@sillyputty that might've been what you saw, but i saw a dude giving limited water to people in a world that had limited water, and gathering milk and cultivating plants (nothing suggests he kept it to himself), meanwhile he's maintained a population centre of people who are actually alive, and he's raised some warriors in a land that's genuinely pretty violent.

the women are living in luxury and we have no idea how he actually treats them. they're behind a vaulted door but i have no idea if they can open it from inside, if they have any personal freedom, etc. all we're told is they ran away because they didn't want their kids to be raised as soldiers. they never even complained about Joe himself.

this is why i suggested exploring a little more about why he's this hated leader, because we don't see enough of why. he's just this dude. he does stuff. he has things. we don't know what he does with them. we don't know if he's evil about it, who he's helping (himself? others?), etc. he's sheltering people and everyone is in a life-threatening survival situation.

heck, an effective screen writer/director probably convey all of that inside of 5 minutes.

so to be very clear on this matter: i got no impression he was evil, saw nothing to suggest he was a bad dude, or really particularly worse than anyone else, and was completely surprised at the end when people were rejoicing that he had died

the women he kept were the only thing but like i said we have no idea how they were handled. obviously they hated their chastity belts, that's about it. but we kept them in good living conditions (or so we might imagine, because we saw their living quarters and they looked pretty good compared to everything else), and theoretically them being beautiful women meant facing sexual violence was a real possibility for them, so really i have no idea whether what he did with them was good or bad.

(because i'm not shown or told much of anything)

there were two side bosses who died, but they didn't really do much to earn it. one was a passionate warrior like everyone else. the other dude was an accountant who was just set up to gross the audience out in various ways; the justification for focusing on his death is he was disfigured and slightly repulsive. hooraaaaayyy that isn't a good reason to kill anyone

so, I'll address the film in terms of what it was trying to be, as BESW is suggesting should be the case (and I think I agree):

set up your villains as villains and do it properly

if it's supposed to be worthy of special notice when someone dies, have more reason for that other than "he's a diseased repulsive accountant." make him actually commit villainy, make there be some actual justice to his death.

if people are supposed to be hailed as a hero for overthrowing the emperor, spend more than a minute exploring that emperor or at least make sure that minute shows us why this guy needs to be overthrown.

"he produces milk and has plants!" isn't a reason. "he has women kept in unknown conditions, which we never see and which they never even tell us about!" isn't a reason. "he doesn't provide much water!" isn't a reason when they have very little water anyway, and he's vocally suggesting they shouldn't get too dependent on it - and i don't know what water he supplies, he might do plenty, we're never told there's nothing else he does other than turn on the pipes.

"he keeps all of the milk and plants to himself and lets the people live with nothing and doesn't even supply them with water!" would be a reason, but considering those people are alive, and they have not died from hunger or dehydration, proves they're actually obtaining food and water somehow. enough to sustain a very large population! immorten joe's clearly doing something right, and that something is probably giving people some of the food and water he has access to.

I don't think anyone is saying that Immortan Joe was either incompetent or needlessly cruel ruler, or that he wasn't doing good things (like giving people some of the food and water he has access to). But to me it at the very least seemed clear that he was a dictatorial leader who retains his power both by controlling access to a vital resource and by presenting himself as a messianic savior and the head of a cult of personality.

that the quasi-religious structure of his rule extends down to the lower ranks of his organisation; the warboys both revere him and have internalised the whole next-life suicide bomber thing (which I think it is reasonable to infer is a doctrine he chose to instill in them)

oh, certainly. certainly the cult is... uh... weird. possibly pretty useful in the wastelands for creating unity and purpose and solving various problems. create a warrior culture that embraces death, and overpopulation issues get solved.

(oh, I'm not saying the cult isn't effective, or even a good decision on his part/from his perspective)

on the other hand, precious resources need someone competent to manage them. the water was from an aquifer, those are limited. hydroponics systems aren't things just everyone understands.

His rule is, if not corrupt, at the very least highly stratified - he keeps himself and his inner circle in comparative luxury, sees other people as his property. But I don't think he's intended to be seen as a laughing robber baron; I imagine that Furiosa will end up ruling in a fairly similar manner to the way he did.

exactly!

it was a necessary power structure. and the person in power living decently is like... a normal and accepted trait, not a trait of villainy. (everything in the wasteland is crap, i don't know if he lived in luxury.)

But he's not a villain because he was a bad thing for the people of the Citadel/Gastown/etc, he's a villain because, despite the fact that he's quite a good ruler, he's a proud, brutal, and vengeful man who considers people his property, which brings us into conflict with the main characters.

If he were a bad ruler running the Citadel into the ground, Furiosa's intention might have been to overthrow him rather than just to escape. Instead, it seems as if she was entirely loyal to his regime; it was a personal appeal to her character on an individual level ("she didn't steal them, they begged her to leave") that caused her to kidnap/rescue Joe's wives.

sure, and that's awesome for the purposes of the chase and stuff. totally everything we needed for that.

still left me confused in the epilogue.

like, they chose to go there in the epilogue, do the whole "hooray, the emperor's been overthrown!" thing. they didn't have to. but they did, and didn't have sufficient story backing for why that'd happen.

It did seem somewhat too-easy how quickly the Citadel was cool with the New Furiosa Regime. But not beyond the realm of possibility? I mean, Immortan Joe set himself up as a deity, ruling through almost divine right, and Max&Co revealed he was dead - that they had killed him - in a very dramatic way. It was a gesture of "hey, look, we're stronger than the guy you thought was your god!"

i kinda expected the crowd to swarm and attack them XD

Furiosa was also very well liked and highly respected; many of her men seemed to have personal loyalty to her, she was high-ranking and well-known, Joe mentions her by name in his bombastic speech about sending out a supply run, she's implied to be a favorite, etc. And we know the crowd of ugly mutant people were dissatisfied with Joe's rule to some degree - we saw them surging forward and trying to force themselves up onto the platform at the beginning, even fighting the platform mooks.

yeah totally

not sure why they did that really

i thought from all the fanaticism they wanted to be on the raid or they wanted to be on the elevator when it came back up or something?

then in the epilogue they're let up and that's cool

And there's a complete lack of any significant power figure who opposes Furiosa's implied claim to power; the random dwarf child-of-Joe who could've theoretically told the warboys to kill her and saved the whole situation (...maybe gotten himself some kind of giant to beat people up for him) just sits there not knowing what to do.

furiosa was definitely the natural second choice

@doppelgreener Yea, like I say, I can see where you're coming from. Your criticisms are entirely valid. To me, though, I have to agree with acomputingpun. He's not evil because of the brutal way he runs his empire (it is, arguably, necessary). He is brutal because he treats people as property. Wives, milk-mothers, warboys, all of them property. And he sets himself up as a god to them. That is a bad man.

And we COULD have had more exploration of that. But too many movies today, in my opinion, go too far, with too much depth. It gets to the point where it is insulting to the audience's intelligence. "You can't figure out the message/plot of this movie, so here is a convenient character to spell it out for you played by Michael Cane." Maybe Fury Road went too far in the other direction. But I just found it so refreshing I didn't care. =)