men before attacking Furiosa for breaking their deal. Meanwhile, Furiosa is just trying to escape the other factions.
  • Furiosa and the Wives versus Max and Nux; Nux seems to believe Max is on his side, while Max would just like him out of the way.
  • A quick one in the final battle when Max jumps onto the Doof Wagon, and knocks off a succession of War Boys while a very irritated Doof Warrior is still on board and fighting both of them for control of his guitar.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender:
  • Two different characters — the female Furiosa and the male Nux — are on a journey for redemption after having been active participants in Immortan Joe's corrupt system. Take a wild guess which one dies for it.
  • In-universe, the War Boys are taught from a young age that not only are they expendable, but that death in battle is the only way to reach Valhalla.
  • Averted with the Vuvalini, as all of them are female and almost all of them die in the final battle.
• Midair Repair: Occasionally, one of the heroes has to venture out and fix something wrong with the War Rig while it's going.
• Moe Greene Special: In the Final Battle, the People Eater gets shot through the eye by friendly fire.
• Mood Whiplash: Omnipresent.
  • When Max is first fleeing from the War Boys. He gets in his Interceptor, speeds off with the War Boys in hot pursuit, setting the audience up for a badass chase scene... until they almost immediately wreck his car with an explosive spear and drag him out of the wreckage.
  • Angharad helps save Max's life and just barely avoids getting splatted by a massive rock in the process. He gives her a grateful thumbs up, she smiles, then slips on the blood from her leg wound, falls off the War Rig and gets run over by Joe's truck.
  • During a heartfelt conversation about life as a War Boy, Nux mentions his mates "Larry and Barry"... and points to two tumors on his neck with smiley faces drawn on them.
  • After his Heel–Face Turn, Nux is gently resting in the War Rig with the wives, enjoying the peace of being accepted into their group. He spots a bug on Capable's shoulder, gently picks it off without waking her up... and eats it.
  • After the night segment, they come to a lone tower in the middle of nowhere with a naked woman at the top screaming for help. Max points out that it's a trap and the mood is tense... until Furiosa announces who she is and all her clan sisters return to gratefully welcome her back into the fold. Then it shifts again when the Keeper of the Seeds tells Furiosa that the Green Place is gone.
  • In the final battle, the War Rig is beset on all sides by War Boys, so Nux climbs on to the hood of the War Rig and starts spitting gas from the hose into the engine intake. Not to be undone, Slit does the same on the hood of the jury-rigged Interceptor, and it devolves into an almost literal spitting contest. And then Max joins in. It's hilarious.
• Mook–Face Turn: Nux is a grunt in Immortan Joe's forces, but his failure to stop the War Rig, his fear that Joe will blame him for Angharad's death, and the kindness showed by Capable convinces him to help the good guys escape — and later, defeat — Joe.
• More Dakka: Justified due to the Bullet Farmer and his men running a place with a lot of guns and ammunition, which are otherwise hard to come by in the wasteland. Not to mention the implications that Bullet Farm also uses its resources to manufacture ammo and small arms, which makes it even more invaluable.
  • In fact, it is subtly shown that the higher you are within Immortan Joe's band, the more dakka you get.
    • The wandering tribes get by with crossbows, small arms and makeshift explosives. The Vuvalinis get rifles.
    • Immortan Joe's Mooks usually have close-quarter weapons, but some can use Boom Sticks.
    • Elite Mook Ace is shown to have a grenade launcher.
    • Imperator Furiosa possesses many fancy weapons such as a sniper rifle and a crossbow firing explosive arrows.
    • Rictus Erectus possesses a minigun which he barely uses, sadly.
    • The Bullet Farmer has two submachine guns as well as a revolver.
    • Immortan Joe only wields a revolver during the movie, but it's because Revolvers Are Just Better.
• Motifs: Fluids. Women are exploited for their breast milk, men are exploited for their blood and the populus is exploited by controlling the water supply in a desert world. The complete control over these liquids by Immortan Joe shows his dominion over his world.
• Mythology Gag: The film is utterly packed with them, mostly as Call Backs to the second film.
  • Max begins the film with Barbarian Longhair as he did in Beyond Thunderdome, and has an Important Haircut later in the film.
  • The Interceptor gets wrecked again. Twice.
  • Nux and Slit fighting over who gets to drive harks back to Roop and Charlie arguing over the same thing in the first film. It should also be noted that Roop and Charlie make a cameo in the prequel comic as soldiers in Immortan Joe's first army.
  • Max attempting to fire his shotgun, only to find that the shells are duds. He then uses an empty shotgun as a bluff, just as he did in the second film.
  • Max being strapped to the front of a car as an ornament recalls two settlers having the same happen to them in the second film.
  • Take a closer look at the skull topping the cruciform Max is strapped to. It's wearing a leather pilot's helmet and goggles that are very similar to the Gyro Captain's attire from The Road Warrior. Seriously, look.◊
  • Furiosa keeps her vehicle rigged so it can't be hijacked. She also keeps a weapon hidden by the controls in case anybody tries to force her to move it. This time, it's Max who spots it.
  • Just like Max in Beyond Thunderdome, Furiosa has a blade hidden in plain sight (Max's flyswatter in Beyond Thunderdome, Furiosa's gear-shift in this film.)
  • Two of Immortan Joe's sons that we see are Rictus Erectus, a dumb giant manchild, and Corpus Colossus, a malformed dwarf. This recalls the pairing of Master Blaster in Beyond Thunderdome.
  • Most of the film is an extended version of The Road Warrior's final chase sequence.
  • Max has to watch a woman and child get run over by the main villain again, only this time, the child hasn't been born yet. What makes it worse is that the villain didn't mean to do it... and it only happens because of something Max inadvertently did.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: During one of Max's flashbacks, Toecutter's eyes bulging out can be seen for a fraction of a second. Blink and you'll miss it.
  • The music box Max gives the Feral Child in Mad Max 2 is briefly seen in the hands of one of the fleeing Wives as she tries to stay calm right before the climactic chase.
  • Immortan Joe's weapon of choice is a shiny and chrome revolver that's similar to Lord Humungus's, but without a scope.
  • An attempt is made to sever a limb to escape from chains.
  • One mook who leaps aboard the War Rig during the climactic battle has a triangular "GIVE WAY" road sign for a shield strapped to his arm, like the one Roop accidentally shoots in the opening chase of the first movie. If you look closely, the sign is riddled with holes as if from a shotgun blast.
