“We are not things” is the defiant reproach to a horrific totalitarian regime that reduces people to commodities in George Miller’s astonishing, visionary “Mad Max: Fury Road.” The film depicts human bodies branded and subjected to the utilitarian, ruthlessly efficient production methods of industrial farming, with blood and mother’s milk harvested and women reduced to breeding stock.

In another movie, a line like “We are not things” could be a platitude, but in the context of vividly imagined atrocities with unnerving echoes of recent headlines, this simple affirmation is fraught with topical power that has only grown in the months since the film’s theatrical debut.

Most obviously, the sexual enslavement of women by the monstrous leader of the cultish horde of the Citadel resonates with the sex slavery practices of the Islamic State newly highlighted in yesterday’s New York Times story by Rukmini Callimachi.

Read the article “Mad Max: Fury Road: Fighting Back from the Edge of Insanity” on cruxnow.com.