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The Dag

The Citadel

Immortan Joe speaks from a balcony on his rock fortress

The Citadel is the stronghold of Immortan Joe. It appears in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Characteristics

The Citadel is a cluster of three rock towers that sit above an aquifer of relatively fresh water. By channeling the water through the rock, the people of the Citadel have been able to irrigate a small area of the Wasteland.

It is the former stronghold of the paramilitary pseudo-religious cult led by the former pre-apocalypse war hero and decorated military veteran of the Australian Army, Colonel Joseph "Immortan Joe" Moore. later on a more civilized and sophisticated urban society was built after Immortan Joes demise, becoming a town and a home for refugees from across the deserts and a bastion of hope and learning within the Wasteland.

Sections

The aquifer was rebuilt with scrap found in the Wasteland. Each tower has its specific purpose:

  • Tower #1: Immortan Joe's headquarters. Inside this tower there are hydroponic gardens, the milking room, water dispersion control and at the very top - the Bio-dome where the Five Wives are kept. Arguably the most luxurious part of the complex, extravagant beyond the dream of the average wasteland-dweller, with a direct tap into fresh water, hydroponics gardens full of fruit and vegetables, breast milk, and some of the remaining bits of knowledge of pre-war society stored in a library of pre-war books, a collection of musical instruments and sheet music, and an assortment of other educational objects stockpiled inside the Bio-dome vault. This pedagogical repository of pre-war lore and artifacts is overseen by a living tutor, the prototypical History Woman Miss Giddy and later an entire group of History Men, to assist in the educational process of the Five Wives and later on all of the children of the Citadel.
  • Tower #2: Inhabited by what little of middle classes there is left. Various people with valuable skills live there which includes individuals with variety of skills, including mechanics, medics, etc. Inside this tower there is a blood bank where captives of the Wasteland are kept as blood bags for War Boys. There is a garden up top, the tower functions as a buffer between Immortan Joe's headquarters and the lowest class of people living in the third tower.
  • Tower #3: The working class of The Citadel lives there. Picked up from The Wretched and promised a better life they ended up being used as slave labour, most notably as Mill Rats used to power the elevator platform. Their lifespan is short as they are not well taken care of, at least as much as the rest of the inhabitants of The Citadel.[1]

Other Areas

Inside the mountain there are many artificial tunnels, probably created by the society of people who lived in the Citadel before the arrival of the ex-military raider gang headed by the Army colonel turned cult leader Immortan Joe.

The lighting of the Citadel is not much different from the lighting of medieval castles: in the tunnel walls the outside can be viewed through holes through which sunlight trickles in; in some places the rooms are illuminated by fuel burning lanterns. Immortan Joe's Harem room, located almost on the very top of the main mountain, is well lit through the dome-shaped glass roof. In the room one can also see clearly through the presence of kerosene lamps, as well as a table electric lamp. The milking room has full-fledged electric lighting with many light bulbs.

Little is known about the interior of the Citadel, the fourth film presents only a small part of it.

  • Platform: The path to the Citadel platform lies only through a platform that rises thanks to the work of several dozen, and maybe hundreds of slaves or hired workers twisting huge gears. The size of the platform allows the War Boys to lower loads weighing several tens of tons from the rocks. This makes the Citadel an impregnable fortress, because there is no other way to it.
  • Garages: In the mountain, located opposite the center, there is a room with garages, in one of them mechanics repaired the damaged "Pursuer" muscle car formerly belonging to Max. In the center mountain there is a garage spacious enough for Furiosa's truck, "The War Rig" .
  • Water supply: In the center mountain there are pumping units that provide the Citadel with clean water from great depths. The distribution system is represented by a pipe complex, three streams go towards the three mountains of the Citadel. Many pipes are laid on the walls of tunnels and connected into a single system. In the room in front of Joe's harem there is one of the greenhouses where vegetables are planted straight in large pipes, where the upper part of the wall is cut off. The pipes themselves are suspended from the ceiling on chains and form long rows above each other. Irrigation seems to be drip and automatic, sprays water directly above the plants. Green plants grow not only indoors, but also on the slopes of the mountains, where no one takes care of them. Plants and even trees also grow on the tops of the mountains.
  • Milking Room: In this room, breast milk is pumped out of the breasts of fat women. All women sit on special chairs placed by the walls. Here, unlike other places, light bulbs are used for lighting.
  • Blood Transfusion Area: It is not known whether all Citadel medical procedures amount to only crude blood transfusion to victims, but no other medical services are provided at the local blood transfusion point. Slaves are kept in special cages suspended from the ceiling. In the event that a Half-life Warrior loses a large amount of blood in battle, the wounded person who has arrives will be connected to a donor slave by means of catheters.