  • Similar to a scene in the first film, an elderly woman wielding a double-barreled shotgun fails to kill the main villain. The villain is even played by the same actor, Hugh Keays-Byrne.
  • The People Eater, mayor of Gastown, resembles The Collector from the third film, who was an official of Bartertown, another energy-producing settlement.
  • Though no attention is drawn to it, Max is still wearing a leg brace.
  • The absurd number of weapons Max collects in the War Rig to disarm Furiosa recalls Max's Extended Disarming in Bartertown in Beyond Thunderdome.
  • Nux's Heroic Sacrifice is reminiscent of Max's in the climax of Beyond Thunderdome.
  • The facepaint worn by the War Boys and War Pups resembles the paint worn by Scrooloose, one of the feral children from Beyond Thunderdome. Given Scrooloose's surprising display of combat proficiency in Thunderdome's final act, this has led to the popular fan theory that Scroolose was a runaway War Pup.
  • The name "Fury Road" recalls "Anarchie Road" (sic), the setting of the first film's opening scene.
  • Max refers to himself as a Road Warrior in the opening narration. Later, the War Boys tattoo details on his back, including the fact that he is a Road Warrior. One of the details is "No Name", a call back to how Max was introduced as "The Man with no Name" in the Thunderdome.
  • The Big Bad is a Malevolent Masked Man, much like the Big Bad from The Road Warrior, and is played by the same actor as the first film's Big Bad.
  • A pair of boltcutters is used as an Improvised Weapon, though this time to a far greater extent than in The Road Warrior.
  • The People Eater carries a Mauser as his sidearm of choice, much like Bubba Zanetti from Mad Max and Max himself in Beyond Thunderdome.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: Nux, who idolizes Immortan Joe, not only receives a gun and direct orders from him, but the promise that if Nux manages to kill Furiosa then Joe will personally carry him through the gates of Valhalla. This is obviously the high point of Nux's life, which makes him almost immediately falling off the rig and losing the gun humiliating for him, hilarious to the audience.
  Immortan Joe: Mediocre!
• Neutral Female: Averted. Every single character introduced (including the distressed damsels, one of whom is heavily pregnant) gets involved in the conflict and violence. Some are or try to become Action Girls, others stick to guile or create new allies. Which, in the case of Angharad, the heavily pregnant woman, costs her her life.
• Never Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight: The Bullet Farmer has a shitload of guns, Max has only a kukri. One explosion and an offscreen battle later, Max comes back unharmed, dragging the Bullet Farmer's loot and covered in blood that's explicitly stated to not be his.
• Never Mess with Granny: The remnants of Furiosa's tribe are a group of older women who join up and are handy with older rifles. One of them even carries an ancient musket and claims she killed anything she could by way of headshot with it.
• Never Trust a Trailer: In the trailer, Immortan Joe can be heard saying in a normal voice, "Everybody has gone out of their mind. You're not the only one, Max." The line never appeared in the movie itself, and much like Lord Humungus, Joe never directly interacts with Max.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Nux's decision to take Max along on the hunt for Furiosa, as a forced blood donor to help with his health problems, ends up leading to everything turning out well.
• Nitro Boost: During the final chase, Nux and Max literally spit an unidentified fluid into the War Rig's engine to temporarily boost its speed. Given the reaction it's most likely meant to be nitrous oxide. Slit does the same thing to his own vehicle to try and overtake them.
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: The Central Theme of the entire Mad Max series, but here it's outright screamed that fighting for control of oil and water is what "killed the world" — and though men like Immortan Joe led the charge, kids like Nux were the Cannon Fodder that waged the wars on the warlords' behalf.
  Why are you hurting these people?
  It's the oil, stupid.
  Oil wars.
  We are killing for gasoline!
• Nobody Here but Us Birds: Apparently, Valkyrie uses a bird call to communicate with her peers when pulling off her Wounded Gazelle Gambit.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: In the final battle, Max brutally bludgeons Rictus into unconsciousness using one of his bottles.
• No Name Given:
  • Max, from Furiosa's point of view. He brushes off questions about his name and doesn't reveal it until the end when Furiosa is critically injured.
  • Most of the Wives's names, except Angharad and Cheedo, aren't stated in the movie, making them this to the viewer (until the credits, that is).
• No Peripheral Vision: Justified example. In the first battles, Furiosa ruthlessly rams anything off the road that gets near her. During the storm, a piece of debris shatters her side view mirror and gives Nux an opening to overtake her. Later on, she is far less able to use the massive rig itself as a weapon, with the notable exception of squashing the Interceptor against the People Eater's rig.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy:
  • Max when he sees the Five Wives. Beautiful women hosing each other down? He couldn't care less. The water they're washing off with? Oh, hell yeah.
  • Max also has no reaction to the sight of a naked woman in a cage except to identify her, correctly, as "bait."
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Despite being set in Australia, all of the actors use their natural accents, which results in a weird eclectic mix of Australian (The Dag, Cheedo, the Vuvalini, almost all of Joe's forces), English (Max, Angharad, Nux) and American (Furiosa, Toast, Capable) accents.
• Not His Blood: When Max returns from killing the Bullet Farmer offscreen, his face is covered in blood. One of the Wives asks if he is hurt because he's bleeding but Furiosa answers for Max in an admiring voice, "That's not his blood."
• Offhand Backhand: In the opening, Max stomps a mutant lizard under his heel without even looking down at it.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The War Rig is stuck in the mud, the Bullet Farmer is approaching, and it's a foggy night, so Max marches off to deal with him. A minute later, there's a big explosion and Max returns, covered in blood and hauling a few big bags of ammunition and the Bullet Farmer's steering wheel.
  Furiosa: It's not his blood.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Max, when he sees that Nux is attempting to suicide bomb the War Rig with their car.
  • Minor version much later, when trying to get the War Rig out of the muck. When Nux starts driving, Furiosa and Max see each other and — realizing that neither of them are driving the damn truck itself — run after it, bewildered.
  • Immortan Joe when he realizes that the War Rig is heading back to the Citadel, which is now undefended thanks to his Stern Chase.
  • When his remaining soldiers realize Immortan Joe is dead, it absolutely breaks their hold on the people.
• Once per Episode: Max does a But Now I Must Go. However, this is the first time he chooses to. The other three films were a Downer Ending and two Bittersweet Endings.
