Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (or Furiosa for short), is the story of how Furiosa became the fearless driving badass that was introduced in Mad Max: Fury Road nine years ago.  In that movie, she (as portrayed by Charlize Theron) was referred to as Imperator Furiosa and was presented to us in her fully-realized form without a hint of backstory.  With her shaven head, grease-painted face and steampunk mechanical arm, she fearlessly drove across the post-apocalyptic wasteland for her boss, Immortan Joe.  Furiosa’s cool head and savvy driving skills made her highly respected within Joe’s autocratic society, which is great when the rest of the world only wants to kill and eat you.  For reasons she kept to herself, she grew tired of working for The Man and decided to drive off the Australian reservation, as it were, liberating herself and Joe’s wives in the process.  After encountering some speed bumps, she rescues Max and together they overthrow Joe’s noxious patriarchy.  In the end, Furiosa became the Citadel’s new, benevolent leader, while Max fades away.

Furiosa was made in the same vein as other recent prequels–Wonka and Solo: A Star Wars Story for example, in that it exists to answer all the questions we never knew we had about one of our favorite characters.  We didn’t need to know how Wonka became the Wonka in the 1971 film, but we managed to enjoy the movie anyway.  The same applied to Han Solo in Star Wars.  We saw him, thought he was cool and wanted to ride along with him.  Does it make a difference knowing what these characters were like “before they were stars”?  Probably not, but when the backstory is delivered in an entertaining way, these movies can still work.

Even taking the prequel limitations into consideration, Furiosa still left me wanting.  While the movie bills itself as “A Mad Max Saga”, a more accurate subtitle would have been “A Mad Max Adjacent Story”.  The movie covers Furiosa’s transformation from a traumatized orphan into the version of her character in Fury Road, a Bildungsroman that is decidedly different from the prior entries of the franchise.  The underlying theme of these films has been that the world ended and people went nuts in varying degrees.  Accordingly, there was no use in reliving the past because the future was here and it was awful (and full of leather).  Max was the notable exception of this saga because the first movie was his origin story.  Furiosa attempts to do the same thing for its eponymous character, and the resulting movie is wildly uneven.

The movie opens in Eden, or the desert equivalent of it.  (Wikipedia states that the location is named the “Green Place of Many Mothers”.)  This is where Furiosa lived her relatively idyllic childhood before a motorcycle gang stumbled across her post-apocalyptic paradise.  They are the minions of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and can’t wait to tell him about Furiosa’s home so they can get into his good graces.  What being a favored cretin of Dementus buys them is never explained and hardly justifiable, given how his followers die at a rapid clip throughout the movie.

The bad guys kidnap Furiosa as evidence of their discovery, and Furiosa’s mother Mary (Charlee Fraser) rides after them.  To their surprise, Mary is not only an excellent tracker but an even better long-distance shot.  The scene where she follows and picks off the bad guys one by one is one of the best in the movie in how it steadily builds suspense with tangible stakes always front and center.  Unfortunately, one bad guy makes it back to camp and presents Dementus with Furiosa.  But before he can tell Dementus where the oasis is, Mary kills him.  No matter, Dementus is fine with keeping Furiosa around until she tells him where home is.  At this point in the movie, Dementus seems like a reasonable fellow.  However, he and his leadership style will grow increasingly unhinged (and loquacious) as the movie progresses.

Mary rescues Furiosa, and Dementus and his brethren follow her.  Mary orders Furiosa to leave her behind, but Furiosa turns back anyway.  Dementus tells Furiosa that he’ll kill her mother unless Furiosa tells him where the oasis is, but Mary pleads with her daughter not to do that.  To prove his ruthlessness, Dementus orders his men to kill Mary while forcing Furiosa to watch.  Just as Mad Max was turned into an emotionless, revenge-driven shell from the violence of madmen, so too has Furiosa.  From this point on, Furiosa becomes the ward of Dementus, until his gang finds him something else to conquer.

Soon enough, Dementus’ men stumble upon Immortan Joe’s Citadel.  Dementus and his crew ride over and demand Joe surrenders.  Joe has his war boys attack Dementus and Co, who quickly high tail it out of there.  I suspect that Dementus’ strategy was to see just how powerful Joe is, which in that case, mission accomplished.  If that wasn’t Dementus’ plan then Dementus is just reckless and stupid.  After determining that Joe is too strong to confront directly, Dementus takes over nearby Gastown and forces Joe into a deal.  Dementus will keep the supply of gas flowing in exchange for food.  Joe demands Furiosa be included in the deal, and Dementus surprisingly agrees.

Shortly afterwards, Furiosa escapes being molested by one of Joe’s sons and hides by pretending to be a boy.  By nature of being in the right place at the right time she gets a position on the automotive crew who support Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), the commander of Joe’s trucking division.  After ten years working as an apprentice, Furiosa tries to escape the Citadel by stowing away on Joe’s rig, but they are overtaken by a band of unaffiliated marauders.  Jack is impressed that Furiosa was able to keep her head during the attack in which the entirety of his crew was killed.  As a reward, Jack will teach her everything he knows about driving so that they both can escape one day.  This sounds great until you remember that Fury Road tells us that the two characters have a much different future ahead of them.

