‘So shiny, so chrome’: images and ideology of humans, machines, and the Earth in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road

Mad Max: Fury Road has been critiqued for its feminist, masculine, biblical, and environmental themes, but these critiques fail to engage with the connection between humans, machines, and the Earth in Fury Road. Nuclear technology may have produced the apocalyptic wasteland in which the film is set, but machines and industrial technology remain coupled to humanity to the point of symbiosis. Through the images of Fury Road, director George Miller reveals an ideology of ecomobility that demands an assemblage of human and machine. To exist in the wild and desolate spaces of the Earth is to become one with machines. Further, despite the distraction of subjective violence, the film is a critique of the ideological fantasy of modernity’s regime of automobility and its connection to capitalism