Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga review

    Furiosa: A Mad Max Story is the prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the best movies of the 21st century as well as arguably the best of the Mad Max franchise. The movie was originally supposed to be filmed back to back with Fury Road, starring Charlize Theron, but events resulted in it being filmed a decade later with a new actress. The recasting and the long wait time may have contributed to its failure at the box office. There is also the question of how much of a niche property a Mad Max movie is without Mad Max.

    The premise is that Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a young woman living in a desert oasis when she’s kidnapped by raiders and brought before wasteland warlord, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Dementus is a bizarre and flamboyant character, leading his biker gang as much on whim as anyone coherent strategy. Dementus adopts Furiosa, against her will, and kills her mother before her eyes. Thus begins Furiosa’s decade-long quest for revenge against the individual that involves rival warlord, Immortan Joe, and his army of War Boys. Furiosa also befriends a rig driver named Praetorian Jack, who may be something more.

    My opinion on the film? Well, it’s good but not great. A prequel is something that always has an uphill battle to win over viewers because a large amount of the tension is removed. We know Furiosa is going to live and eventually rebel against Immortan Joe. Thus it is on the movie to make side characters whose fates we care about or make the events compelling enough that we don’t care about knowing what is going to happen to them. Furiosa, unfortunately, doesn’t quite do either.

    Anya Taylor-Joy is likable enough as Furiosa but it is hard to believe she is the hardened protagonist of Fury Road. She is mostly silent throughout the film and while this is the case for Mad Max himself in most of the movies, this is a far more talky film than most of them. Some more scenes where we find out what she thinks of her Devil’s alliance with Immortan Joe and her relationship with Praetorian Jack would have been welcome. Indeed, the complete lack of romance scenes despite one being central to her relationship to Joe’s regime is unfortunate.

    As a result of Furiosa’s silence, Chris Hemsworth steals the movie for better and worse. The movie makes the bizarre choice to give him a fake nose and teeth, perhaps to distract from his natural good looks, as well as have him speak in an especially nasal voice that is just confusing. Dementus is perhaps the most interesting character in the movie, though, with a surprising amount of nuance. He does terrible, unforgivable, things in the movie but you understand his perspective. Indeed, part of the movie’s problem is Dementus is charismatic enough and Immortan Joe is so one-dimensionally evil that you root for the former against the latter. This despite Furiosa being on Joe’s side(ish).

    Really, the movie feels like a tamer and toned down version of Fury Road. Fury Road was in your face about its feminist message, contrasted with two hours of relentless action that, nevertheless, kept its message clear. Furiosa, at its worst, feels like the PG-13 Hunger Games version of the post-apocalypse. Furiosa is sold to Joe’s harem and it pretty much skips over that part (not that I wanted to see the trauma involved) despite the fact that seems like it is a pretty important part of her story. We also have only a couple of other women in the movie, none of whom really interact with Furiosa. She is, to quote a lot of bad fiction, “not like other girls.”

    Spectacle-wise, the movie also falls short. It’s a very pretty film, don’t get me wrong. Unfortunately, CGI is heavily relied on in this film to the point that it feels less gritty and grounded by a significant degree. Fury Road had some CGI, but it’s a lot more noticeable here. The characters pull off cartoonish stunts that make it feel like an anime at times. I think it says a lot about my opinion of the movie that some of my favorite parts of the film were the appearance of Mad Max video game characters like Scrotus and Chumbucket, canonizing them.

    It’s not a bad film, but if you want to know a single moment that defines it for me, it’s when Furiosa has been masquerading as a boy for years in the pits of Immortan Joe’s mechanics shop. The wind picks up at one point and reveals her beautiful flowing hair, revealing her to be a girl to Praetorian Jack, which says the movie didn’t think that Furiosa would shave her head to protect her identity. It’s the kind of thing that takes you out of the film.

Available here