Mad Max: Fury Road - 8 Things We Learned From The Trailer

2. And Tom Hardy Is A Damsel In Distress

The other neat inversion and big surprise of the Fury Road trailer is just how ineffectual Mad Max is. That's clear from the first shot, where he complains about his world being one of "fire and blood" before crushing that innocent two-headed lizard under his foot for no good reason. That's the only action shot he gets for the whole trailer, since he spends the rest of the time getting his car flipped over, being kidnapped by various scary looking gangs, being tortured and tattooed, almost being drowned, being paraded on the front of a truck with a mask that resembles another he wore in a blockbuster genre movie, and from the looks of it only manages to escape all of this turmoil thanks to the intervention of Charlize Theron. On the basis of this trailer, Tom Hardy will be the damsel in distress of Fury Road. Rather than going down the usual, somewhat sexist route of portraying the female character as nothing more than motivation for the hero, a MacGuffin that pushes the plot forward, it's instead Mad Max himself that will instigate the movie's story by getting his own stupid ass kidnapped. This is Tom Hardy as Princess Peach, kinda. Which is fun. Continuity-wise, however, how did he end up in such dire straits? At the beginning of the trailer we get a glimpse of some long, flowing locks unlike any of the Mel Gibson portrayals of the character. They soon get shorn off, sure, but the "embittered hero not bothering to cut his hair" trope almost always signifies some inner turmoil. If we're gonna go ahead and take George Miller's first answer, and assume that Mad Max 4 somehow follows directly on from the first film, then our hero really isn't having a very good time of it. He's just quit the Main Force Patrol after his wife and kid were murdered by some punk jerks, going from a straight-laced, by-the-book future police man into a guy who takes the law into his own hands, brutally killing the scavengers who took away his family. At this point Max has nothing, his entire world and personality having been ripped apart. You probably wouldn't be very good at defending yourself with all that emotional baggage, either. Which will be why he looks in such a sorry state throughout this trailer.