The SolarPunk genre/movement is about offering something different to the usual fare of dystopian visions:
defying dystopian doomerism – Sidmouth Solarpunk
So, it might appear a little strange to have the latest Mad Max film showcasing the promise that is SolarPunk.
Here’s the start of a review from Oli Mould writing in The Conversation:
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – blink and you’ll miss a solarpunk alternative to series’ usual dystopia
Since the first trilogy of films in the 1980s, the Mad Max saga has been a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction, with the harsh desert of the Australian outback the perfect stage for an Earth ravaged by ecocide. The marauding gangs of feral warlords that the films are famous for, with their dieselpunk aesthetic (a combination of petrol-based machinery and a retro-futurist sensibility), conjure the kind of kill-or-be-killed society that English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once imagined of humanity’s distant past. It’s refreshing then that the newest instalment in the series, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, gives a fleeting glimpse of the alternative: utopian societies that could exist alongside – or perhaps, instead of – the nasty, brutish and short life of a post-collapse world…
The titular Furiosa is a young girl at the start of the film who grows into the battle-hardened feminist icon (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) from director George Miller’s Fury Road, released in 2015. Furiosa is seen at the outset of the new film in her first home, “The Green Place”. We know from Fury Road that this home is eventually spoiled, but at the beginning of Furiosa, we get a hint of what sort of society it was: lush vegetation, bountiful fruit, careful women woodworkers and renewable energy supplied by wind turbines and solar panels. It appears in one sweeping shot, but it is enough to evoke utopian fantasises at odds with the rest of the film’s setting. If the hyper-masculine dieselpunk of Mad Max is how we’re used to imagining the world after some civilisation-ending catastrophe, The Green Place of Many Mothers is a different vision of the future entirely – one that has theorists and advocates in the real world…
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – blink and you’ll miss a solarpunk alternative to series’ usual dystopia
With more from the Fandom pages:
Young Furiosa in the Green Place, clutching a peach.
The Green Place | The Mad Max Wiki | Fandom
copyright WARNER BROS:
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – Wikipedia
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