10 Movie Characters Who Had To Die To Win

We were all sad to see Nux bite the bullet at the close of George Miller’s belated and critically beloved follow up to his Mad Max franchise, 2015’s Fury Road. A former War Boy (a cabal of post-apocalyptic, misogynistic, possibly-cannibal(?) fascists) converted to the forces of good during the course of the film, Nux’s eventual self-sacrifice is as heart breaking as it is undeniably cool, sailing headlong into a pile up to off the bad guy’s right hand man Rictus with a defiant, chrome-dusted war cry of “Witness me!”.

Nux’s death is more than just a strategic masterstroke, though, it’s a perfect piece of character development and caps off an emotionally affecting arc which plays out over his few sparsely scripted scenes onscreen.

Where Nux begins as an acolyte of the cult leader Immortan Joe, willing to sacrifice himself to uphold an unequal and brutally cruel system of resource raitioning, over the course of the film he falls in love with one of his previous hostages Capable, and their quiet moments together give the film real heart amidst all the car-crunching ultraviolence.

So by the end Nux gets to die helping the heroes, rather than restoring unfair order for the rest of his psycho cult.