Reviews For The Easily Distracted: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

A Little Late On This One, Aren’t You? The preview screening was canceled due to lack of power. Truly, nobody knows the critic’s struggle.

Describe This Movie In One The Waste Land Quote:

T.S. ELIOT: I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones.

Brief Plot Synopsis: Looks like the only people who survived the apocalypse were fashion consultants.

Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 3 Bobos out of 5.

Tagline: “Remember her.”

Better Tagline: “Forget the Alamo.”

Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: Life in the post-apocalypse isn’t all pretzels and mother’s milk, and no one knows that better than Furiosa (Alyla Browne, then Anya Taylor-Joy). She’s snatched from the Green Place at a young age by the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) before disappearing into Immortan Joe’s (Lachy Hulme) Citadel, where she disguises herself as a boy, learns how to navigate the Wasteland, and bides her time before taking her vengeance.
“Critical” Analysis: Since the word “saga” is right there in the title, it follows that Furiosa differs significantly in tone and pacing than its predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road. Referring to Max at all is a bit of a throw-off as well, because both these movies are Furiosa’s stories, this one just isn’t as coy about it.

And besides being longer and more deliberate in fleshing out several returning characters, it also feebly asks the question: can romance bloom in the Wasteland?

This being a prequel, there are other factors to consider. For example, anyone who’s seen Fury Road knows who’s going to live and who’s going to die (or disappear, which is the same thing). Furiosa the Character is as deserving of backstory as anyone in the franchise*, but Furiosa the Movie threatens to undercut George Miller’s previous accomplishments.

Which is what makes Taylor-Joy’s performance notable: she inhabits Furiosa to such an extent that the new stuff doesn’t diminish Theron’s take … without really adding to it. Fury Road’s Furiosa hooked us with nothing more than her fierce determination to free the Wives, stone-cold badassery with a Type 56 SKS rifle and a War Rig, and a blistering “Remember me?” delivered while ripping Immortan Joe’s face off. The horrors of her early years were devastating even when merely implied.

Next to the action pieces, Taylor-Joy’s best bits come as she’s learning to survive under the boot of the various warlords, and in the brief period of (almost) romantic idyll with the heretofore unknown Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke).

click to enlarge

Headshots. All of them. Snap! Right in the medulla.

If we take Miller at his word, he’d storyboarded Furiosa before a single frame of Fury Road was filmed. That’s a little hard to reconcile with the latter’s whiplash pacing and the former’s occasionally languid running time. Furiosa is the longest Mad Max movie by a good thirty minutes, and didn’t need to be.

Take Hemsworth. He’s fine, but still can’t top Hulme’s Immortan Joe for menace. Dementus is Road Warrior’s Lord Humungus with a schmear of Thunderdome’s Auntie Entity, and the results – which aren’t bad by any stretch – often feel unnecessary. Hemsworth is clearly having a ball playing a nutbag bad guy, and has the most lines in the movie. But half would have done just as well.

The action, once it ramps up, is expectedly excellent. No one knows their way around vehicular carnage like George Miller, and the “40 Day Wasteland War” is depicted in a very Road Warrior fashion, with dissociative scene transitions and abrupt, martial music backstopping the carnage.

Furiosa isn’t superfluous, by any means. The first act, in which Furiosa’s mother(?) (Charlee Fraser) pursues carves her way through Dementus’ stooges trying to get her back, is masterful. But if Miller is merely going to create stories in the Mad Max Universe without Max, that’s certainly his prerogative (he built the damn universe, after all), the reaction may not be as shiny and chrome as before.

*Runners-up: Warrior Woman (Road Warrior) and Fifi (Mad Max).

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is in theaters now.