Your inner D&D nerd is showing though . I caught the Dark Sun reference right away. Athas indeed.

Also you are slightly wrong about Conan. He proved to be an excellent dutiful King in his time at least in the Leiber continuation though how much of that was Howard I do not know and we weren’t graced with many such stories, I suspect his Sons and maybe Grandsons were as well. After that though they were probably only marginally better than the corrupt previous kings.

The lesson of King Conan always seemed to be a stronger stock with honor makes a better ruler than a corrupt king.

Speaking from friends descriptions and what I’ve read the unintended lesson of this film from what I can tell was the opposite of feminism. never trust a woman.

Had Joe kept Furiosa well away he could have gone on for quite some time and maybe even achieved his goals, sending war-boys out to find water or other resources.

But he trusted her, she betrayed him and he was ruined

Um, the fact that it’s basically Max + a bunch of benevolent Earth-mother women versus a gang of brutal, violent, bleach-white skinhead men? The fact that its caricature of post-apocalyptic sex slavery is a thinly-veiled dig at traditional marriage (ironic that a few months ago the top grossing movie was a female fantasy about being a sex slave, and that movie was actually made for women)? The fact that Furiosa is the biggest cliche of a tough-as-nails steel-nerved butt-kicking leader-of-men Strong Independent Womyn this side of a Mila Jovovich movie? I admit it’s easy to ignore all that stuff given everything else happening onscreen, but don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. The creators of the movie openly call it feminist, are you going to argue with them?

I do agree that within the story’s morality it’s debatable whether Joe is really a villain. Yes he keeps women as slaves, he also gives them the safest, most luxurious and comfortable life of maybe anyone in the entire world. Furiosa’s intervention would’ve led to all of them dying if Joe hadn’t gone after her. And as you point out, it’s far from clear whether they’re any better off at the end of the movie than if they’d just stayed put from the start.

The real problem with the movie is that there’s too much action and not enough reason to care about it. By the 100th minute of uninterrupted car chase it starts to ring hollow and feel like a FX highlight reel (it reminded me of the extended Rube Goldberg chase scenes from the Hobbit movies in its gratuitousness). It’s a shame, I usually like Tom Hardy but they gave him zilch to work with here, it’s the most forgettable role I’ve ever seen him in and light-years beneath Mel’s charisma.