• One Bullet Left: Max has a scoped SKS rifle with only three rounds, and aims into the night toward the oncoming searchlight of the Bullet Farmer's vehicle (who, as his name indicates, has plenty of ammo). He uses two shots to no effect, so hands the rifle to Furiosa, who braces the rifle on Max's shoulder and fires a shot that shatters the searchlight, blinding the Bullet Farmer.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Averted with Angharad. Max accidentally grazes her leg with a bullet when threatening her, and while at first it seems like she's fine except for the blood, later the wound on her leg causes major problems for the group and contributes to her slipping from the War Rig which leads to her death.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Immortan Joe sends Furiosa on a routine run to the Bullet Farm and Gas Town in order to pick up (obviously) bullets and gas. When she turns off the road heading east, his son keeping the lookout realizes something is odd and calls Immortan over, who immediately realizes something is seriously wrong and runs to his vault. Yup, his harem has been stolen. This is the only time we see Joe visibly express anger.
• Opening Monologue: Max gives a brief one with a deep voice.
• Orange/Blue Contrast: To an exaggerated extent, the whole film is tinted in a strong orange (desert) or blue (sky), punctuated with red (blood, explosions, fire) and a strong electric blue for night scenes.
  In an interview with slashfilm.com, George Miller said :
  We spent a lot of time in DI (digital intermediate), and we had a very fine colorist, Eric Whipp. One thing I've noticed is that the default position for everyone is to de-saturate post-apocalyptic movies. There's only two ways to go, make them black and white — the best version of this movie is black and white, but people reserve that for art movies now. The other version is to really go all-out on the color. The usual teal and orange thing? That's all the colors we had to work with. The desert's orange and the sky is teal, and we either could de-saturate it, or crank it up, to differentiate the movie. Plus, it can get really tiring watching this dull, de-saturated color, unless you go all the way out and make it black and white.
• Outside Ride: Coupled with Traintop Battle. Many fight scenes involve characters hopping onto the War Rig to hijack the truck.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Max. First, he gets hung upside down to transfuse blood to Nux. Then, he gets strapped to Nux's car hood to keep supplying blood to him. Near the end, he transfuses some of his blood to Furiosa. And he keeps kicking ass to the end without suffering any ill effects of blood loss.
• Paddleball Shot: After Nux blocks the canyon by crashing the War Rig, Doof's guitar comes flying out of the wreckage towards the camera before getting yanked back by its bungee cords, followed by the War Rig's steering wheel which blots out the screen.
• Peaceful in Death: The Vuvalini elder after being mortally wounded. She dies while nobody was watching but her peaceful expression tells us that she realized that their mad plan would succeed.
• Pedal-to-the-Metal Shot:
  • A feature within the War Rig allows Furiosa to lock the accelerator down at full throttle, which is shown off during the raid by the Buzzards so she can shoot at them without slowing down.
  • Happens in Nux's car revealing his pedal to be labeled "Nux".
  • Invoked by Max when he pulls a Deadfoot Leadfoot using the People Eater.
  • Toast does this upon taking control of the Gigahorse after Joe is killed.
• People Farms: The Citadel has women being used as breeders and for their breast milk, and men being drained of their blood for the War Boys who are suffering from radiation poisoning.
• Pietà Plagiarism: Immortan Joe holding the lifeless body of Angharad, wheezing the raspy approximation of a Death Wail through his open mask, while Rictus angrily fires his BFG in the direction of the retreating War Rig.
  Warboy on bike: Are you alright?
  Immortan Joe: NO, NO!
• Pop the Tires:
  • A common tactic employed against the War Rig, albeit with quite limited success courtesy of its spiked hubcaps. The Warboys do manage to burst one tire during the final battle, but it helps them little as the tire they shred is an apocalyptic version of a run-flat so the War Rig just keeps rolling.
  • Furiosa manages to do this to Nux's car's front left wheel, hoping it would slow him down or make him crash. Nux responds by telling Slit to move the "bloodbag" to the back as counterweight, so he only has to rely on the right wheel for turning and balance.
• Post-Peak Oil: As in the previous films, conflicts over oil as well as water brought about the nuclear holocaust that burned the world.
• The Power of Rock: Invoked by Immortan Joe, who has a vehicle in his war party built solely to house a team of drummers, a colossal set of speakers and a guitarist called the Doof Warrior blasting heavy metal to further psych up his War Boys.
• Practical Effects: The vast majority of the film is done through real props, actual stunts, and working cars. That includes the guitar guy playing their anthem, all the jumps from vehicle to vehicle, flamethrowers, people on bending poles, etc. Most of the CGI is digital composition putting these races into narrow canyons, set extensions, the dust storm scene, and the internal mechanisms of Furiosa's replacement arm. This makes it look and feel very similar to the first three films, which were made before the CGI era.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Immortan Joe isn't particularly concerned with making sure Furiosa suffers for defying him; his sole concern is the return of his "property." Even when Nux offers to keep Furiosa alive for him to exact vengeance upon her, Joe rejects that suggestion and insists that he simply kill her to ensure that the War Rig stops.
• Precision F-Strike: Not one F-Bomb in an R-rated action movie, most (if not all) swear words are replaced with Australian slang.
• Pregnant Hostage: The central plot features Max driving an oil rig with pregnant women who become his captives after he threatens them with a gun and forces them to help him drive the rig.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: At the end of the film, Furiosa says "Remember me?" before she kills Immortan Joe.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Warboys are a deconstruction; the whole impetus behind the film is how restrictive and unhealthy such a masculinity- and death-obsessed culture really is, most noticeably to its women, but really to everyone who isn't squarely on top.
• Psychopathic Manchild:
  • Nux is curiously innocent and non-malicious, even while he's killing loads of people.
  • Also Rictus, who is the big Dumb Muscle variety. Showing little independent thought, he seems only to want to please his father.
• Psycho Serum:
  • Immortan Joe's Warboys huff chrome spray paint to psych themselves up in battle.
  • The justification In-Universe for using Max as the blood bag.
    Slit: It's a raving feral!
    Nux: That's right; high octane crazy blood, fillin' me up!

Tropes Q to S

• Reaction Shot: When Slit unchains Max to move him to the back of the vehicle, we see the gleeful expression in Max's eyes as he's finally got a chance to escape.
