The vehicles in Mad Max: Fury Road are a lot of things–they’re locations and props, but they’re most definitely also characters. And they’re sort of machine extensions of the human characters who drive them.
So the War Rig is both a character and an extension of Furiosa. The War Rig is canonically gendered female. She’s hard and spiky and lethal, bristling with weapons, and capable of out-fighting and out-driving anyone around her, just like Furiosa.
And, since the vehicles are characters, they participate in the battles and get their own hero moments, just like the human characters. The War Rig has a bunch, but I just want to talk about my favorite one here.
It’s that moment in the big final battle when Everything Is Fucked. Furiosa is stabbed and Keeper is dying and Toast is captured and Max is slipping out of her grip and about to get crushed by Slit and the war parties are closing in because Max blew the engine spitting gasoline into it even though Furiosa said not to overdo it with that shit and you can see Furiosa thinking, fuck, this is it, we’re all about to get captured or die.
And then Nux fixes the engine and we hear the sound cue of the engine revving up and hear a beep from…whatever the hell this thing is:
…and we see the RPM dial going back up…
…and we see Furiosa reacting to it…
…and the next time we see her face it looks like this:
Because if the War Rig still has some fight left in her, then Furiosa does too.
And even though we know, intellectually, that it was Nux who fixed the engine, it’s hard not to think “War Rig to the rescue!” with the same thrill that we do when Valkyrie pops up on a bike with a crack shot or Max takes a running leap to body-slam a polecat.
It’s even clearer in a clip when you can hear the soundtrack–listen to how the music changes at 0:30 and then again around 1:00.