I’ve written and reblogged a lot of stuff about Fury Road’s style of action, the way it lets its female characters be bloody, dirty and angry, and the way it takes violenceseriously.
This is obviously a stylistic choice, but it’s only possible because the movie is rated R (no children under 17 without an adult) in the American rating system.
The MPAA rating system is ludicrous and arbitrary in many ways; getting into all that is beyond the scope of this post. (For a good expose, check out the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.)
The vast majority of blockbuster action movies Hollywood releases today are rated PG-13. Getting into the history of why that’s the case is also beyond the scope of this post, because it has to do with the rise of the blockbuster model of cinema and how the film industry has changed over the past 30 years. (This article is a good primer, though.) The TL;DR is that studios want teenagers (implicitly, teenage boys) to be able to go see big-budget action movies with or without their parents, because $$$. So they must be rated PG-13.
This puts constraints on what you can show in terms of violence, but not necessarily the ones you might expect.
Return of the King, in which armies slaughter each other on the plains of Pelennor Fields by the thousands? PG-13.
Every movie in the Jurassic Park franchise, in which dinosaurs repeatedly eat people? PG-13.
The first cut of The Avengers was given an R rating–not for any of the scenes where midtown Manhattan gets smashed to rubble in a battle between superheroes and aliens, but for the scene where Loki stabs Coulson. (Seeing the blade come out of Coulson’s torso was apparently the dividing line between PG-13 and R, which seems pretty arbitrary since the PG-13 Lord of the Rings franchise has plenty of impalements. The scene was re-cut to get a PG-13 rating.)
While each of the examples above is slightly different in terms of what it does and doesn’t show in terms of violence, there’s a particular style of bloodless mass destruction that’s become a mainstay of a lot of PG-13 action, particularly many superhero movies. You can smash whole cities in battles in which thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people die, but if you don’t show any blood or bodies? PG-13.
While Fury Road is actually quite restrained compared to how gory it could be, given everything that happens in the course of the movie, it has violence that mostly actually looks real. People bleed when they get hurt or killed; injuries that should be life-threatening actually are; and there are a few moments that are, I would say, appropriately gross. The movie sometimes bends the rules (Max really should have some blood on his forehead from the bolt he almost gets impaled with) but for the most part, the violence looks like it’s actually violent. It has consequences.
It’s a matter of personal taste, but I much prefer this kind of violence. But while there are R-rated action franchises (The Matrix) and R-rated recent installments of older franchises (Prometheus; the latest Die Hard), R-rated action movies–ie., action movies made explicitly for adults–are considered somewhat of a financial risk in Hollywood. Which is too bad, because Fury Road made me want more of them.