• Recurring Camera Shot: The opening shot of Max looking upon a valley with his ride next to him is repeated later when he watches the rest of the group dash away across the salt plain.
• Recycled Trailer Music: The rare aversion in that all of the music in the Fury Road trailers are from the film itself.
• Redemption Equals Death: Nux doesn't get to survive his Mook–Face Turn. Then again, he was already dying.
• Reduced to Ratburgers: The movie begins with Max eating a two-headed mutant lizard whole, and later Nux eats an insect.
• Road Trip Plot: It's in the title. About 90% of the movie is spent driving on the titular Fury Road.
• Rotten Rock & Roll: Immortan Joe's army prominently features a guitarist (whose guitar is also a flamethrower) who constantly plays regardless of the action around him. He also serves a more practical purpose of sounding general orders.
• Rule of Cool:
  • How can Furiosa have a fully functional mechanical arm in a world with no means of designing it? Who cares? Also an example of the Rule of Drama; Furiosa gets her arm entangled in Joe's face mask and throws it into his car wheels to kill him, something that would obviously be impossible with a regular arm.
  • A guitarist serving as a drummer "boy" for Joe's forces is reasonable. Having the guitar also be a flamethrower is this trope.
• Rule of Symbolism: The way Furiosa kills Joe. She attaches her mechanical arm (the symbol of her disability) to his breathing mask (the symbol of his), and kills him by throwing a grappling hook wrapped around her arm into the wheels of Joe's car. She embraces her disability and uses it to her advantage, while Joe's philosophy teaches that all physical disability is weakness. Both of them are handicapped, but she makes no secret of her disability, while he tries to disguise his own rather disgusting body with ridiculous fake muscular armor and an army of war boys to do his bidding. In the end, she literally casts aside her own disability, showing that she won't let it define her, while Joe's inability to do the same gets his face ripped off. Bonus points for the grappling hook going into the wheels of his own massive gas-guzzling car, an additional symbol of masculine virility used to disguise physical and moral weakness.
• Running Gag: Nux tries to reach Valhalla three times with a Heroic Sacrifice, but ends up doing an Epic Fail. It's only til he's doing it to save someone else that he succeeds.
• Safe Zone Hope Spot: Furiosa is taking the Wives to "the green place", an oasis where she was born and raised before being abducted by Immortan Joe. Her tribe tells her that they had already passed it when they drove through the quagmire. Apparently, since her abduction, the green place soured and dried up, forcing her tribemates to scavenge like everyone else. The tree they use as an anchor to get the War Rig out is an early clue to this. Turns out that the only fertile land left is the Citadel that they just left behind.
• Sampling: Giuseppe Verdi's "Dies Irae" is sampled quite a bit in the soundtrack. It was also used in one of the trailers for the movie.
• Sane Boss, Psycho Henchmen: Immortan Joe may be a brutal warlord, but the "War Boys" are unhinged lunatics and kamikaze fighters willing to throw away their lives for Joe without hesitation.
• Scenery Porn: The Namib Desert combined with George Miller's unhindered vision of a post-apocalyptic wasteland is truly a sight to behold.
• Secretly Dying:
  • Immortan Joe. He's weak of breath, needs help walking, and has attendants caring for scars or boils on his back. He disguises this to his followers by donning muscular-looking armor whenever in public. Even his attendants might not realize the state of his health, considering how Brainwashed and Crazy they are. It doesn't help that neither of his sons are fit to rule in his stead; Rictus is too stupid, Corpus too physically weak.
  • The Keeper of the Seeds, after being mortally wounded in the co-driver seat of the War Rig. She manages to take out the Mook who stabbed Furiosa before peacefully going out with a smile.
• Self-Harm:
  • Splendid Angharad's facial scars have been confirmed to be from self-harm. Also, as a Freeze-Frame Bonus, small scars can be seen on her wrist as she hands Max the water hose. Note that Splendid was Joe's "favorite" and all that it implies.
  • The same kind of scars can be seen for a split second on Furiosa's wrist while she activates the Rig's killswitches, although in another closeup a second later they are no longer visible.
• Sequel Escalation: To a ridiculous degree.
  • The Interceptor was destroyed shortly before the final chase in The Road Warrior. Here, it gets wrecked in the first five minutes. And, after a rebuild, it gets wrecked again late into the film.
  • In each film, Max has fought progressively bigger antagonists, in the first film it was a small gang of bikers, in the second a large clan of marauders, and in the third Auntie Entity was a warlord controlling the small settlement of Bartertown. Here, Joe is a dictator who controls his own religion with a massive tower and works with at least two other warlords.
  • The famous climax of The Road Warrior is a Stern Chase on a Big Badass Rig while pursued by enemy soldiers. Fury Road takes that chase and stretches it out to the length of the entire movie.
• Sexy Soaked Shirt: Max is sneaking up on the War Rig, only to encounter the Five Wives washing themselves down with a fire hose after being hidden in the War Rig's fuel tank. Given that they're in the middle of the Thirsty Desert, the sight of the water is more lust-inducing to Max than their wet clothes.
• She Is the King: Furiosa has the title of Imperator, Roman for emperor, and the female version of this word would be imperatrix.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Max is clearly in the throes of severe PTSD, tormented by visions of the people he didn't manage to save both while awake and asleep.
• Shell-Shock Silence: Several times after explosions does the sound drown out, especially during the Final Battle.
• Ship Tease: While no explicit scenes are shown to confirm Max and Furiosa feeling attracted to each other, the movie is definitely open to that interpretation, with moments such as when Furiosa asks Max to come with the Vuvalini, or Max cradling her when she nearly dies from blood loss and talking to her in a gentle tone he's not heard using for anyone else.
• Shout-Out:
  • The spike-covered Volkswagen Beetles that attack the War Rig is a shout-out to the Australian horror film The Cars That Ate Paris.
  • The Buzzards themselves, the drivers of said cars, look a lot like Star Wars's sand people.
  • The Dag calls Immortan Joe a "smeg".
  • The Bullet Farmer promises "just one angry shot, for Furiosa!", a possible reference to the Australian war movie The Odd Angry Shot.
  • One from the tie-in comic: When Max goes to rescue Glory, there's a poster for Dredd in the background.
