Fast & Furiosa | Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) Movie Review
Furiosa neither surpasses its predecessors, nor needs to 🧐
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I have a confession. I didn’t love Mad Max: Fury Road. I prefer The Road Warrior, as a film, despite the fact that literally everyone in the universe seems to disagree with me on that point, including George Miller, himself.
Doesn’t make me wrong.
Fury Road is a triumph of stunt work and practical effects (it’s not as though post-production special effects work wasn’t used in the making of the film, but due to the remarkable and noteworthy use of practical, in-camera stunts and effects, it does have that reputation).
My first issue with the film, and especially script, is the decision to divide it into five chapters, “The Pole of Inaccessibility,” “Lessons from the Wasteland,” “The Stowaway,” “Homeward” and “Beyond Vengeance.”
Typically (not always), films employ a three-act structure, so the deviation is notable.
Is there any real reason for it?
Not that I could discern.
It shows Furiosa at various stages of her growth and development, but the vignette style serves to separate one from the other so much that they do not feel especially connected or part of a narrative whole. Instead of seeing her growth, we’re left to fill in gaps between the titled chapters, leaving the story feeling plotted and piecemeal.
To be clear, Furiosa involved real stunts, practical effects and vehicles in much the same way as the prior films, and was filmed on location (though in Australia, not Namibia). I think much of the filming process, which Miller has refined through five iterations, is codified and crystallized. I think the apparent differences are more likely due to switching up from Fury Road cinematographer John Seale (who won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for The English Patient, and was also nominated for Witness, Rain Man, Cold Mountain and Mad Max: Fury Road) to Simon Duggan (I, Robot, Underworld: Evolution, Live Free or Die Hard, Knowing, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, etc.)
I think that, alone, probably explains the gap in cinematography, which is profound. Miller reportedly offered Seale the Furiosa job, but couldn’t get him out of retirement (at age 80-something, reasonable), and so had to go to his (presumably) second choice. No shame or malfeasance in any of that, but one certainly feels the difference, especially jarring because the cinematic language of the Mad Max movies is one of the few unifying factors. They could all conceivably take place in different timelines or universes; what joins them together is the aesthetic and feeling they give (though the original Mad Max is an outlier, even then).
The legacy of the Mad Max films is multifaceted, and still evolving. But one sad fact is that the legacy of prior Mad Max films is that they pushed the envelope — stunt-wise — and people got hurt. Broken legs, clavicles, concussions — these were not especially safe movies to make, based on the track record.
To my knowledge, no one was hurt in the stunts for Furiosa, and good. If the cost is that the action onscreen looks a little less convincing, so be it. But again, I think the differences in the way the crashes and chases look on the screen are largely attributable to the change in cinematographers, more than different (perhaps safer) processes in the execution of the stunts.
One feels the difference, one way or another.
If anything, the biggest difference seems to be the number of moving pieces (i.e. human souls inside their human bodies and non-souled vehicles) either present or absent in the crash/stunt sequences up to Furiosa vs. Furiosa.
But though the crashes and violence lack a little of the heft of the earlier films, it’s still filled with nice touches, the veteran flourishes of a lifelong, career filmmaker. The Wasteland’s denizens often speak in grunts or very-limited Australian English, but Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus speaks like someone’s larrikin uncle (from his own mouth, he says he based it on his grandfather’s ‘How ye goin, boys?’ Aussie energy, a bygone and distinctive accent that never stops being amusing to me). His weird prosthetic nose never works for me, but on the whole, the character has some interesting touches or flourishes, and something interesting to say by the time the credits have rolled.
Films have different trajectories and cadences. A recent (dreadful) film I reviewed, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, was dead in the water twenty minutes in. I knew exactly what movie I was getting, and how the rest was going to play out.
Not so, Furiosa. I settled into it more and more as time went on, and it didn’t overstay its welcome, even at 148 minutes. The closest I came to wanting to turn it off was early on, and even though it lacked some of the inspiration and je ne sais quoi I felt in the earlier Mad Max films, and although the clunky, vignette structure never worked for me, I was pretty committed by the final act.
Furiosa’s flourishes and world-building largely work. They’re interesting, worthwhile additions to the Mad Max lore, and exhibit or showcase the kind of ‘from the twisted mind of’ perspective that chyrons and title cards love to tout. Nothing I’ve ever seen or read indicates to me that George Miller has a ‘twisted’ mind, but I can personally attest to the fact that he consistently brings new, interesting, dieselpunk ideas (a term I just learned moments ago, reading about this movie) into play.
In one scene, Dementus is shot in the foreground, and all of the truck hijacking is shown in the background (in an obvious use of greenscreen or compositing, but with no cuts), which I don’t know if I’ve ever seen before, at least not like that.
This movie surprised me a number of times with its effort, ingenuity and spirit. Not to endlessly compare it to a much-worse film, but although Miller and Tim Burton both said a lot of similar things about the motivation to dive back into their most-celebrated created worlds, Furiosa feels infinitely more like a labor of love and the product of real, creative energy than the tiresome, dull Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The number of thoughtful, world-building touches (something Miller is justifiably known for) start to add up, and as they do, the world feels more lived-in, authentic and immersive. Does it reach the heights of Fury Road? Not quite. But it’s close, and given how cosmically far Mufasa: The Lion King and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice landed from their original vision and purpose, Furiosa’s proximity to the aesthetic and vision of the prior films is kind of refreshing. Like Moana 2, it’s very much expansion of existing IP, but also like Moana 2 — and unlike most other prequels and sequels — it’s still worthwhile viewing, if not absolutely essential.
Anya Taylor-Joy isn’t in this film that much. To be sure, her shoots were grueling, and she put a lot of herself into this role, but I’m just saying, onscreen, we don’t see all that much of her. Two of the five vignettes revolve exclusively around very-young Furiosa (because Taylor-Joy is Young Furiosa) and I’ve read (and believe) that Taylor-Joy had fewer than 30 lines of dialogue in the script and final film.
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but prequels all seem to suffer from the same general malaise, which I imagine is the result of writing characters and situations that all lead to something we, the audience, already know.
If a writer has to write to a defined, given endpoint (Game of Thrones’ final seasons are a good television example of this, when the showrunners only had a list of bullet-point plot events to adapt, rather than the rich text of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels), the narrative suffers.
I think this might be axiomatic or definitional. I’m not sure there’s any getting around it, though an individual film here or there might be exceptions to the rule (I can’t think of any at the moment, except maybe Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior, itself, one of the rare sequels that surpasses its original in artistic vision and narrative ambition).
That said, judging the film holistically, it’s more good than bad. I was honestly pleasantly surprised by how many new ideas and concepts featured in the film, and how little nakedly-nostalgia-bait fan-service there was.
Is Furiosa better than its predecessors?
No.
Is it better than a lot of the other IP-farming, craven (literally, Kraven) content we’re being fed these days?
One thousand percent.
It’s not a perfect film, but Furiosa has more than enough effort, energy and effect to justify a viewing, if you’ve been on the fence. A worthy addition to the eclectic, unique Mad Max canon.
