Tangentially, I've been thinking about Mad Max: Fury Road.
Now, Theron's Furiosa? I thought she was great. If there's a "problem" with Furiosa, it's mostly that she renders Max's presence more or less irrelevant. I am absolutely ready to see a movie with Furiosa as the lead if that's what the movie makers want to do, and I'm equally ready to give Charlize Theron the go to star or co-star as an action lead in any other action movie she might want to do. (Something I wouldn't have been as ready to say after, say, Aeon Flux.)
Howev's, the movie's other attempts at feminism... don't bear thinking about, so much.
You see, Immortan Joe's enclave has a lot of awfulness about it, particularly in how it starves the common people for water and apparently uses women as breeding slaves/cows.
But on the other hand, it's also apparently managed to re-launch agriculture. It's given hundreds of young men with nothing more to do than wait to die of cancer a sense of purpose. It's created a sense of structure.
Now obviously, that structure is a weird, hierarchical, quasi-theocratic monarchy that serves to the benefit of a select few. But is it entirely fair to judge that against an egalitarian democracy that no longer seems to exist in a harsh, Darwinistic, post-nuclear wasteland?
It's worth pointing out that Furiosa, a woman, apparently rose to a position of respect and authority in this setting. She may have gone through awful things to get there, including losing an arm, but it does imply that rising in the ranks on the basis of merit is at least possible under Immortan Joe.
Now, compare that to what we see in the "Green Place".
Immortan Joe and his cronies have taken a limited set of resources- apparently water, gas, and bullets- and turned them into something resembling a functioning, if dysfunctional, society.
The women of the Green Place have watched while a functional place has turned into one more barren waste.
Now, is that their fault? No, of course not. But their response to it is. They haven't scouted afield to find a more suitable place to exist (or they might have had a plausible response to Furiosa's "we go in one direction until we run out of gas" plan.) If they've sought solutions to the diminishment of the Green Place, they never succeeded in finding them.
And if what we see of them is any indication, they've only survived as long as they have through banditry.
(No, seriously... Luring people with a nude woman yelling for help in the middle of the desert? That's the most self-initiated thing we see them do.)
And I can't help but note that the women of the Green Place have no equivalent male counterpart to Furiosa. Not until Max, at least, and there's every indication that without Furiosa's intervention, they would have happily shot him.
But whatshername has those seeds!... Well, bully for her, but as I said, Joe's enclave has actual plants and something resembling hydroponics, so... Without outside intervention, there's little to suggest those seeds would have ever amounted to anything as the matriarchs of the Green Place grew old and died.
Whereas, barring outside intervention, there's little to suggest Immortan Joe's enclave might not have gone on chugging in their fiery guitar warlordy ways for quite some time.
But what of where we leave things? Are Furiosa and the GP matriarchs going to remain in charge with freely available water? Are they going to start rationing or controlling it to control the masses, just like IJ? Are we to believe that the water IJ has been so strictly controlling is an unlimited aquifer? And the farms- should we take it on faith that their fertility can expand to cover everyone "freed" by IJ's downfall?
What about the War Boys? A bunch of them died chasing Furiosa and co. around the dessert, sure, but how are they going to pacify the rest? What kind of life are all those younger boys who were growing into savage warriors seeking Valhalla going to find in the new order?
What's to say that the city-state ruled by IJ and his cronies, now under Furiosa and co., isn't going to become as barren and useless as the Green Place under its new management?
"Who killed the world?" Well, if you want to say warlords, sure, I guess there's that case to be made. But is replacing male warlords with female bandits such an obvious improvement that we should take it as a happy ending without a second glance?