  • In a recursive shout-out, the film has a lot of similarities to the ReBoot episode "Bad Bob", which revolves around a post-apocalyptic racing game inspired by The Road Warrior, including the metal-heavy soundtrack and turning the big rig around and returning to the starting point. Production designer Brendan McCarthy worked on both and was in fact responsible for getting George Miller interested in continuing the Mad Max franchise when he showed him a tape of the episode.
• Show, Don't Tell: Often listed as one of the film's greatest strengths is its in-depth Worldbuilding with minimal dialogue (including the opening voiceover, Max himself only has 52 lines). For example, the beginning shows a tumor-ridden Immortan Joe having powder applied to his skin, donning muscular-looking armor to hide his affliction, and giving a gathered crowd of other sickly people water — but not enough. It tells you everything you need to know about what kind of place the Citadel is and we haven't even gotten to the sex slaves yet.
• Sigil Spam: The Citadel's skull insignia is everywhere: on a cliff face, branded on the backs of the Wives', the War Boys', and even Furiosa's necks (Max barely escapes said branding), on their vehicles (including the roof of Furiosa's War Rig), on every steering wheel, dangling from Immortan Joe's belt, etc.
• Skeleton Motif: Immortan Joe's empire is represented by a flaming skull emblem. Joe's pale hue and breathing apparatus also personally makes him resemble a skeleton. Furiosa takes advantage of this by mounting a skull on the War Rig with a pistol concealed inside it.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: Immortan Joe's people are big into skulls as decorations, both pictorial and real.
• Skewed Priorities: Immortan Joe sends his entire army to chase down the war rig and a handful of runaway sex slaves, expending huge amounts of fuel, ammo, and troops in an attempt to get them back. This also leaves his community completely unguarded. Not such a great idea for a dictator who rules with an iron fist. The People Eater calls him out on this.
• Skyward Scream: Upon learning that the Green Place had turned to poison muck, Furiosa undergoes a Heroic BSoD that involves dropping her arm in the sand, kneeling on the sand, and screaming.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Moderately idealistic. It's a harsh world, but individuals can make a difference, and an act of kindness towards an enemy has positive consequences (see Mook–Face Turn, above).
• Sniping the Cockpit: Subverted on two occasions:
  • The Keeper of the Seeds takes out the Interceptor/Razor Cola's driver with a well-placed shot, taking it out of the fight, only for Slit to get behind the wheel and bring the car back into the fight.
  • The Valkyrie lands a tight group of shots on the Gigahorse, which would have certainly killed Immortan Joe had the windscreen not been made of bulletproof glass.
• Source Music: Almost all of the chase music is being played by Coma-Doof and the drummers.
• Spear Carrier: The one Warboy who briefly informs Nux about Furiosa's mutiny with almost Shakespearean cadence, who is about as much of a Mr. Exposition as this movie gets.
  Warboy: Treason! Betrayal! An Imperator gone rogue!
• Spiked Wheels: The Buzzards have these on their hedgehog-like vehicles, designed for disabling vehicles that enter their territory. To counter this, vehicles such as the War Rig have spikes on their own wheels which point outwards to parry them.
• Spikes of Villainy: The vehicles used by the Buzzards who attack Furiosa's party when she first leaves the path are so thickly covered with metal spikes that they look like wheeled hedgehogs (or an Australian echidna, you could say).
• Spiteful Spit: A couple. First Furiosa and Nux have a spit exchange inside the truck. Then at the end, after Furiosa brutally rips Immortan Joe's face off, Toast spits at his corpse.
• Splash of Color: During the blueish sequences of Hollywood Darkness:
  • The blood on Max's face retains a red color hue.
  • Also a plantlet produced from a bag is shown in bright green color.
• Squee: Nux gets a massive fangasm when Immortan Joe glances at him. Later, he bursts into tears when Joe personally gives him a mission.
• Stab the Scorpion: When Cheedo attempts to go back to Joe after Angharad's death, Furiosa calmly levels a scoped rifle... and snipes a bandit charging towards her. It drives home to the audience that she isn't just a rogue general of a fascist warlord out to screw over her former superior, and the safety and wellbeing of the Wives themselves is her top priority.
• Stealth Pun: Joe is a conservative religious leader of a fascist Right-Wing Militia Fanatic culture. He controls his people by giving them enough water to fight over, but not enough to be healthy. In other words, he is literally a practitioner of trickle-down economics.
• Steel Eardrums: Downplayed. The movie emphasizes Max going temporarily deaf every time a firearm is used in close proximity to him, but he still rolls through it without any real permanent hearing damage.
• Stern Chase: The entire movie. Until Max realizes their only hope is to turn round and go back the way they came, right through their pursuers.
• Still Wearing the Old Colors: Immortan Joe's armor incorporates his old military decorations from his past as an Australian Army colonel. Max meanwhile still dons his MFP uniform, albeit worn, torn and repaired almost beyond recognition.
• Stock Footage: When Max awakes abruptly from his dream right after the blue sequence, the last image of his dream is a close view of eyes popping out of a face. This footage is from Mad Max, when Toecutter is killed.
• Strange Salute: The Warboys greet Immortan Joe by crossing their arms over their heads and screaming "Immortan!"
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop: The dramatic orchestral buildup that plays when Nux is tasked by Immortan Joe to kill Furiosa abruptly cuts off when his chain trips him.
• Suicide Attack: The War Boys, who are dying of radiation poisoning anyway and have a religious belief that their leader Immortan Joe will resurrect them in Valhalla. The attacks include leaping on their enemies with explosive-head spears, or flooding their vehicles with their own fuel and dropping lit flares to create improvised car bombs.
• Surprise Vehicle: Max's pursuers in the opening scene are not heard until they enter the screen.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Regarding Splendid Angharad's leg injury. When they first meet, Max accidentally grazes it when he fires warning shots at her. At first, she seems just fine save for a little bleeding, but over time the bleeding gets worse and the pain bothers her more and more. It comes to a head when all hands are needed to shake off pursuers and she jumps out of the rig to help her rescuers, but her leg injury ensures that she can't get a proper foothold to climb back in, which leads to her falling to her death.