Before we get to that there’s a fateful confrontation between Furiosa, Jack and Dementus, followed by a fateful confrontation between Dementus and Joe, which leads to a very fateful confrontation between Furiosa and Dementus.  I won’t spoil what happens to Dementus, except to say that it was insanely ridiculous.  That doesn’t mean that I liked it, only that it was an odd time for George Miller to inject a visual sight gag.

I can’t deny that I was looking forward to seeing Furiosa.  The online hype for the movie had me anticipating something as mind-blowing as Fury Road.  While I did enjoy this movie, it didn’t have nearly the same impact as its predecessor.  This was somewhat inevitable, given how we already know where everything in Furiosa eventually leads.  Even still, Furiosa gave me deja vu because at times it feels like a remake of Fury Road.  Many elements of this movie were introduced in the previous one, including the war boys, Joe and the Citadel, dust storm tornadoes and tanker truck chase sequences.  This is the first movie in the franchise that felt samey to me, which is something I’d come to expect in other franchises but not this one.

Furiosa is so intent on establishing Furiosa’s legend that it stops at regular intervals to highlight the progress she’s making.  This results in a much slower-paced movie that occasionally interrupts itself with spasms of high-speed action and violence.  This approach could have worked if there was something notable about Furiosa’s journey, but curiously that is not the case.  As this movie reveals, Furiosa’s success can be chalked up to two things: a) other people’s forgetfulness, and b) being in the right place at the right time.  Where Furiosa was once a character surrounded by mystery, she’s reduced to being the beneficiary of good luck.

The two central performances are visually striking but lacking nuance.  Chris Hemsworth’s Dementus is certainly the chattiest villain of the franchise to date.  I liked his performance and his daft monologuing at first, but then I grew tired of it as it droned on.  His leadership style is confusing to say the least, making me frequently question why anyone would follow such an obvious clown into the fray.  I also wasn’t sold on Anya Taylor-Joy as an action movie heroine.  Even though she’s seriously de-glammed here, she still looks too delicate to be taken seriously as a grimy and fearless warrior.  Like Taylor-Joy’s previous directors, George Miller loves emphasizing her wide, expressive eyes, which are a special effect all by themselves.  Unfortunately, Miller relegates her to being a silent, revenge-driven cypher for most of the movie, which reduces her to playing a one-note action figure until the very end.

The saving grace of the Furiosa is ultimately the action sequences, which are done with the same propulsive energy Miller is known for but are marred by very unconvincing CGI.  (There were several times when the war boys hopped to and fro and it looked suspiciously like video game footage.)  Regardless, there’s no one else who can manufacture the propulsive thrill of a car chase like George Miller.  Whenever the engines revved, I felt my pulse quicken.  If the movie had not gotten bogged down with myth-making and simply got on with it, I would have enjoyed it more.  Furiosa is an entertaining movie, but overlong and redundant.   Mildly recommended.

Analysis

When I review a movie, I often look for things that justify watching it.  Some might call this being charitable.  While it certainly is easier to simply hate a movie, I try to appreciate what does work instead of lingering on what doesn’t.  Sometimes, I find myself focusing on smaller things that I liked that made the experience worthwhile.  A solid performance, clever dialog or noteworthy direction often can make up for a lot of lapses.  Don’t get me wrong.  I can hate a movie as passionately as anyone.  For example, I detested the faux naughtiness and idiot plot machinations that drove Fair Play, a movie I wanted to thoroughly trash with but decided to write about something I enjoyed instead.

Which brings me to Furiosa.  I loved all of the action sequences in this movie, even the ones with rubbery CGI.  However, no other aspect of the movie worked for me at the same level.  On the one hand, this is a testament to George Miller and his ability to orchestrate chaos.  There are few people working in cinema today who can do what Miller does in this movie, and watching him flex his muscles is always a treat.  On the other hand, these sequences stand in stark contrast to the rest of the movie, which meanders in ways that threaten to bring the entire thing down.  After the gripping opening sequence, the movie that followed was a mixed bag for me, and I explain why below.

Prequellitis

Everybody watching Furiosa already knows who Furiosa will become.  This is a problem that all prequels face, where the outcome is a forgone conclusion.  The problem with Furiosa is that going back in time requires doing something the franchise has never done before, which is tread on familiar ground.  Every previous Mad Max movie has been distinctly different from that last, which has given the franchise a vibrancy that few others have.  With Furiosa, the element of surprise is mostly gone because we’ve already been introduced to many elements of the movie via Fury Road .  This is not to say I didn’t like being reacquainted with the foundation of Fury Road.  However, Furiosa mostly feels like a retread of concepts that George Miller has already explored.  While there are new characters and new settings in the mix, the movie has a “been there, done that” feel to it that nagged at me throughout its run time.