Organisation

Pre-Citadel

Originally the aquifer was inhabited by a group of heavily armed men protecting the water resources. After Colonel Joe Moore's takeover the aquifer was rebuilt into The Citadel.[2]

Immortan Joe's society

Only privileged people live in the Citadel, among whom are the Half-life Warriors, or War Boys - the elite troops of the Immortal Joe, obsessed with heroic death in battle. Inside, warriors live an ordinary life, repairing cars, building, as well as keeping prisoners as blood donors for the coming battles. The wives of the Immortal Joe live in a separate room with a dome-shaped roof. Breast milk is pumped out of specially fattened women to the Citadel for drinking.

Ordinary poor people were not allowed to enter the Citadel, they lived at the foot of the rocks and worked for the Citadel for the water that Joe shakes from the bowels of the earth. This water was also known as Aqua Cola. From time to time, Immortal Joe went to a rocky balcony depicting a skull on the facade. From it, the head of the Citadel, with the help of levers, demonstratively supplied water pouring out of giant pipes directly to the foot of the rock. At such moments, all the poor people approached the flow of water and drew water with all possible containers.

The settlement traded with the Gas Town in the south and the Bullet Farm. In exchange for fuel, and cartridges and lead, respectively, the Citadel supplied both settlements with clean water, breast milk and food, delivering them by caravan on a water carrier.

In the Citadel, hydroponics grows plants, which also grow in many on the top of the rocks. At the end of the film Mad Max: Fury Road, a large number of seeds of various trees are delivered to the Citadel, which were later planted and added to the gardens.

Before his overthrow, Joe maintained his control through a loyal corps of War Boys, whom were picked from The Wretched as War Pups and indoctrinated from childhood to believe that Immortan Joe is a god and following his orders would grant them eternal afterlife. The War Boys defended the Citadel, escorted trade caravans, and scavenged the countryside for useful scrap and slaves. War Boys were indoctrinated into the Cult of V8 and they became mechanics first. After surviving long enough they may have been granted their own vehicle and eventually became Imperators (commanders).

The Citadel traded its water with surrounding outposts, including Gas Town, which provided the petrol it needs to power its vehicles; other machines are powered by sheer muscle.

Deep within the Citadel is where Joe kept his "breeders" whom he used to try to make a viable heir.

At the very bottom of the hierarchy are The Wretched - a large group of malnourished, sick and homeless people who traveled across the Wasteland to The Citadel in hope of a better life. Immortan Joe, however only sparingly offered them water and used it as means of control. The Wretched are not indoctrinated into the Cult of V8 but they seem to perceive Immortan Joe as a leader. Unbeknownst to them - Immortan Joe hid his face under a mask and his failing body under protective armor. He could not be clearly visible with naked eye from the very bottom of the towers either, which helped to mask his true appearance. The moment Immortan Joe's dead body was revealed, The Wretched ripped it apart and the illusion of his immortality and his cult vanished immediately.