  • Max and Furiosa's initial fight. Furiosa is highly trained and experienced at inflicting violence, about as much as Max, and has several huge advantages: she opens the fight with a sneak attack, gets her hands on several weapons, is fighting a guy who is chained to a hostile prisoner and can't use all his limbs at once (this is balanced out by the fact that she lacks one of her arms), has five other women to help her (though they don't do much, they can still pull on his chains to unbalance him), and Max is already dehydrated, exhausted, and injured going in. On top of this, Max doesn't actually want to hurt her, just do the minimum to neutralize her as a threat and then leave, while she goes for lethal force immediately. So how does the fight turn out? Max wins. Easily. Furiosa only ever has a chance when she has a weapon on her (a club, an empty gun, a chain, a hose, a loaded gun), and when that fails, he pretty much immediately overpowers her. The gap in strength between women and even average-sized men is really, really big. Females have 37-68% of muscle strength of males in general.
  • Also regarding Furiosa's War Rig. Her destination is at least a day's journey, but driving a huge, gas-guzzling rig non-stop across a sweltering hot desert eventually overheats the engine, forcing the group to stop to let the engine cool off before they can continue. Considering their pursuers, this is a problem.
  • Generally speaking, everything involving the nature of a chase through harsh environments; especially illustrated by the War Rig. Drove through a sand-lightning-tornado-storm? Rig needs to have the sand taken out of the intakes. Rig's engine block is on fire? Need to lower the plow to apply dust to extinguish it. Stuck in a quagmire? Place the engine covers under the wheels for traction. Overdo the direct oil injection boosts? The engines fail and need fixing. The rig doesn't run on miracles; it's an engine and it needs to be maintained.
  • Nux's eagerness to prove himself to Immortan Joe by charging blindly into the fray without noticing the situation around him qualifies. The first attempt for glory is foiled by Max, who just wants to get the hell out of Dodge while Nux still believes he's on his side. The second attempt is stopped by the Wives after he tries to kill Furiosa, because he believes Furiosa kidnapped them, not realizing that the Wives followed her of their own free will. The third and most humiliating attempt is when he tries too hard to impress Immortan Joe and ends up looking like an idiot because he doesn't notice that his chain got stuck on the rig and falls off. Really, Nux's character prior his Heel–Face Turn could serve well as a Deconstruction of the Determinator character type.
  • After the Bullet Farmer is blinded, he goes on a raving More Dakka spree, Dual Wielding guns and firing sightlessly... and not hitting a single thing.
  • Sending a gargantuan War Rig after a relatively small force in a post-apocalyptic setting where fuel, working vehicles and munition is a scarcity, proves to be a massive waste of resources, as the People Eater points out.
  • At the climax, the way Furiosa pulls out the gearshift she had been stabbed with demonstrates why in real life you do not remove an impaling object from an injury. She develops a pneumothorax and very nearly exsanguinates before Max gives her a blood transfusion.

Tropes T to Z

• Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: After she manages to cut the chain binding the War Rig and Immortan Joe's car and narrowly avoids slamming into a pile of rocks, Angharad shows a smile of relief while Max gives her a thumbs up. Immediately after that, the door she's holding onto falls off and she's hit by Joe's car.
• Taking the Bullet: One mook jumps in front of Immortan Joe and takes the bullet when Furiosa fires at him during a chase scene.
• Tear Off Your Face: Happens to Immortan Joe. Furiosa hooks his mask with a harpoon and lets the chain fall into his car's wheel, tearing off the mask and part of Joe's face.
• Terminally Dependent Society: The Citadel, Gastown and the Bullet Farm are all dependent on the water in the citadel's underground aquifer. While Immortan Joe keeps control of his army of War Boys through Cult of Personality, he uses the much more mundane method of rationing the supply of water to control the unwashed mutated masses. He also makes a point of keeping the outgoing water just beneath subsistence level, despite sitting on enough water to keep the population well-hydrated for many decades.
  Immortan Joe: Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
• Testosterone Poisoning: Deconstructed. Immortan Joe puts a heavy emphasis on hyper-masculinity in the running of his empire and the cult he's built around himself. This is shown to be harmful to everyone, men and women alike. Women are treated essentially like livestock, valued only for their looks and fertility. Barring that, they are kept either out of the Citadel or used as milk farms. The men strong enough are brainwashed into a psychotic Martyrdom Culture obsessed with cars and battle, willing to kill themselves "historically" in service to their Glorious Leader in the hopes that they will be resurrected in the Warrior Heaven of Valhalla. In the end, the only ones who benefit from this mindset are Immortan Joe himself and his fellow warlords.
• The Three Faces of Adam: Nux is the naive, but enthusiastic, Hunter who craves a father figure; Max is the hardened Lord whose experience has made him deeply cynical, but not destroyed his humanity; Immortan Joe is the twisted and evil Prophet who deeply desires a capable heir to his empire, as his strongest days are behind him.
• This Means Warpaint:
  • Imperators smear their foreheads with engine grease.
  • The War Boys spray their mouths with chrome paint, which has the added benefit of making them high when launching their attacks.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Played with. The Wives want no unnecessary killing, which spares Nux's life.
• Title Drop:
  Nux: If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die historic on the fury road!
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Although ammo is for once not all that scarce in this franchise thanks to the existence of the Bullet Farm, Max and Furiosa do have to carefully consider the use of their BFG, an enormous sniper rifle, as they only have four bullets for that particular gun.
  • This trope shows up again after Max deals with the Bullet Farmer and collects an arsenal off of the guy. After that, Max and Furiosa are never seen using guns again (barring Max's brief use of a Browning Hi-Power) with only their comrades, the Vuvalini, making use of any firearm — which were the longarms that they had with them since they first met Furiosa and Max.
• Torn Apart by the Mob: At the end of the film, Max returns to the Citadel. To intimidate the city's guards into not imprisoning him again, Max pulls out the lifeless corpse of the Citadel's dictator Immortan Joe and kicks it to the floor. Immediately, the city's peasants rejoice that their oppressor is dead and descend on the body to rip it to pieces.
• Torso with a View: One Citadel mook gets shot with an explosive crossbow bolt that blows his chest open, exposing his ribcage.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The very first trailer uses many of the big action scenes, including the one where Nux overturns the War Rig to block the pass, essentially the final shot of the climax. This actually ends up working, since in this particular case the audience watching the trailer had no reason to assume Nux, the character who appears in it is anything other than a mook having a suitably spectacular death.
• Traintop Battle: Max fighting off mooks on top of the War Rig.
• Traumatic C-Section: Angharad has her baby cut from her body as she dies from her injuries, in the hope of saving its life. It doesn't work.
