I WAS going to write this week about the ACT’s electoral redistribution. Then I went to see “Mad Max: Fury Road”, and now I’m going to write about that.

Because a lot of people might be put off by the Mad Max brand and, while it’s going to be seen by a huge number of people, those with more refined tastes might miss it and that would be a shame.

We should firstly acknowledge the sheer, snowball-glistening-in-hell improbability of this movie being made.

Seventy-year-old George Miller with nothing but children’s films under his belt in the last 30 years somehow managed to be funded to the tune of $150 million with complete creative control.

There are one or two directors in the world who get that much money and control and they’re consistent box-office gold with current genre experience.

It’s true the leads are an Englishman and a South African-born woman. Also true, the steering wheels are on the American sides of the cars and the Australian desert was too green when they wanted to film, so it was shot in Namibia.

But aside from the leads, all the other actors certainly sound and look convincing to a post-apocalypse Australia.

It’s a movie with limited dialogue, which will serve it well in international markets. But the visual storytelling is rich and detailed and I’m going to have to watch it again.

The depiction of skinny, pasty, tattooed, paint-huffing lunatics has a certain resonance to anyone who saw Summernats at its worst in Canberra.

Perhaps most intriguingly, a lot of people are seeing it as a feminist text.

Twenty minutes into the movie my unconvinced date leaned over and whispered: “In what way is this a feminist movie?” But around that time those elements started to unfold.

Men’s rights activists (MRAs), possibly spurred on by the movie’s publicists, have been up in arms screaming blue murder at the feminist propaganda hiding in the form of an action blockbuster.

Leading MRA Aaron Clarey even hilariously complained the movie is “a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes”.

Which is doubly hilarious considering it’s a piece of Australian culture being continued by the creator and writer of the original movies.

On the other hand, feminists have been excited to see a movie in which women are competent and capable of agency, which doesn’t honestly seem to be asking very much.

To the average reasonable human being (not an abundant group, I will concede) it doesn’t really seem like that big a deal.

Men and women share driving, men and women look after each other, a woman is in charge of an expedition, low on ammunition a man hands a rifle to a woman who is a better shot.

In my world these things do not seem particularly unusual.

But to the MRAs these are exceptional attacks on their sense of identity as the precious snowflake that is the white, middle-class male; they do the driving, they do the shooting and they should be in charge.

To the women who’ve been putting up with those jerks for far too long it is, apparently, a pleasing surprise, worthy of celebration, to get an action movie in which women are treated as human beings.

But if you tire of gender conflict, there remains a movie where a man in a red gimp suit plays a flaming guitar from the top of a racing truck made of speaker stacks, as a whole desert explodes – for the best part of two hours.