Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – Review
First off, let me say how much I have enjoyed the entirety of the Mad Max franchise (yes, even Beyond Thunderdome), and am a big fan of Anya Taylor-Joy, as well.
Cool?
Then let’s begin, shall we?
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below, then listen as he and Ryan talk about the film in more detail. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
148 Minutes, Rated R
Written by George Miller and Nick Lathouris
Directed by George Miller
Synopsis:
As the world fell, young Furiosa is snatched from the Green Place of Many Mothers and falls into the hands of a great Biker Horde led by the Warlord Dementus. Sweeping through the Wasteland, they come across the Citadel presided over by The Immortan Joe. While the two Tyrants war for dominance, Furiosa must survive many trials as she puts together the means to find her way home.
Second off, I was hesitant going into Furiosa, because I felt like it was a bit soon to be doing a prequel for a character who was only introduced… in 2015?
Fury Road came out 9 years ago? That is absolutely insane.
Okay, so maybe enough calendar time has passed for this.
What else, then, to say about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga?
Well… honestly, I’m not sure. I mean, I can tell you that, overall, I enjoyed the film.
But that enjoyment comes with some caveats.
First, the thing that made the previous Max Max films so fantastic was that so much of them (all of them in the older films, in fact) was practical. Sure, George Miller used CGI to enhance Fury Road in terms of the landscape over which our (still practical) vehicles were racing and destroying one another.
Heck, even the pole-cats were practical, which is just about as insane as it looked when we saw them in the theater the first time!
With Furiosa, though, it’s clear that much more of the similar-to-Fury-Road budget was spent on CGI. Or not spent on CGI, depending on how you feel about the results.
The Wasteland of old felt real. It had a tactile look to it which helped lend credibility to all of the insane car stuff. You knew you were watching real cars and real people doing real things.
In Furiosa, the impact of CGI is all too clear. From shifting perspectives to obvious backdrops to CGI motorcycle jumps, Furiosa lacks that fundamental bit of DNA that so endeared the franchise to movie fans for decades.
Also a bit unusual for Furiosa, in relation to other films, is the introduction of a love interest. Sure, some folks will try to play off the relationship between Furiosa and Praeorian Jack as a mentor-mentee, father-daughter kind of thing… but they’re reaching. While never explicitly explore, it is heavily implied.
Out of place here.
And let’s not mention that Jack is a cleaner, more social version of Max, down to his similar, though not black, costume. This leads me to the thought that this similarity is part of the reason she doesn’t kill Max in Fury Road once they get past the initial, kill-or-be-killed exchanges.
And there’s a blink and you’ll miss it implied cameo in the last third of the film that could easily feel unnecessary and/or shoehorned in.
You’ll see it.
Now, the performances in Furiosa are all pretty good. My chief complaint is Chris Hemsworth’s Dr. Dementus. Going as far back as the original film, the over-the-top characters never seemed remotely humorous; they all seemed terrifyingly unhinged. Dementus’ behavior is similarly unhinged, but damned if I didn’t feel al little bit of a Taika Waititi-inspired Thor undertone to it, the comedic bits played a bit too much for laughs rather than the abject terror of earlier films.
Again, not a deal-breaker, just something I noticed and couldn’t unnotice.
On the plus side, in Furiosa, George Miller gives us a greater visual tour of the locations mentioned in Fury Road; Bullet Town and Gas Town are now actual places instead of names on someone’s lips. We see more of the inner workings of Immortan Joe’s Citadel. We see the place of abundance from Furiosa’s youth in its full spendor. This universe has always been intriguing, so it’s nice to see it get physically built out instead of just implying these places exist.
As always, George Miller makes sure that buying a ticket to a Mad Max film is backed with an adrenaline shot to the chest, with almost more action than you can handle.
Almost.
This time, though, it feels like he has sacrificed a bit of that magic. The story of Furiosa is not without its charms, don’t get me wrong, but it generally took too long to get there, with Taylor-Joy’s adult Furiosa not showing up until what feels like at least an hour into the run time (time dilation not to scale). Young Furiosa, though, played by Alyla Browne (recently seen in the Aussie horror Sting), carries herself nicely in the see of post-apocalyptic, mutant testosterone, first from Dementus, then Immortan Joe and his sons, Scrotus and Rictus Erectus.
Overall, you probably won’t be disappointed with Furiosa; I wasn’t, but I wasn’t as jazzed about it as I might have been, or hoped to be.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga hits theaters this Friday, May 24 and stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne, George Shevtsov, Lachy Hulme, Angus Simpson, Nathan Jones, Josh Helman, and David Collins.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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