• The Triple: Max refuses to budge in the War Rig after the kill switches are activated. Furiosa thinks he's going to make a bargain with Immortan Joe, and points out he'll be pissed for damaging his favorite Wife. Max doesn't react. She then says he's driving a Big Badass Rig, the only hope of escaping. That gets his attention, but he still doesn't budge. Furiosa then offers help getting his mask off. That works.
• Try and Follow: Imperator Furiosa takes her War Rig into a sandstorm that's a virtual tornado, to (temporarily) escape the pursuing War Boys. Given their Blood Knight nature not all of the pursuers are deterred, but as Furiosa's Big Badass Rig is heavier it survives while lighter vehicles are blown into the air and destroyed.
• Underside Ride: Both Furiosa and Nux have scenes where they climb underneath the War Rig to do repairs.
• Under the Truck: One of the Rock Riders slides his cycle under the War Rig to grab at Furiosa who is trying to make some on-road repairs.
• Undying Loyalty: Deconstructed, as the fact that the War Boys don't hesitate to sacrifice themselves for Joe is a sign of their brainwashing, exploitation and mental instability, giving everything they have to a cruel dictator who gives them nothing in return. Nux is practically giddy about the prospect of pulling a Suicide Attack on the War Rig, and another mook doesn't hesitate to throw his body in front of Joe when Furiosa fires two shots at him through the windshield.
• Use Your Head:
  • Furiosa headbutts once in combat.
  • Also Nux, when fighting over the steering wheel with his brother.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: There are some strong hints at Max/Furiosa, but nothing can come of it since he leaves at the end.
• Vagina Dentata: A subtle one, but when one of the Five Wives gets a chastity belt taken off, it has a very razor-sharp entrance.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Inverted, where Furiosa survives her injuries, and Angharad, one of the feminine Five Wives, is killed halfway through the film.
• Vehicular Assault: Takes up a major part of the fight sequences.
• Virile Stallion: Immortan Joe has this as his motif. His gas mask is decorated with horse teeth, his car is named the Gigahorse, carries a pair of western-style revolvers of the type used by 19th-century cavalrymen, as well as his attempts to breed the perfect heir which bears a very uncomfortable similarity to equine husbandry.
• Wake Up Fighting: While in the co-driver seat of the War Rig, Max wakes up from one of his haunting nightmares and throws his arms around in panic.
• Warrior Heaven: The War Boys believe they will go to Valhalla if they die a warrior's death. Fatally injured Boys will get high on aerosol fumes and demand others "witness" as they perform suicide attacks. Nux, who is dying of apparent lymphoma, is torn by the fact that he has come close to the "gates" several times but always survives.
• Water Wake-up: Of the accidental kind. After the sandstorm has passed, Max finds himself chained to a lifeless Nux. He carries the body over to the truck where the water pouring from the hose lets Nux come alive.
• Weapon for Intimidation: Max's shotgun. After finding the shells are dud, he uses it to make Furiosa and the Five Wives give him water and bolt-cutters. Furiosa wrests the shotgun off him, only to find it's empty when she tries to Boom, Headshot! Max.^note This is a Nod to Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, where Max spent half the film threatening the Gyrocopter Pilot with an (unbeknownst to him or the audience) empty shotgun. And when he finally did find a shell for the gun, it was a dud.
• Weather of War: Furiosa takes her War Rig into a sandstorm that's a virtual tornado, to (temporarily) escape the pursuing War Boys. Given their Blood Knight nature not all of the pursuers are deterred, but as Furiosa's Big Badass Rig is heavier it survives while lighter vehicles are blown into the air and destroyed.
• Weather Saves the Day: A Deadly Dust Storm comes to the aid of the heroes who can temporarily escape their pursuers in it.
• We Have Reserves: All of the wasteland factions that appear are continually willing to keep throwing away lives long after the costs outweigh the potential rewards. Immortan Joe even raises generations of suicide troops for this very reason; he specifically separates out "half-lives" — men who are very obviously close to death such as Nux due to his anemia and throat-constricting neck tumors — and promises them eternity in Valhalla if they die in his battles. The only exception are the Vuvalini, and given their diminished numbers it's very likely they've been living this way too.
• We Need a Distraction: Nux disables the hydraulics on the fuel pod, correctly assuming that Wives wouldn't be the ones sent to repair it. While Max is busy reattaching the hose, Nux sneaks under the rig through the hidden passage and gets into the cab. He hadn't exactly thought his plan out past that, though, so the Wives toss him right back out.
• Wham Line: "But if you came from the west, you passed the Green Place."
• What Happened to the Mouse?: We see neither hide nor hair of Miss Giddy or the Organic Mechanic after Angharad's c-section in the quagmire. Last we see, they're on the Gigahorse with Joe, but in the final chase they're both curiously absent. A deleted scene shows that Miss Giddy was tortured for information on the Wives' plans. When she refused, she and Angharad (or Angharad's body) were left in the desert and attacked by crows, presumably until they both were dead. Articles about the above scene also state that the Organic Mechanic was off relieving himself in the desert when the War Rig was spotted and consequently left behind.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Defied. When Nux offers to stab Furiosa in the back to keep her alive for Immortan Joe, he shoots down the offer and hands Nux a revolver to put Furiosa down with.
• With Us or Against Us: When Angharad asks Nux "Who killed the world?", she's not just decrying him as her enemy for serving Immortan Joe; she's decrying everything Joe stands for, all who believe as he does, and all who support him. She's arguing that behavior like Joe's — an ideology of glorifying endless war, monopolization of resources by a small elite, the domination and exploitation of the weak by the strong — is what killed the world, and if you participate in continuing that behavior, you bear some moral responsibility.
• Women Are Wiser: The Dag is surprised when one of the Vuvalini says she's killed everyone she's met out here, saying she thought the women would be above that. So she shows Dag the seeds she's kept for future use.
• Worldbuilding: George Miller is an expert. Without a single line of exposition, you get a lived-in world (especially in the Citadel). The first things you see there are Immortan Joe giving water to a thirsty populace (but not giving enough and wasting most of it), a hydroponic farm, a human milking room, and a harem room. Those images giving you all the information you need about what sort of place the Citadel is. In addition, everyone has their own motivations, but that info is doled out naturally. For example, the Big Bad Triumvirate don't always see eye-to-eye and they have their own reasons for their actions.
• World of Badass: Justified, in that the strong dominate the weak, and only the stronger can protect the weak.