The Woman.  The Myth.  The Legend.

One of the refreshing aspects of the Mad Max franchise is that it refused to explain itself.  It always charged ahead without getting bogged down with backstory, context or sentiment.  For example, we never learn who Immortan Joe was in the past.  He simply is who he is.  The war boys are the war boys.  Why they are covered in white paint and spray their mouths with aerosol is never explained–it’s what they do.  While Max does have a backstory, he never discusses it with anyone and after the original movie it’s only mentioned again in a preface in The Road Warrior.

Furiosa is similar to the original Mad Max in that it wants to tell us everything about Furiosa before she became Imperator Furiosa.  In doing so it removes the one aspect that made the  character so compelling: her mystery.  Where did she come from?  How did she come to work for Immortan Joe?  How did she become such a good driver?  How did she lose her arm?  Fury Road gave us plenty of questions and steadfastly withheld the answers, and the movie was better for it.  Furiosa supplies us with her entire backstory, and in hindsight most of it was  unnecessary.  (It’s not at the same “movie as Wikipedia entry” level that AO Scott described Solo: A Star Wars Story as being, but it’s close.)

The movie expends a lot of energy establishing how Furiosa’s and Max’s lives are equivalent in terms of tragedy and loss, but the effect of doing so is trite.  They both had their loved ones viciously taken away from them and became damaged human beings who have survived against the odds.  I didn’t find this compelling because it’s already been done once before within the franchise.  Miller has wisely avoided doing this since the original movie because in this world, everyone has a sob story.  Instead, he has emphasized how this world is cruel and pitiless and has no room for tearful remembrances.  The object of life in this world is ultimately one of survival, no matter what it takes.  In circling back and giving us all Furiosa’s origin story, the movie indulges in sympathy that felt awkward in comparison to Fury Road.

Hey, whatever happened to…?

I don’t recall another origin story where the hero’s rise from the ashes was dependent upon others completely forgetting about them.  Rey’s abandonment on Tatooine in the last Star Wars trilogy is close, because the Emperor would never completely forget about his grandchild due to her bloodline.  It begs the question as to why Immortan Joe insists she be included in the deal between himself and Dementus, given how he forgot that she ever existed after that day.

Then there’s the matter of how Furiosa becomes a member of Praetorian Jack’s pit crew.  Everyone accepts that he/she is meant to be there without question.  She just appears on the scene and suddenly she’s helping to salvage automobiles as part of a small crew who all know each other.  The nonchalance with which Furiosa comes and goes belies how controlling Joe’s power structure was.  That people would first forget she existed and then never question her presence defies belief.

Supporting Characters

The previous entries of this franchise had always paired Max with one or more supporting characters that the audience could emotionally bond with.  For example, Nux (Nicolas Hoult) and Furiosa (Charlize Theron) were those characters in Fury Road, effectively offsetting Max’s crustiness and cynicism.  Furiosa positions Praetorian Jack in a similar way, but neither his character nor his relationship with Furiosa was developed to the point where I was upset when he was eaten by CGI dogs.

The absence of a character like Nux was sorely missed in this movie.  Without him, the war boys are little more than faceless cannon fodder.  The only war boy I honestly cared about was the dwarf, and he was killed at the end of the one assault he appeared in.

Let’s Get Demented

I can tell Chris Hemsworth had a lot of fun playing the part of Dementus.  In many ways, it reminded me of his Thor, who also held himself in high regard and viewed recklessness as a strength.  While I enjoyed Hemsworth’s broad comedic take on Dementus initially, I grew weary of it by the end because Hemsworth plays the character as an unmodulated clown throughout.  Even when Dementus is about to be killed by Furiosa, he frustratingly remains the same ridiculous figure he was from the outset.

Throughout the movie, I wondered how Dementus had amassed such a huge following.  It’s comical how many men he loses over the course of the movie due to his own incompetence.  Other than his successful takeover of Gastown, his actions mostly result in many of his men getting killed.  Unlike other villains in this franchise, he has no capacity for strategy and tries to accomplish everything through brute force alone.  That Immortan Joe is able to defeat him so easily with some very basic misdirection only underscores how fundamentally silly and stupid Dementus is.

ATJ

Anya Taylor-Joy is a fine actress whose acting I’ve enjoyed over the years.  Unfortunately, she wasn’t convincing as an action movie heroine in this movie.  No matter how hard the movie works to turn her into the younger version of Charilze Theron’s character, I wasn’t convinced.  While the movie effectively de-glams her, Taylor-Joy is too slight to pull off a tough warrior woman.  Miller’s decision to restrict her performance to that of a silent movie actress doesn’t pan out, because Taylor-Joy lacks the skill to communicate with her eyes in the same way that Theron does.

Lastly, there were several times in the movie when I noticed Taylor-Joy pouting and striking dramatic poses as if she were imitating a comic book superhero.  I doubt Miller intended for these shots to be funny, but I couldn’t help laughing at them anyway.