Post-Immortan Joe Town

Later on, the Citadel was claimed by Furiosa and The Five Wives and is being operated with the help of Corpus Collosus. With their aid, a more egalitarian society is built around a small town of brick and mortar and rock at the base of the triumvirate of rock towers comprising the main Citadel, constructed by the former Wretched of Joe's Empire. Over time, the small town built by the former Wretched developed into a relatively large city and its population seems to be thriving. Further fueling hopes for the future, The History Men, founded by their precursor, Miss Giddy, presumably a former teacher and scholar from before the apocalypse and collapse of the old world, operate from The Citadel, where they began teaching children about history and other preserved and reclaimed academic knowledge, Through the History Men and their allies, the Citadel, following Immortan Joe's fall, acts as a bastion of hope and learning within the Wasteland. It is possible that by issuing out their knowledge, they helped The Wretched to build the Town at the foot of The Citadel. the History Men were supported by relatively large pre-existing repository of pre-war lore and artifacts that Joe had stockpiled in the hermetically sealed bio-dome to help realize his increasingly corrupt vision of rebuilding pre-war civilization in his own image and restoring order to the Wasteland. To what extent the History Men and their allies did rebuild modern civilization after Joe's demise, and how successful the History Men were, is unknown.

Behind the scenes

Design inspirations

George Miller and Collin Gibson independently started to collect materials for what would eventually become the first concept of The Citadel. Upon Gibson's first visit to Africa he looked at a lot of places that were carved into mountains, caves used for shelter and for storing food during primitive and violent times of raping and pillaging. This resonated with the primitive nature of the Wasteland.

Another aspect was the feudal construction of society which was quite literally depicted in the form vertical hierarchy. The Wretched lived at the very feet of The Citadel, whereas Immortan Joe lived at the very top. In between lived his armies, Milk Mothers, mechanics, and so on.

The essential idea of The Citadel was based on height and Gibson's idea of the Citadel was amplified by Miller until it became a monumental structure made of three interconnected towers.[3]

Visual effects

The Citadel location was produced via a combination of principal photography in Namibia, shooting in Sydney and visual effects work from Iloura informed by actual rock cliffs photographed in Australia and re-worked using photogrammetry.

Visual effects supervisor - Andrew Jackson considered reference locations in Jordan, including the famous Wadi Rum mountains, but ultimately found suitable cliffs in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

“I took a helicopter and we flew backwards and forwards with a high res stills camera. It has real lighting but because it was shot in overcast conditions you can add more key light. We had the chopper standing by for 10 days waiting for the right conditions. We didn’t have one cloudy day for a week and a half, but the day we went was just perfect.”

- Andrew Jackson

The use of photogrammetry techniques for the Citadel location, and for others in the film, was actually inspired by Jackson’s initial use of an on-set aerial photography drone from Sensefly that he had intended to employ just for ground reference photos. “It was a little one meter wingspan plane with a compact camera,” explains Jackson. “It completely flew itself. You just map out the area on the ground, you throw it into the air and it flies up and flies in a grid taking photos every two meters and then comes back and lands where it was launched. The software they give you with the plane was Photoscan.”

At one point Joe addresses his citizens from a rock-platform balcony, a location where he also opens the water pipes using ship pump actuators. “The balcony went through a huge number of iterations,” says Tom Wood, visual effects supervisor. “There was a practical set piece that was shot in one of the stages at Fox Studios in Sydney, which was completely replaced. The only thing that’s real are the four guys and the pump actuators. For below him they had shot about 150 extras and we extended those to 30,000 with crowd sims. Those rocks didn’t exist so we were controlling light across the crowd, which was really tricky.”

The water flow from the pipes made use of a Houdini simulation for wide shots, with some practical water on set. “They had practical rain machines on set in front of their very small piece of rock face,” describes Wood. “That sprayed out more than a mist - it was a rain. There was also some pouring water where it splashes on some rocks. Everything above that was VFX.”[4]

Trivia

  • According to Fury Road co-writer Brendan McCarthy, the theme of turning humans into a commodity was to be reflected in the design of the gardens on top of The Citadel. Originally the plants would be growing from dead bodies split open, acting as grow bags. Different types of plants ranging from flowers to wheat would have been growing from carcasses. Dead bodies would have been recycled and used as fertiliser, Max's cut off hair was going to be recycled as well.[5]

Gallery

References

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