• World of Ham: From the character design to the action to the performances, everything in the film is played over-the-top — which makes both Max and Furiosa stand out since they're The Stoic.
• World of Symbolism: Pick a scene. Any scene.
  • Joe milking his "failed" Wives — he sees them as cattle.
  • The bathing pool in his harem looks like a sperm cell.
  • The "Organic Mechanic" — what present times would call a doctor — is only comprehensible to the post-apocalyptic culture as "someone who can fix people as if they were cars."
  • All the War Boys are covered in white powder — to deter sunburn and keep them cool — which along with their scarred, chapped lips gives them the appearance of skeletal corpses; they consider themselves to be already dead, merely looking for a path to Valhalla.
  • Max and Nux are connected in Chained Heat by a literal bloodline, which limits them both — Max is limited by his constant need to help others despite himself, and Nux is limited by his physical weakness. Max only gets the chain connecting them both cut off him after a subtle act of compassion — firing three warning shots to Furiosa instead of just blowing her head off.
  • Nux has an engine block schematic scarred into his chest — he's one of Joe's War Machines.
  • Max is dubbed a "Blood Bag" and dangled upside-down to replenish anemic War Boys — he's being "milked" for his blood.
  • Nux yanks the steering wheel off his pursuit vehicle and brandishes it — he has no idea where he is going and does not care.
  • The three arms of Joe's empire are basically a military-industrial-corporate right-wing trinity;
    • The People Eater is a greedy, obese oil baron.
    • The Bullet Farmer is a gun-obsessed arms dealer.
    • Immortan Joe himself is a patriarchal politician who rules through religion comprised of equal parts car-culture, gun-worship, re-purposed Viking mythology and other uber-masculine "honor culture" staples.
  • Furiosa's people, the "Vuvalini".
  • The physical world is a toxic wasteland where nothing can grow, and the people are mostly oil, gun, and car-obsessed male warriors and scavengers, with the Arc Words "Who killed the world?". With the movie's overt feminist message, the exchange between Angharad and Nux symbolically blames the apocalypse on masculinity.
  • Angharad calls bullets the anti-seed, "plant one and watch something die." The man who owns the bullet factories is called, fittingly, "The Bullet Farmer." The Vulvalini are good guys because they carry real life-giving seeds on them, not just life-taking bullets.
  • When Angharad gives Max some water, the shot of the running hose is right next to her heavily pregnant belly, symbolizing how both water and mothers give life. Paradoxically, it's held at crotch height and some water dribbles out in a very phallic fashion.
  • On that note, Immortan Joe hoards away the few beautiful, healthy women left in the toxic world, just as he hoards away what little clean water is left, declaring them both his personal property to dispense with as he sees fit. Since both women and water create and sustain new life, Immortan Joe controls who lives and who dies.
  • Angharad uses her own heavily pregnant body to block Joe from shooting him with a very long-barrelled revolver. Joe does not tell her "Get out of the way!" or "Get back in the rig, it's not safe!" but only bellows at her "That's my child! That's my property!"
  • Everyone under Joe has his logo seared into the backs of their necks, from the lowliest "blood bags" (Max) to his highest war generals (Furiosa), and all in between (Wives and War Boys), showing how Joe sees them all as just his own personal property.
  • Furiosa and Joe are both disabled, she with her arm and him with his breathing mechanism. She makes no attempt to hide it and remains badass despite her handicap, while Joe is a Non-Action Big Bad who uses armor and robes to hide his deformity from the world and project a false image of physical superiority. Fittingly, Furiosa kills him by latching her robotic arm to his face mask, and throwing it into the wheels of Joe's own humongous car, simultaneously exposing his own deformity to the world and literally shedding her own.
  • All of the villain's deaths are ironic: The Bullet Farmer, who hoards munitions, is presumably either shot or blown up, the morbidly obese People Eater, who uses human beings as commodities, is used as a literal meat shield, and Joe, who leads a cult of muscle-car worshippers, is killed when Furiosa latches his mask to the wheels of his own humongous car.
  • Max's ultimate heroic act is using his salvaged "blood bag" IV tubing to give Furiosa his blood, saving her life — meaning his greatest act is not killing but healing.
  • Max's Iconic Outfit is dirty and dingy when it first appears because he's just another scavenger. When he is captured, it's taken from him as a battle trophy, along with his Cool Car. He takes it back after escaping, but it's still just a tattered piece of clothing. After he returns from killing the Bullet Farmer it's much cooler-looking, because he is once again the Road Warrior.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Used by Furiosa's tribe to bait possible raiders: one of them perches naked in an old electrical tower and the others lie in ambush. Max sees through the ruse almost instantly.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Or they can and are making an Expospeak Gag. At the plains of silence, Furiosa tells Max that they can ride for 160 days. Assuming that they ride at 50 kph (31 mph) for five hours per day, that's 40,000 kilometers or 24,800 miles; 40,075 kilometers or 24,901 miles is the circumference of the Earth.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Furiosa led the group to find the "Green Place", only to find that it had become a poisoned swamp.
• You Fool!: When entering the canyon, Furiosa asks Max his name so she can call out to him in an emergency. When he refuses to tell her, she decides to call him "fool".
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Having killed the supposedly immortal Immortan Joe, Furiosa gets to rule the Citadel. Granted, it's also because there aren't enough mooks to oppose her and the now roused populace.
• Zeerust Canon:
  • Most if not all of the vehicles are based on pre-1979 models, in keeping with the original trilogy. Justified in that They Don't Make Them Like They Used To — these models can stand up to the harsh desert conditions better than modern computerized vehicles, so even if later models ever existed, the older ones are the only working cars left. Also justified in that older vehicles would still be available by the fact that they are made of iron and steel, while modern vehicles tend to be made of fiberglass and plastic. Given a choice between these materials, it is easy to pick metal as the substance more likely to stand up to abuse. Most fiberglass/carbon fiber parts would be useless bits of plastic at that point.
  • Same goes for most of the guns that appear, with most, if not all, being Cold War era weaponry at the latest, with some being much older, such as the Webley revolver and Luger Furiosa stashed on the War Rig, or the positively antique guns wielded by the Vuvalini (including a muzzle loading musket). In fact, the most notable exception is the Glock that gets passed between Max and Furiosa for much of the film and even that had been in development during the original film's release.

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"Oh, what a day! WHAT A LOVELY DAY!!!"

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